The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

  The Threat from Fundamentalism. The world is struggling with an especially pernicious form of religious fundamentalism in the form of radical Islamic terrorism. Although it may appear that these terrorists have no program other than destruction, they do have an agenda that goes beyond literal interpretations of ancient scriptures: essentially, to turn the clock back on such modern ideas as democracy, women’s rights, and education.

  But religious extremism is not the only form of fundamentalism that represents a reactionary force. At the beginning of this chapter I quoted Patrick Moore, cofounder of Greenpeace, on his disillusionment with the movement he helped found. The issue that undermined Moore’s support of Greenpeace was its total opposition to Golden Rice, a strain of rice genetically modified to contain high levels of beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A.38 Hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia lack sufficient vitamin A, with half a million children going blind each year from the deficiency, and millions more contracting other related diseases. About seven ounces a day of Golden Rice would provide 100 percent of a child’s vitamin A requirement. Extensive studies have shown that this grain, as well as many other genetically modified organisms (GMOs), is safe. For example, in 2001 the European Commission released eighty-one studies that concluded that GMOs have “not shown any new risks to human health or the environment, beyond the usual uncertainties of conventional plant breeding. Indeed, the use of more precise technology and the greater regulatory scrutiny probably make them even safer than conventional plants and foods.”39

  It is not my position that all GMOs are inherently safe; obviously safety testing of each product is needed. But the anti-GMO movement takes the position that every GMO is by its very nature hazardous, a view that has no scientific basis.

  The availability of Golden Rice has been delayed by at least five years through the pressure of Greenpeace and other anti-GMO activists. Moore, noting that this delay will cause millions of additional children to go blind, quotes the grain’s opponents as threatening “to rip the G.M. rice out of the fields if farmers dare to plant it.” Similarly, African nations have been pressured to refuse GMO food aid and genetically modified seeds, thereby worsening conditions of famine.40 Ultimately the demonstrated ability of technologies such as GMO to solve overwhelming problems will prevail, but the temporary delays caused by irrational opposition will nonetheless result in unnecessary suffering.

  Certain segments of the environmental movement have become fundamentalist Luddites—“fundamentalist” because of their misguided attempt to preserve things as they are (or were); “Luddite” because of the reflexive stance against technological solutions to outstanding problems. Ironically it is GMO plants—many of which are designed to resist insects and other forms of blight and thereby require greatly reduced levels of chemicals, if any—that offer the best hope for reversing environmental assault from chemicals such as pesticides.

  Actually my characterization of these groups as “fundamentalist Luddites” is redundant, because Ludditism is inherently fundamentalist. It reflects the idea that humanity will be better off without change, without progress. This brings us back to the idea of relinquishment, as the enthusiasm for relinquishing technology on a broad scale is coming from the same intellectual sources and activist groups that make up the Luddite segment of the environmental movement.

  Fundamentalist Humanism. With G and N technologies now beginning to modify our bodies and brains, another form of opposition to progress has emerged in the form of “fundamentalist humanism”: opposition to any change in the nature of what it means to be human (for example, changing our genes and taking other steps toward radical life extension). This effort, too, will ultimately fail, however, because the demand for therapies that can overcome the suffering, disease, and short lifespans inherent in our version 1.0 bodies will ultimately prove irresistible.

  In the end, it is only technology—especially GNR—that will offer the leverage needed to overcome problems that human civilization has struggled with for many generations.

  Development of Defensive Technologies and the Impact of

  Regulation

  One of the reasons that calls for broad relinquishment have appeal is that they paint a picture of future dangers assuming they will be released in the context of today’s unprepared world. The reality is that the sophistication and power of our defensive knowledge and technologies will grow along with the dangers. A phenomenon like gray goo (unrestrained nanobot replication) will be countered with “blue goo” (“police” nanobots that combat the “bad” nanobots). Obviously we cannot say with assurance that we will successfully avert all misuse. But the surest way to prevent development of effective defensive technologies would be to relinquish the pursuit of knowledge in a number of broad areas. We have been able to largely control harmful software-virus replication because the requisite knowledge is widely available to responsible practitioners. Attempts to restrict such knowledge would have given rise to a far less stable situation. Responses to new challenges would have been far slower, and it is likely that the balance would have shifted toward more destructive applications (such as self-modifying software viruses).

  If we compare the success we have had in controlling engineered software viruses to the coming challenge of controlling engineered biological viruses, we are struck with one salient difference. As I noted above, the software industry is almost completely unregulated. The same is obviously not true for biotechnology. While a bioterrorist does not need to put his “inventions” through the FDA, we do require the scientists developing defensive technologies to follow existing regulations, which slow down the innovation process at every step. Moreover, under existing regulations and ethical standards, it is impossible to test defenses against bioterrorist agents. Extensive discussion is already under way to modify these regulations to allow for animal models and simulations to replace unfeasible human trials. This will be necessary, but I believe we will need to go beyond these steps to accelerate the development of vitally needed defensive technologies.

  In terms of public policy the task at hand is to rapidly develop the defensive steps needed, which include ethical standards, legal standards, and defensive technologies themselves. It is quite clearly a race. As I noted, in the software field defensive technologies have responded quickly to innovations in the offensive ones. In the medical field, in contrast, extensive regulation slows down innovation, so we cannot have the same confidence with regard to the abuse of biotechnology. In the current environment, when one person dies in gene-therapy trials, research can be severely restricted.41 There is a legitimate need to make biomedical research as safe as possible, but our balancing of risks is completely skewed. Millions of people desperately need the advances promised by gene therapy and other breakthrough biotechnology advances, but they appear to carry little political weight against a handful of well-publicized casualties from the inevitable risks of progress.

  This risk-balancing equation will become even more stark when we consider the emerging dangers of bioengineered pathogens. What is needed is a change in public attitude in tolerance for necessary risk. Hastening defensive technologies is absolutely vital to our security. We need to streamline regulatory procedures to achieve this. At the same time we must greatly increase our investment explicitly in defensive technologies. In the biotechnology field this means the rapid development of antiviral medications. We will not have time to formulate specific countermeasures for each new challenge that comes along. We are close to developing more generalized antiviral technologies, such as RNA interference, and these need to be accelerated.

  We’re addressing biotechnology here because that is the immediate threshold and challenge that we now face. As the threshold for self-organizing nanotechnology approaches, we will then need to invest specifically in the development of defensive technologies in that area, including the creation of a technological immune system. Consider how our biological immune system works. When the body detects a pathogen the
T cells and other immune-system cells self-replicate rapidly to combat the invader. A nanotechnology immune system would work similarly both in the human body and in the environment and would include nanobot sentinels that could detect rogue self-replicating nanobots. When a threat was detected, defensive nanobots capable of destroying the intruders would rapidly be created (eventually with self-replication) to provide an effective defensive force.

  Bill Joy and other observers have pointed out that such an immune system would itself be a danger because of the potential of “autoimmune” reactions (that is, the immune-system nanobots attacking the world they are supposed to defend).42 However this possibility is not a compelling reason to avoid the creation of an immune system. No one would argue that humans would be better off without an immune system because of the potential of developing autoimmune diseases. Although the immune system can itself present a danger, humans would not last more than a few weeks (barring extraordinary efforts at isolation) without one. And even so, the development of a technological immune system for nanotechnology will happen even without explicit efforts to create one. This has effectively happened with regard to software viruses, creating an immune system not through a formal grand-design project but rather through incremental responses to each new challenge and by developing heuristic algorithms for early detection. We can expect the same thing will happen as challenges from nanotechnology-based dangers emerge. The point for public policy will be to invest specifically in these defensive technologies.

  It is premature today to develop specific defensive nanotechnologies, since we can now have only a general idea of what we are trying to defend against. However, fruitful dialogue and discussion on anticipating this issue are already taking place, and significantly expanded investment in these efforts is to be encouraged. As I mentioned above, the Foresight Institute, as one example, has devised a set of ethical standards and strategies for assuring the development of safe nanotechnology, based on guidelines for biotechnology.43 When gene-splicing began in 1975 two biologists, Maxine Singer and Paul Berg, suggested a moratorium on the technology until safety concerns could be addressed. It seemed apparent that there was substantial risk if genes for poisons were introduced into pathogens, such as the common cold, that spread easily. After a ten-month moratorium guidelines were agreed to at the Asilomar conference, which included provisions for physical and biological containment, bans on particular types of experiments, and other stipulations. These biotechnology guidelines have been strictly followed, and there have not been reported accidents in the thirty-year history of the field.

  More recently, the organization representing the world’s organ transplantation surgeons has adopted a moratorium on the transplantation of vascularized animal organs into humans. This was done out of fear of the spread of long-dormant HIV-type xenoviruses from animals such as pigs or baboons into the human population. Unfortunately, such a moratorium can also slow down the availability of lifesaving xenografts (genetically modified animal organs that are accepted by the human immune system) to the millions of people who die each year from heart, kidney, and liver disease. Geoethicist Martine Rothblatt has proposed replacing this moratorium with a new set of ethical guidelines and regulations.44

  In the case of nanotechnology, the ethics debate has started a couple of decades prior to the availability of the particularly dangerous applications. The most important provisions of the Foresight Institute guidelines include:

  “Artificial replicators must not be capable of replication in a natural, uncontrolled environment.”

  “Evolution within the context of a self-replicating manufacturing system is discouraged.”

  “MNT device designs should specifically limit proliferation and provide traceability of any replicating systems.”

  “Distribution of molecular manufacturing development capability should be restricted whenever possible, to responsible actors that have agreed to use the Guidelines. No such restriction need apply to end products of the development process.”

  Other strategies that the Foresight Institute has proposed include:

  Replication should require materials not found in the natural environment.

  Manufacturing (replication) should be separated from the functionality of end products. Manufacturing devices can create end products but cannot replicate themselves, and end products should have no replication capabilities.

  Replication should require replication codes that are encrypted and time limited. The broadcast architecture mentioned earlier is an example of this recommendation.

  These guidelines and strategies are likely to be effective for preventing accidental release of dangerous self-replicating nanotechnology entities. But dealing with the intentional design and release of such entities is a more complex and challenging problem. A sufficiently determined and destructive opponent could possibly defeat each of these layers of protections. Take, for example, the broadcast architecture. When properly designed, each entity is unable to replicate without first obtaining replication codes, which are not repeated from one replication generation to the next. However, a modification to such a design could bypass the destruction of the replication codes and thereby pass them on to the next generation. To counteract that possibility it has been recommended that the memory for the replication codes be limited to only a subset of the full code. However, this guideline could be defeated by expanding the size of the memory.

  Another protection that has been suggested is to encrypt the codes and build in protections in the decryption systems, such as time-expiration limitations. However, we can see how easy it has been to defeat protections against unauthorized replications of intellectual property such as music files. Once replication codes and protective layers are stripped away, the information can be replicated without these restrictions.

  This doesn’t mean that protection is impossible. Rather, each level of protection will work only to a certain level of sophistication. The meta-lesson here is that we will need to place twenty-first-century society’s highest priority on the continuing advance of defensive technologies, keeping them one or more steps ahead of the destructive technologies (or at least no more than a quick step behind).

  Protection from “Unfriendly” Strong AI. Even as effective a mechanism as the broadcast architecture, however, won’t serve as protection against abuses of strong AI. The barriers provided by the broadcast architecture rely on the lack of intelligence in nanoengineered entities. By definition, however, intelligent entities have the cleverness to easily overcome such barriers.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky has extensively analyzed paradigms, architectures, and ethical rules that may help assure that once strong AI has the means of accessing and modifying its own design it remains friendly to biological humanity and supportive of its values. Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to “get it right the first time,” and that its initial design must have “zero nonrecoverable errors.”45

  Inherently there will be no absolute protection against strong AI. Although the argument is subtle I believe that maintaining an open free-market system for incremental scientific and technological progress, in which each step is subject to market acceptance, will provide the most constructive environment for technology to embody widespread human values. As I have pointed out, strong AI is emerging from many diverse efforts and will be deeply integrated into our civilization’s infrastructure. Indeed, it will be intimately embedded in our bodies and brains. As such, it will reflect our values because it will be us. Attempts to control these technologies via secretive government programs, along with inevitable underground development, would only foster an unstable environment in which the dangerous applications would be likely to become dominant.

  Decentralization. One profound trend already well under way that will provide greater stability is the movement from centralized technologies to distributed ones and from the real world to the virtual world discussed above. Centralized technologies invo
lve an aggregation of resources such as people (for example, cities, buildings), energy (such as nuclear-power plants, liquid-natural-gas and oil tankers, energy pipelines), transportation (airplanes, trains), and other items. Centralized technologies are subject to disruption and disaster. They also tend to be inefficient, wasteful, and harmful to the environment.

  Distributed technologies, on the other hand, tend to be flexible, efficient, and relatively benign in their environmental effects. The quintessential distributed technology is the Internet. The Internet has not been substantially disrupted to date, and as it continues to grow, its robustness and resilience continue to strengthen. If any hub or channel does go down, information simply routes around it.

  Distributed Energy. In energy, we need to move away from the extremely concentrated and centralized installations on which we now depend. For example, one company is pioneering fuel cells that are microscopic, using MEMS technology.46 They are manufactured like electronic chips but are actually energy-storage devices with an energy-to-size ratio significantly exceeding that of conventional technology. As I discussed earlier, nanoengineered solar panels will be able to meet our energy needs in a distributed, renewable, and clean fashion. Ultimately technology along these lines could power everything from our cell phones to our cars and homes. These types of decentralized energy technologies would not be subject to disaster or disruption.

  As these technologies develop, our need for aggregating people in large buildings and cities will diminish, and people will spread out, living where they want and gathering together in virtual reality.