Is a "Singularity" Near? Learning more about Ray K., part 1

 As mentioned last post, there will be a "Singularity Summit" this weekend in San Jose (at The Tech Museum on Friday and the Montgomery Theatre on Saturday with discounts on tickets here.)

The summit is the brainchild of inventor-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, in partnership with IEEE, the engineering society. But the conference is not all and only about the visions of Kurzweil; it is a convening of several big thinkers and scientists sharing updates on everything from nanotech to artificial intelligence.

For those not already familiar with Ray, this might be an apt time to share from a couple presentations I myself gave about his ideas last year. Whatever you think about his specific predictions, his understanding of history is compelling and his sense of the future is fascinating.

For the next few days I will be folding in snips from my own speaking notes as a preface to what I will later report from the conference itself.

In his book, The Singularity, Ray Kurzweil makes the case that life as we know it is about to radically change. Within a scant few decades, perhaps as soon as 2030, he predicts we will see a "Big Bang" when exponential growth in our understanding of the brain converges with explosive growth in machine intelligence plus nanotech, and the boundaries between man and machine become blurred. How much of this prediction is likely how soon has been a topic of dispute, so much so that IEEE devoted a special issue to this topic last year.

What follows is some detail from the Kurzweil book, interspersed with my own reflections.

Part One: Introduction to The Singularity

When I was a kid, futurism was making an impact in the minds of young folk with things like "Tomorrowland" at Disneyland and the Jetsons on TV. But with all of those things, even a kid knew it was mostly fantasy and just had fun wondering which specks of those stories might come true.

Today, the serious study of the future is separated from science fiction in the public mind and most of us know which is which. After Orson Welles fooled much of the radio-listening public into thinking the Martians had landed, we developed much sharper radar to help us distinguish what might come true from what might be imagined.

But when it comes down to the more clear-eyed and hard-nosed analytical side of futurism as we see it today, Ray Kurzweil pushes up to the limits that separate science from fiction. His analysis of the past sounds so realistic and he frames so many complex themes so clearly, you think 'now here is a guy who gets how the world works.'

Then you read his specific predictions and start wondering.

Those specific predictions range from the merger of mind and machine producing computers so smart you'd swear they were human, to the merging of all manufacturing and engineering (much cheaper and simpler), to all of health (virtual longevity in which aging becomes optional), to an end to the whole ecology mess (where super bugs and nanobots sweep it all up), all of it happening quickly.

In Kurzweil's non-fictional frame for what he sees as our probable future, we reach a real utopia that is anything but imaginary and we do so with incredible speed.

A real utopia?
If RayK is right, just about every problem on earth will be solved by humans working together with machines (in the process, changing what 'machine' means in a new merger of biology and physics).

We will be tons smarter. The machines will be many tons smarter too (and incredibly much smarter than we, at least about some things, teaching us a lot about complex systems dynamics as they grow, making us smarter again, in a beneficial feedback loop that will also grow with exponential strength, he suggests).

If that sounds fantastic on its face, think about how many specks of that story are already happening.

Taking a ride into near outer space in a passenger ship might be as cheap as a family week in Disneyland within 20 years or less, thanks partly to Richard Branson.

The garbage-eating fuel-excreting super bug (actually super algae) is already in the testing phase with investors that include General Motors.

We decoded the whole human genome (thanks to Craig Ventnor) a whole lot faster than anyone predicted, and we now get it that what happens in bodies is as much about proteins as genes. 

And the beat goes on as the list of amazing leaps grows.

For more specifics on what Ray predicts, look for another summary in the next day or two (and subscribe to my RSS feed -- see bottom of screen right -- if you want to make the updates easy).

Beam me up, Scotty. I need to take a break on the holodeck!