Ray Kurzweil

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

The Flintstones

Back to the Future II

Planet of the Apes

The first thing you see when walking into Kurzweil’s office is this mannequin. He’s supposed to be a general “inventor” guy who just hangs out and greets visitors. It’s very creepy.

Vice: The Singularity sounds neat and all, but right now the global economy is a ruptured septic tank and people could care less about what’s 30 years down the road. In 2005 you wrote that deflation was just a niggling concern and we’d be in good shape for years to come. How do you reconcile this?

Ray Kurzweil:

Sure, but most of the folks I know who’ve been laid off in the past six months won’t be able to afford the next iPhone. They’re just thinking about the necessities.

That kind of correspondence will only be possible if we develop advanced artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. How long will it take for computers to surpass our own intellect?

Once we have hardware that far surpasses the human brain’s computational power, you predict that it will take about a decade to reverse-engineer the subtleties and nuances of the way our minds work. Then nanorobots will allow us to supplement our bodies, eventually resulting in the emergence of nonbiological humans who are more machine than man. And this will allow us to live as long as we want, raise our intelligence to unimaginable heights, and control our senses. Any ideas what the world is going to look like after this happens?

Second Life

Second Life

Creepy.

Second Life

Are we going to look like humans forever, or will we eventually just become ghosts in the machine while our physical bodies devolve into dwarves with lobster hands?

So you’re saying I could be sitting on the toilet and a pop-up ad is going to materialize out of nowhere? That’s very discomforting.

A promotional poster for one of Kurzweil’s early reading machines.

Surely a significant number of people will find this transition terrifying and attempt to resist it.

Something that’s deeply troubling about your vision of the future is the risk of hyper-equality. What’s the point of life if everyone is perfect and super-smart? It seems like it will hinder diversity.

more

Is the ultimate goal to transcend biology and choose how long we would like to live?

What can your average Eddie Lunchpail do to be sure he lives long enough to reach this era of unprecedented advances in health care?

Is it fair to call the Singularity a belief system?

If we change who we are, how will we still be human?

a new instructional health book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, will be in bookstores April 28 on Rodale Press.

For more of Ray Kurzweil’s mind-blowing insights about the future of technology, watch an extended interview with him on Motherboard on VBS.TV.