The Singularity is Far
Ray Kurzweil wrote a thick volume combining 50’s style naive technology-optimism, uncritical extrapolation of current trends (especially, but not only, Moore’s law) and somewhat-more-than-half knowledge of biology. He assembles all of that into his own personal pseudo-religion, and even uses a terminology that sounds very religious (He calls himself a “singulatarian”). According to Kurzweil, all will be well: hunger, disease, aging and even death will be eradicated once we fuse with computers and have nano-robots populate our bloodstreams. Even wars will be less bloody – he includes a graph of declining US war deaths over time, conveniently ignoring the numbers of foreign human beings killed by the US in these wars.
In most cases, his arguments are not very sound, in my opinion. One problem is that he strongly believes that all the current technological trends will continue to accelerate, disregarding physical boundaries and resource constraints. Often his argument goes as in: X has been achieved. Therefore XX is maybe, theoretically possible, said some expert. Once we have XX, we will be able to achieve YY. Hence, YY is about to become reality within a decade.
In my own field, neurobiology, he mistakes models (intellectual tools to explain certain aspects of a phenomenon) with complete, reverse engineered, functional reproductions of neural systems. There are certainly good models out there, but no neural structure has so far been reverse engineered, not even close.
Always suspicious: the use of quotations of old or dead wise men to cover up the lack of content in a book. Just because someone managed to look up what Ein- or Wittgenstein once said, that does not make his arguments stronger, does it? But, it leaves the reader in this aura of just having being confronted with the words of these intellectual giants, and some of that must rub off to what the author had to say, no? Kurzweil wins Olympic gold in name-dropping with “The singularity is near”, where there are rarely less than three quotations in front of a chapter, and whole chapters are only made up of quotations, nothing else!
This is in fact a rather involuntarily interesting book. Why does a member of the US upper class come up with a technology based salvation story? I think what we have here is an extremely interesting fusion of the American believe in the power of technology to solve problems with the strong US religious tradition.
