![]() What's more, there's also "exponential growth in the rate ' of exponential growth". He is not unique in his adoption of the idea – the information theorist John von Neumann hinted at it in the 1950s retired maths professor and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge has been exploring it at length since the early 1980s – but Kurzweil's version is currently the most popular "singularitarian" text.įor Kurzweil, the crux of the singularity is that the pace of technology is increasing at a super-fast, exponential rate. The singularity, writes Kurzweil, is "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed". To understand exactly what he means, and why he thinks that his predictions bear up to hard scrutiny, it's necessary to return to the title of the above-mentioned book, and the grand idea on which it's based: "the singularity".īorrowed from black-hole physics, in which the singularity is taken to signify what is unknowable, the term has been applied to technology to suggest that we haven't really got a clue what's going to happen once machines are vastly more "intelligent" than humans. "There's something remarkable going on right now." "The issue is not just something amazing is going to happen in 2045," he says. "People don't really get their intellectual arms around the changes that are happening," he says, perched lightly on the edge of a large armchair, his overall sheen of wellbeing perhaps a shade more encouraging than you'd expect from a man of his age. A father of two, he resides in the Boston suburbs with his psychologist wife, Sonya, but has flown into Los Angeles for a private screening of Transcendent Man, the upcoming documentary that examines his life and theories over a suitably cosmic score by Philip Glass. In person, chewing pensively on a banana, the softly spoken, slightly built Kurzweil looks chipper for his 61 years, and wears an elegantly tailored suit. A man of lesser accomplishments, touting the same head-spinning claims, would impress few beyond an inner circle of sci-fi obsessives, but Kurzweil – honoured as an inventor by US presidents Lyndon B Johnson and Bill Clinton – has rightfully earned himself a stockpile of credibility. It's as well to mention at this point that, in 2005, Mikhail Gorbachev personally congratulated Kurzweil for foreseeing the pivotal role of communications technology in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates calls him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence". "Intelligence," he writes, "will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst spread out from its origin on Earth." With this last prediction, Kurzweil is referring not to any recognisable type of space travel, but to a kind of space infusion. Just when will this ultimate life-affirming feat be possible? In Kurzweil's estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing "a person's entire personality, memory, skills and history", by the end of the 2030s humans and non-biological machines will then merge so effectively that the differences between them will no longer matter and, after that, human intelligence, transformed for the better, will start to expand outward into the universe, around about 2045. The rest of his biography – the essence of his very existence, he would contend – belongs to the future. However, these past accomplishments, as impressive as they are, would tell only half the Kurzweil story. ![]() His Kurzweil 3000 educational software, which helps students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, is likewise typical of an innovator who has made his name by combining restless imagination with technological ingenuity and a commendable sense of social responsibility. In 1976, he created the first machine capable of reading books to the blind, and less than a decade later he built the K250: the first music synthesizer to nigh-on perfectly duplicate the sound of a grand piano. ![]() Should, by some terrible misfortune, Ray Kurzweil shuffle off his mortal coil tomorrow, the obituaries would record an inventor of rare and visionary talent.
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