Inventions

In Silicon Valley, there's no overstating the redemptive potential of technology. Tech can make us happier, wealthier, healthier and luckier. It's almost like a religion.  It should come as no surprise, then, that this religion has its own rapture: the rapture of the geeks known as the singularity. According to this belief system, faster and better machines (a central tenet is Moore's law) will beget faster, better machines at an exponential rate, and eventually, the machines will become so powerful that they rival human intelligence. Although there are variations, most people who subscribe to the notion of the singularity believe that when it comes, we will upload our consciousness into a computer and live forever. It will be the death of death.

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the 1965 I've Got A Secret game show (Click Here To See Video), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil (age 17), but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.   Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done.   But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.  That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet.

Ray Kurzweil

The chief evangelist of this vision is futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil has serious credentials. He invented the text-to-speech synthesiser, among many other devices. The White House selected him to receive a National Medal of Technology, the highest technology honour in the US. He is in the US Patent Office's National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is also famous for consuming up to 150 vitamin pills a day to slow his body's ageing, so that he will be around to witness the singularity. The Singularity is Near is a hybrid of documentary and drama, co-directed by Kurzweil, that tries to explain the why and how of its title. Kurzweil's alter ego, an animated character called Ramona, illustrates the evolutionary arc of thinking machines. She starts out as a primitive, choppy animation but gradually acquires consciousness.

Sonya Kurzweil as Ramona's Psychologist

As Ramona goes about her life, at one point seeing a clinical psychologist, her story is interwoven with documentary footage of Kurzweil explaining why the singularity is near. He tells us how machines are becoming atom-sized and how we are already implanting devices into the brains of people with Parkinson's disease.  Threaded throughout, as further proof of the rapid evolution of medical technology, are montages of news footage, notably one in which a man with no arms picks up a milk bottle using the Luke arm, a next-generation prosthesis. These are delivered rapid-fire to illustrate that the era of the cyborg is already upon us.

In the parallel dramatic plot, Ramona takes down a plot by a nefarious nanotech artificial intelligence to destroy the world, but gets in legal trouble as a result, and needs to be coached by motivational speaker Tony Robbins on how to be convincingly human. The narrative arc is equal parts Pinocchio story, Michael Crichton gray-goo horror and TED talk. For the uninitiated, the movie will be a fascinating and convincing entry point.

If you're already familiar with the story of the singularity, however, there's not much new here.
 
For a start, the cyborg argument falls apart under shallow scrutiny. Many of the documentary montages stretch the truth with claims that they already enable living cyborgs. Embedded computers haven't cured Parkinson's, and the Luke arm is not on the market because insurance won't cover it and it's too expensive to find a manufacturer to commercialise it. The claims about developments in nanotechnology are equally inflated.

Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil asserts that medical advancements will keep his generation alive long enough for the exponential growth of technology to intersect and surpass the processing of the human brain. Kurzweil explains how nanobots will eventually be able to repair and replace any part of the body that wears out, but relies on other methods of medical technology to prolong our lives long enough to reach the singularity. The usefulness of this medical postulate then becomes a function of how long it will take to reach the singularity, something that has been thrown into question due to the possibility of quantum brain processing explored in many recent books by scientists, such as Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. According to Ray Kurzweil, DNA errors (in the form of either pathogens, viruses, and/or cancer cells) are the causes of most major illnesses. These illnesses range from cancer to Alzheimer's disease and Down syndrome.  The only permanent way to get rid of the DNA errors (that are a part of cancer cells and/or the various pathogens found in other illnesses) is by injecting nanobots (ideally multifunctional nanoparticles) into the patient's body. The high levels of SP2 protein that are found in cancer cells would be neutralized. The same nanobots that would lower the levels of SP2 protein inside the patient's stem cells could also repair the long-term damage to the person's DNA strand so that his/her descendants are less likely to acquire cancer and/other diseases in the first place. All methods of death that are not caused by accidents are caused by a long line of DNA errors that are never corrected over a very long period of time. However, this method may not be possible or even affordable until the year 2025 (the Kanzius RF Therapy is scheduled to begin testing in 2012 but will be extremely difficult to acquire for many years). All research about curing cancer with nanorobotics has been currently restricted to small animals like mice.[8] Thanks to the cost-performance ratio, nanomedicine is becoming more affordable for the average person year by year.[3] It may become possible to have extremely effective and extremely inexpensive treatments for AIDS that will eliminate the DNA errors that are causing the disease through nanomedicine.

Singularity Man Bold Brain

Then there's self-aware Ramona. Kurzweil indicates that because we are on the cusp of understanding the human brain and mind, sentient AIs like her will be inevitable. If we create sentient AIs and give them the rights of people, who pays for their creation and upkeep?   Smaller transistors may mean greater intelligence, and more intelligent algorithms may help create better brain simulations, but none of this equals consciousness. You can't live inside a blueprint of a house.  But the main problem with the singularity, and with this film, is that it's already dated.
 Singularitarians still treat nanotechnology as if it were magic that will save us from all human frailty. The more mundane reality is found in history: technologies are tools, and after the initial giddiness dies down, they simply amplify our human traits.  The singularity isn't near. In fact, it might be said that it's an idea whose time is finally over. It's not future-facing to be a singularitarian. At this point, this film is a true story about the past.  Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.  If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity. This transformation has a name:  Singularity.