Silicon Insider: Ray Kurzweil's Vision of Forever

Sept. 29, 2005 — -- Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky.
… Death is the mother of beauty, mystical
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessy.
-- Wallace Stevens ("Sunday Morning")

If you haven't heard of Ray Kurzweil, don't worry, you soon will. His new book, "The Singularity is Near," is likely to become the most discussed science book this year -- and some pundits are already suggesting that every responsible person should at least know what Kurzweil means by "singularity," as well as the underlying themes of the book.

In case you have a cocktail party tonight, or a meeting with the board of directors this afternoon, let me give you a quick summary of Kurzweil's theory:

The term "singularity" is one you may have heard before, especially if you are a fan of cosmology. A singularity is an event so profound that little information survives it -- the ultimate singularity being the creation of the universe, during which (apparently thanks to some kind of quantum twitch) everything suddenly emerges from nothing. The best known form of singularity occurs when a star, after exploding, collapses in on itself -- until it reaches a point of infinite density and zero volume, and forms a "black hole" that ruptures space and time and exhibits so much gravity that not even light can escape its embrace.

The first use of "singularity" in regard to the electronics revolution comes from, of all people, that founding father of computing (and game theory, and a lot of other stuff that defines modern life), John von Neumann. In the 1950s, von Neumann apparently said, with his usual superhuman prescience, that "the ever-accelerating progress of technology… gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, cannot continue."

Basically, all you really need to know about Kurzweil's book is that he not only believes that von Neumann is right, but that this singularity in human affairs is less than 50 years away. And he, for one, intends to be there for this Digital Rapture -- even now, at age 56, he gulps 250 pills per day and takes even more nutrients intravenously each week, in the hope of preserving himself long enough to cross over, at the singularity, into immortality.

What will this singularity look like? For Kurzweil, it will be a "period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." And by transformed, he means that mankind will move on to the next evolutionary step, in which our intelligence will rapidly grow to fill the entire universe. Think the Star Child in "2001: A Space Odyssey," except with HAL as its body. In becoming one with the stars, we will first become one with our machines.

Why will this singularity occur so soon? Because so much of the scientific world has been moving forward at an exponential rate. The best known of this progressions is, of course, Moore's Law which claims that the performance of integrated circuit chips -- measured in speed, size, performance or price reduction -- will double about every 24 months. And we have seen the extraordinary gains in chip performance over the last 40 years, whereby one modern Intel microprocessor is thousands of times as powerful as its model 8086 precursor was just three decades ago. No invention in human history has evolved so fast.