A look into the future: how advanced technologies and artificial intelligence will change humanity and is the singularity already around the corner?
When the historians of the future look back at the 21st century, they will point to Ray Kurzweil as one of the men who shaped the spirit of the age. and not in vain. Kurzweil has already been selected to be part of the group of "16 revolutionaries who made America what it is" in the last two hundred years. He won every possible award in the field of entrepreneurship, received 21 honorary doctorate degrees, and much more.
He won all these awards mainly thanks to his groundbreaking inventions, such as the synthesizer or an automatic reading machine for the blind. But the paradox is that he will probably not be remembered because of those inventions, but precisely because of the revolutionary ideas he promoted: the exponential development of technologies, the technological singularity and the possibility of reaching eternal life even in our time.
All these ideas were promoted by Kurzweil in his first book, "The Singularity is Near". The book became a hysterical bestseller and was translated into many languages. Kurzweil argued in the book that it is impossible to think of the development of science and technology in static terms.
What is meant by?
In the past, it would take a long time to reach any new scientific insight, and to translate it into a technological application. Think of Antony van Levanhoek, for example, who discovered bacteria. He had to carve and polish the lenses of his microscopes himself, draw the animalcules (the bacteria and single-celled creatures) he saw in the water drops, painstakingly write his letters to the national and international scientific societies, all while he also worked for a living. The letters themselves took months to reach their destinations (and some must have been lost along the way), and for the other scientists to gather to read them.
And today?
Today, you can buy lenses - or other sophisticated laboratory equipment - at a very low cost. You can take pictures of the products and share them quickly. The articles can be written with a word processor and uploaded to the web, where they will immediately reach everyone who is interested in them. Anyone who would like to talk to the original researcher, learn from him and cooperate with him, will be able to do so easily from the other side of the globe. And the technologists can immediately harvest the products of science, and use them to establish new and groundbreaking companies.
Kurzweil believes that the improvement in technologies can advance scientific research - as indeed happens in the age of the Internet and artificial intelligence. Accordingly, faster scientific research will lead to insights at a higher rate, which will lead to new technologies, which in turn will help scientists conduct faster research, and so on and so forth. In fact, science and technology support each other and build a staircase in which each rung is higher, as they improve their capabilities with each step up.
This process describes Kurzweil's famous "exponential development". Kurzweil relied on this exponential development to provide predictions for the future that seemed extreme and crazy just a decade ago. He claimed, for example, that artificial intelligence will be able to talk to humans as if it were human itself, before 2030. This claim makes a lot of sense, provided you accept Kurzweil's assumption: that the rate at which science and technology produce new improvements and developments will continue to grow every year. And so, when GPT came to fruition and the public was left shocked by the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil just smiled to himself. He understood in advance that this was the direction in which we were moving forward, and that we would get there much sooner than expected.
What will happen if we continue to advance science and technology at an ever-increasing rate, as Kurzweil predicts?
Then we will reach the singularity.
The singularity
Kurzweil continued to think about the future, realizing that this "exponential development" was going to bring us to what he called a "technological singularity". That "singularity" is a point in time, where everything changes and nothing is as it was. In a loose translation of Kurzweil's ideas, we will reach the singularity around the time machines are about as smart as humans.
What will happen at that point? When machines are as smart as humans, they will already be able to perform truly complex tasks. If until now they have only helped humans to do science and invent new technologies faster, then in the singularity they will be able to develop technologies entirely by themselves. Of course, one of the technologies they will open up will be... more sophisticated artificial intelligence. And it, in turn, will develop a much more sophisticated artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth, at a faster and faster pace. In a short time, the changes and inventions will start coming so fast that it will be impossible to understand what will happen even a year ahead into the future. At that time, the unbelievable will become reality, and all our dreams will come true.
In his book "The Singularity is Near" from 2005, Kurzweil predicted that we will reach the point of the singularity around 2045, and then we will achieve the big dream: to merge with the computers and become superhuman. If this is not your dream, too bad. This is Kurzweil's dream, and this is what he predicts will happen.
But this prediction was provided by Kurzweil almost twenty years ago. What has changed since then? Did he change his mind in the new book?
The new predictions
In short energetically, Kurzweil regrets nothing. If anything, he admits that his original prediction of a "general AI" (ie, one that can do anything a human does) by 2029 may have been a bit pessimistic. Like several other opinion leaders from Silicon Valley, Kurzweil now believes that there is a chance that such artificial intelligence will appear even sooner.
From the moment such artificial intelligence appears, developments will happen much faster, and Kurzweil is still convinced that by 2045 we will reach the final and most extreme realization of the singularity: the complete connection with computers.
"By 2045, we will take the next step in our evolution." Kurzweil number In a video he produced about the book. "Imagine the creativity of every person on the planet, connected to the speed and flexibility of the fastest computer. This will unlock a world of unlimited wisdom and potential. This is the singularity.”
How will we reach this connection with the computers? Kurzweil reviews in his new book initial attempts in the direction, such as the chips Neuralink company begins to be implanted in human brains, allowing them to control computers, or Military plans to develop similar technologies. However, he is aware that a continuous and ongoing connection between the brain and the computer will require technologies that are not yet in our hands. Here comes Kurzweil's leap of faith: the technologies are not there yet, but he is convinced that the artificial intelligence of the next twenty years will help us develop them.
You can snort in disdain at this leap, but it cannot be denied that technology has indeed advanced by leaps and bounds in the last hundred years, and every decade brings us new wonders. Kurzweil is also right when he says that in the 22s, most 'sane' people thought that we would not reach general artificial intelligence before the XNUMXnd century. Kurzweil correctly deciphered the exponential development, and predicted that such an intelligence would appear in only thirty years - and indeed it seems that this is what is going to happen. So when Kurzweil predicts the future based on the same principles, I wouldn't bet against him easily.
What will be the technologies that artificial intelligence will invent for us towards the singularity, and that will enable the connection to computers? Nanobots, of course. Tiny robots the size of molecules - much smaller than any human cell - that can connect to brain cells. Those robots will pick up our brain activity and transmit it to the cloud. At the same time, they will also be able to transmit instructions from the cloud directly to the brain.
The result? We will all be connected to the computing cloud. But more than that: we will become a part of it. We can think faster, be more creative and expand our thinking "millions of times", according to Kurzweil.
Of course, the singularity will not end there. Similar nanobots could travel through the bloodstream, kill cancerous tumors and clean blood vessels to prevent heart attacks and strokes. They will be able to repair failed organs and tissues, and re-engineer the genetics of each and every cell to deal with harmful mutations. And when all these abilities join together, the meaning is that they will be able to extend the human healthy life span. how much? Nobody knows. How can one evaluate a technology that does not yet exist? But suffice it to say that people who will be equipped with such nanobots, will be able to live much longer and healthier than any person who has lived so far in history.
Oh, and there are dangers too.
The dangers
To summarize Kurzweil's most extreme predictions for the far future, we will have nanobots in the body, receiving instructions from the cloud to maintain it. This seems like an open door for hackers, who will be able to do much more damage to any person than they can do today. And what about general artificial intelligence, which is as smart as humans themselves? Is there no fear that she will turn against us?
Kurzweil has answers to these questions, but the truth is that they are not very good answers. There are entire books dealing with concerns about the technologies of the future, and finding ways to protect ourselves from out-of-control nanobots or malicious AIs. Kurzweil's new book is not one of them. He is, quite simply, optimistic. And to tell the truth, it's a good thing.
My friend, Dr. Uri Katz, recently wrote a critical article against science fiction, in which he claimed that the visions of the future we have today are too scary. In fact, they are so frightening that they may suppress the progress and development of science and technology. Unfortunately and happily, I think he is right. Happily, because science fiction is supposed to help us think ahead about future threats, so we can prepare for them. Unfortunately, because if we are flooded with apocalyptic visions about the future, then this is the way we will think about it. A gloomy, scary future, for which there is no reason and no point in moving forward.
New popular science and science fiction books come out every year, promising us a more explosive, more menacing and more dystopian future. In all this flood, it is good to see one book that talks about the ways in which technology will improve our lives and change them for the better. It is important to read "The Singularity is Closer" to understand what the vision for a better future is - and then also look at the corresponding books, to understand how to reduce the chance that we will all die a horrible death on the way to that vision. And also, so that we can also understand whether the risks are so great that it is better for us to give up Kurzweil's far-reaching vision, and compromise on simpler and less disturbing futures.
Summary
Kurzweil likes to be accused of being almost robotic in his thinking. It is claimed that he thinks of man as a machine that can be improved by other machines. that he sees the brain itself - the seat of the legendary soul - as an engine that can change its way of working.
All true.
Kurzweil really thinks logically, but not like a robot but like an engineer and an inventor. The human body is truly a machine - a wonderful biological machine - and so is the brain. Kurzweil starts with this basic truth, and tries to understand how to improve their performance.
But why? If we are just 'machines', why does Kurzweil care about our needs? of our desires?
The answer is that we are machines with feelings, with awareness, with the ability to think for ourselves. These are characteristics that are important to preserve and expand, and this is Kurzweil's real goal. Not to invent technologies to improve the body simply because we can, but to expand human thinking, to allow us to understand ourselves better and realize and fulfill our dreams, desires and desires.
And Kurzweil does it himself.
Kurzweil's father was a gifted composer, pianist and conductor. When Kurzweil reached the age of 22, his father died suddenly, and Kurzweil missed his conversations with his father about music ever since. And so, Kurzweil decided to do something: he uploaded all his father's writings to the computer. All the love letters he wrote to his wife, all the lectures he gave, all the parts of his diaries. All these were used by Kurzweil as a way to create a chatbot, which talked to him just as if he were his father. As Kurzweil himself wrote -
"This double was able to give coherent, natural and surprising answers to our questions - probably well enough that if I told you that this was a conversation I had with my father when he was still alive, you wouldn't notice anything unusual. For me... his words resonate with me in a familiar way, in terms of the way Frederick Kurzweil thought and spoke."
And he concludes - "This is the first step to bring my father back."
And that's what Kurzweil really wants, for him and for all of us. Even for the great inventor, the man around whom the Church of the Singularity arose, technology is only a tool. A tool for a world where we will enjoy a healthier, more complete, fuller life. A vessel for a world where no one dies prematurely and leaves behind grieving orphans. A tool for a world where we can all talk - really talk with an open mind - with each other.
