The editorial God, Darwin, and the Media in a recent edition of the Progress (available at www.pickensprogress.com) sparked some impressively thoughtful, fiery, sometimes damning debate in our “Letters to the Editor” section. In an effort to keep the dialogue lubricated we thought it was time to bring up evolution once again.
However, this go around we are turning our focus away from the origin of our species towards the future of our species, which (according to an article on CNN.com entitled Scientists: Humans and Machines Will Merge in Future) is on a collision course with technology. The article’s main source, Dr. Ray Kurzweil, is a highly-respected, all be it highly controversial, inventor and futurist who predicts humans are on the cusp of what he calls ‘Singularity,’ a radical, revolutionary amalgamation with technology that could happen in as little as 20 years.
Kurzweil defines Singularity as “the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots.” He predicts that by 2030 humans will be more non-biological than biological.
Here are some of the high points of Kurzweil's prognostications taken from his 2005 book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:
• 2010: Computers take on non-traditional forms and are carried inconspicuously (The Blackberry?).
• 2014: House cleaning robots will be commonplace. Cool.
• 2020: PC's will have the same processing power as a human brain.
• 2020's: By the later part of the decade, virtual reality will be indistinguishable from real reality.
• 2030's: Mind uploading will be possible, and most internal organs will be obsolete because of alternate methods of nano-nourishment in the bloodstream.
• 2040's: People will spend the majority of time in full-immersion virtual reality (Yes, like the Matrix, without the doom and gloom part).
• 2045: Artificial Intelligence surpasses human intelligence and will be capable of human-like thought.
• Beyond 2045: Universe becomes giant supercomputer with our greenspace partitioned as nature preserves. Artificial intelligence-human hybrids have omnipotent intellectual capability and super physical strength. Inter-dimensional travel and immortality will be possible, and planet-sized computers will be created (Yes, like the Death Star, only bigger).
It's disgusting imagining our organic human bodies, our consciousness and our ecosystem as food for highly advanced A.I. in the not so distant future. But Kurzweil has made plenty of accurate predictions in the past, and what makes these predictions (especially those for the 2030's and beyond) so unsettling is that, while they seem laughably farfetched on one hand, the Law of Accelerating Returns which underpins his entire philosophy makes them completely plausible on the other.
The Law of Accelerating Returns as used by Kurzweil says, basically, that human and technological evolution is not linear, as humans intuitively predict, but exponential, meaning the rate of development gradually increases until it reaches explosive growth. Kurzweil says we are now "in the knee of the curve," at the point just before the explosion.
No doubt the human world has been changing rapidly the last few hundred years. And Kurzweil is right, the change has become so rapid we can hardly keep up with our technology. It’s maddening and unfortunate that prophets like Kurzweil aren't going to let up on their hopes for the future, so humans will be living in a techno-saturated world for a long time to come.
But evolution, defined by Ken Wilber (our source in God, Darwin, and the Media) as the urge to transcend what came before while also including what came before, has the potential to take unexpected turns.
Maybe Kurzweil and his logarithms don't give human traits like love, courage, and compassion enough clout in their calculations. Maybe we will become something unrecognizable in the fast approaching future, but maybe we can keep our Human Bodies Version 1.0, as Kurzweil would say, as organic as humanly possible. Transmission complete. |
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