Emma Tannanbaum

Beyond the Singularity

When speaking with Raymond Kurzweil, the world-renowned futurist, writer, and pioneer in the fields of text-to-speech synthesis, it’s simple to be awestruck. This man has achieved more in forty years than most accomplish in a lifetime. Kurzweil came to RIT on September 17 to share his ideas about the future, when he believes human technological development will transcend biology. “We’re entering an era where Information Technology will affect everything we care about,” said Kurzweil.

Kurzweil chose to come to RIT because “it’s a leading technology school with not only a broad array of science and technology, but an interest in fostering innovation, creativity, and strong disabilities interest.” He added, “I like interacting with students, and particularly students who are technologically literate and where there is a broad diversity of interests. [RIT students] are clearly an ideal audience. Tonight, I’m going to make the point how health and medicine have now become an Information Technology, that not being the case until just a few years ago.”

On the night of his speech, a large crowd of students , faculty, and staff gathered in the Gordon Field House awaiting his public address, following a brief statement by President Destler. “He’s launched ten companies and written five books,” Destler noted, and went on to call him “one of our country’s true luminaries and... an inspiration throughout the world.” After this, Kurzweil took the podium. The room erupted into thunderous applause.

There appeared to be a profound understanding in Kurzweil of how human progress and technology are interwoven to ultimately reach the same destiny. All human beings are part of what he’s come to call “a very predictable outcome.” He illustrated that, since the beginning of recorded history, people have reached the next stages of their own evolution exponentially quicker than before in terms of how knowledge is acquired. Essentially, all of us contain “the tools of disruptive change” and human intelligence is all about our ability to make predictions about the future. “Today, the very nature of technology is very linear in some minds. However, if you take what we can do today, there will be so much that’s feasible in tomorrow’s future,” remarked Kurzweil.

He stressed the importance of Biotechnology as “a new and emerging field,” as technology is shrinking and becoming twice as powerful every two years. He talked about how computers will eventually be as small as human cells, how we’ve conquered the genome, and how we will eventually reverse engineer the human brain. According to Kurzweil’s predictions, humanity will one day reach a point where computers will have computing power comparable to a human brain and perform the same function as cells, perhaps even in curing disease. As technology continues to increase in power and in scope, progress will reach a singularity of human intelligence.

“One of the aspects of the singularity,” Kurzweil argued, “is that exponential growth becomes extremely steep and we will capture our intelligence in a machine. From a hardware and software perspective, we then enhance our own intelligence ultimately a billionfold by merging with its non-biological counterpart, and that’s going to be a profound transformation.”

Kurzweil’s claims can leave even the most optimistic technologists skeptical. His grandiose visions of the future that he presents as fact border on science fiction. To him, “Technology continues in a succession of paradigms.”

Whatever position one takes on this issue, there are also ethical standards of faith, reasoning, and timing. According to Kurzweil, “Success is a matter of timing... and failure is success deferred.” By this rationale, the countdown has already begun; The singularity is inevitable.