by Joel Garreau
Kurzweil, for example, points to his 1989 prediction in The Age of Intelligent Machines of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but in 1988, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency averred that that regime would be America’s principal foe through the lifetimes of our children and our children’s children. Kurzweil, by contrast, saw the Soviets’ dilemma. “Either they would support these decentralized technologies, which would ultimately destroy how tight a control they would have, or they would avoid them—as they tried to relinquish, say, photocopiers—in which case they would destroy their economy and ultimately fail. I actually predicted that they would do a little bit of both and both would do them in, and I think that is exactly what happened.”
Even the rapid, peaceful, and complete collapse of the Berlin Wall and the five-decade-long Cold War is less breathtaking than Kurzweil’s predictions for the near future. Those are about technology entering our bodies and our brains, fundamentally transforming us.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines, written in 1998 and published in 1999, Kurzweil went way, way out on the proverbial limb. He did something popular Nostradamus-style “futurists” always avoid: He predicted not only what he thought would happen but also when. He did so unambiguously, with specific numbers, and in print. He made clear his methodology in ways others could replicate and critique—which they certainly did. In 2001 he opened an award-winning Web site, www.kurzweilai.net, complete with a daily e-mail newsletter on which is posted papers and news reports that address the possibilities that his predictions might be right or wrong. He even collaborated on a book of essays by some of his most scathing critics—Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong AI, albeit one in which he gets to comment on their challenges. Kurzweil majored in creative writing as well as computer science at MIT. (By the end of his sophomore year, he’d taken all the computer science classes MIT had to offer. There weren’t that many of them in 1967.) One suspects that the skills he picked up helped gain him a much wider audience than his peers who languish in the sometimes difficult-to-plow-through ghetto of science writing. Kurzweil became the John the Baptist of the technologists, offering broad and striking visions of the future. Even those who disagree with him are forced to acknowledge their debt. As you will see in the next chapter, he cleared the way for Bill Joy, the former Sun chief scientist, to get so agitated that Joy felt compelled to publish his Hell Scenario.
In his narrative describing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Kurzweil portrays a world in which individuals primarily use computers that are portable, as many as a dozen of which are commonly worn as wristwatches, rings, earrings, eyeglasses and clothing. They provide services previously associated with cell phones, personal digital assistants and credit cards. But they also provide directions, play games and allow you into secure buildings. Keyboards still exist in Kurzweil’s 2009, but the majority of text is created by devices that recognize speech. Many commercial transactions—such as purchasing gasoline at a 7-Eleven—are conducted with an animated personality. That is to say, the gas pump has a face and a voice. Supercomputers match the estimated hardware capabilities of the human brain—20 million billions of calculations per second. An ordinary $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second. Children learn to read on their own, using their personal computers, before grade school. Synthetic voices sound fully human. Persons with disabilities—the deaf, the blind and the lame—are rapidly overcoming their handicaps through intelligent devices. Telephones that translate languages are common, though still buggy. Sexual experience at a distance—with other flesh-and-blood people as well as synthetic computer-generated virtual partners—is emerging but is not great. Intelligent assistants with animated personalities routinely assist with finding information, answering questions and conducting transactions. Both males and females prefer female personalities for their computer-based intelligent assistants. “The two most popular are Maggie, who claims to be a waitress in a Harvard Square café, and Michelle, a stripper from New Orleans. Personality designers are in demand, and the field constitutes a growth area in software development,” Kurzweil writes.
Work groups are dispersed. People are successfully working together despite living in different places. The average household has more than a hundred computers—which is to say chips—most of which are embedded in appliances, entertainment and telephone systems, automobiles and even key chains. (Remember, Kurzweil is predicting this for 2009. Count the number of tiny colored lights in your household.) Household robots have emerged but are not yet fully accepted. Intelligent roads are in use, Kurzweil predicts, primarily for long-distance travel. They allow you to sit back and relax after your car’s smart cruise control locks onto the control sensors. Local roads, though, are still predominantly conventional. Privacy has emerged as a major political issue. There is a growing anti-technology neo-Luddite movement. There is continuing concern with an underclass that has been left behind by a lack of skills, although the size of this underclass appears to be stable, since most people seem to be keeping up. Most visual art—especially performance art, photography and video—is a collaboration between humans and their software. Human musicians routinely jam with computer-generated musicians. Those who wish to create music no longer absolutely need fine finger coordination, the kind you see in traditional pianists and guitarists. There is a surge of interest in new “air” controllers, in which you create music by moving your hands, feet, mouth and other body parts. Virtual realities are convincing in terms of what you see and hear, although transmitting the sense of touch is still rocky. In fact, the creation of virtual reality environments is a form being addressed by artists. Wars are decided by those who have the best and most secure computers, Kurzweil predicts. Most conflicts are not between nations but between nations and terrorists. The greatest threat to national security comes from bioengineered weapons. Cancer and heart disease mortality is being reduced by bioengineering. There is serious speculation as to whether computers will ever be conscious, like humans.
Phew.
Okay, then comes Kurzweil’s narrative for the end of the second decade of the century—2019. In this prediction, based on The Curve, computers are largely invisible. They are embedded everywhere—in your walls, tables, desks, clothing and body. People generally communicate with them the way they might with a human assistant—through speech, gestures and facial expressions, which the computers recognize and respond to, as in the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report. Keyboards are rare, as are connecting cables. Phone calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional moving images piped directly into the eye. They can fool people into thinking a person is physically present. Automated language translation is high-quality and common. Some manufacturers use nanotechnology to assemble objects one atom at a time, like masons laying bricks, but that process is still not widespread. Paper books and documents are rare, since handheld displays are about the size, weight and resolution of a magazine. Adult human workers spend the majority of their time acquiring new skills and knowledge.
In Kurzweil’s 2019, it is difficult to tell if a person might be blind, deaf or paraplegic because of the way computers have been so completely integrated into the body. As a result of sophisticated brain scanning, significant progress has been made in understanding how the human brain works, and that has been translated into how machines work. The price of a computer with the same raw power as a human brain is $4,000 in 1999 dollars. Of the total computing capacity of the human race—all human brains, plus all the technology the species has created—10 percent is nonhuman.
You can do virtually anything with anybody regardless of physical proximity. The technology to accomplish this is easy to use and ever-present, since it does not require any gear that is not normally worn or implanted. Household cleaning robots finally work. The vast majority of commercial transactions include a simulated person with high-quality animation and understanding of language. Often,
no human is involved in this transaction at all; it’s common for the human to have asked his automated personal assistant to, say, book the reservation. Transportation fatalities are rare because of the intelligence in both cars and highways. Violent crime is also down because of tiny cameras everywhere. Privacy is a difficult thing to come by. Kurzweil is reminded of Phil Zimmerman’s line. Zimmerman created the leading encryption software of the early 21st century, Pretty Good Privacy: He once said, “In the future, we’ll all have fifteen minutes of privacy.” This turned on its head Andy Warhol’s line from the 1970s that in the future, “every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”
The personality of their intelligent assistant is something people spend a lot of time crafting. You can model it on actual persons, including yourself, a rock star or the secretary of state. Or you can create a personality that, like characters in a work of fiction, combines traits. In fact, people are beginning to have relationships with their automated assistants, who serve as companions, teachers, caretakers and lovers. These assistants are not yet regarded as equal to humans in the subtlety of their personalities, although there is disagreement on this point. After all, automated personalities are superior to humans in some ways—they have very reliable memories, and their responses are not governed by wildly unpredictable hormonal fluctuations.
In 2019, “an undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence,” Kurzweil writes. “There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. Computer intelligence is thoroughly interwoven into the mechanisms of civilization and is designed to be outwardly subservient to apparent human control.” Humans are required by law to take responsibility for the actions of their machine-based intelligences. On the other hand, few decisions are made without consulting them. The life processes encoded in the human genome are now understood, including those that underlie aging, cancer and heart disease. As a result, life expectancy, which has marched steadily upward since the 1800s, continues to rise. It is now over 100. Virtual artists in all of the arts are emerging and are taken seriously. These machine artists, musicians and authors usually collaborate with humans who have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques. However, interest in their output has gone beyond the mere novelty of machines being creative.
The primary threat to security comes from small groups combining human and machine intelligence using unbreakable encrypted communications. Their weapons of choice are software viruses and bioengineered disease agents. Most flying weapons are tiny—some the size of insects. Kurzweil imagines having a conversation about security with a 2019 person, Molly. Molly reports, “It’s true that the century so far has seen much less bloodshed. But the other side of the coin is that the technologies are so much more powerful today. If something did go wrong, things could spiral out of control very quickly. With bioengineering, for example, it feels a little like all ten billion of us are standing in a room up to our knees in a flammable fluid, waiting for someone—anyone—to light a match.”
Kurzweil replies, “But it sounds like a lot of fire extinguishers have been installed.”
“Yeah, I just hope they work,” Molly replies.
Now comes Kurzweil’s 2029. This is about the time that those who follow The Singularity expect it to kick in, and Kurzweil comes close. But note how Kurzweil’s predictions, for all their breathtaking change every ten years, are still essentially incremental. They all seem natural and obvious to those who are experiencing them.
In 2029, says Kurzweil, a $1,000 unit of computation—one hesitates to call it a computer, because how can you tell where one leaves off and another begins?—has the hardware capacity of 1,000 human brains. (That is 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second—20,000 million billion.) Of the total computing power of the human race—all human brains plus all the technology that the species has created—more than 99 percent is nonhuman. Remember, this is a mathematical projection of The Curve into the near future. It is easily within the lifetime of most people reading this book.
The architecture of the human brain has been much more difficult to decode than had been expected at the turn of the century, says Kurzweil about this 2029. Nonetheless, many areas of the brain are now understood. This knowledge has been used to create the computers of the day. That’s why networks modeled on the brain’s neural activity are substantially faster, more powerful and more capable of remembering than is the human brain. People have implanted in their eyes—either permanently or in something like contact lenses—the ability to see three-dimensional computer-generated images in addition to whatever is in front of them (handy for conference calls). Ear implants commonly provide communications both ways to the Web, in addition to helping people hear. Mind implants allow you to trade thoughts with computers. You can buy all the long-term memory and reasoning you want. It is not yet possible to download knowledge directly, however. Learning still requires time-consuming human experience and study. This is how humans spend most of their day. Automated agents, meanwhile, are learning on their own without being spoon-fed by humans. Computers have read all available human and machine-generated literature. Significant new knowledge is created by machines, which, unlike humans, easily share knowledge with each other.
It is as hard to tell if a person is physically handicapped as it is to guess his original hair color. Everything from nerve stimulation to intelligent prosthetics makes blindness, deafness and paralysis as quaint as whooping cough. In fact, most people use devices originally aimed at the disabled. Neural implants allow family members to sit around the living room enjoying one another’s company without being physically proximate. The human population has leveled off at 12 billion people. The economy continues to boom. Basic necessities of food, shelter and security are available for the vast majority of the human population. There is almost no human employment in manufacturing, agriculture and transportation. Human and nonhuman intelligences are focused on the creation of knowledge. The largest profession is education.
Aging has slowed dramatically. Most diseases can be prevented or reversed. Drugs are individually tailored to an individual’s DNA, so there is nothing like the 100,000 annual deaths even from properly used prescription drugs that had been common in the United States. Robots the size of blood cells—nanobots, as they are called—are routinely injected by the millions into people’s bloodstreams. They are used primarily as diagnostic scouts and patrols, so if anything goes wrong in a person’s body, it can be caught extremely early. The nanobots also serve as an early warning system against bioengineered pathogen attacks. To a more limited extent, they are used as repair agents in the bloodstream and as building blocks for organs built from scratch. Life expectancy is now around 120 years. Fifty-year-olds look like 35-year-olds did in the year 2000. Significant attention is being paid to the psychological ramifications of a substantially increased human life span. Continuing extensions to the human life span will involve further use of bionic organs, including portions of the brain.
A sharp division no longer exists between the human world and the machine world. Machine intelligence is derived from the design of human intelligence, and human intelligence is enhanced by machine intelligence. Through neural implants of computer hardware into the brain, humans have greater understanding, memory and perception than ever. At the same time, many machines have personalities, skills and knowledge derived from the reverse engineering of human intelligence. In either case, the implants mean that human intelligence is popped directly into machines and vice versa.
Defining what constitutes a human being is a significant legal and political issue. It is difficult to cite human capabilities that machines can’t match. For reasons of political sensitivity, machine intelligences generally do not press the point of their superiority. The rapidly growing capability of machines is controversial, but there is no effective resistance to it.
Humans realize that disengaging the human-machine civilization from its dependence on machine intelligence is not possible. Since machine intelligence was initially designed to be subservient to human control, it has not presented a threatening face to the human population. Discussion of the legal rights of machines is growing. Those not embedded in a human brain are independent. Many of the leading artists, for example, are machines. These artists say they are conscious and have as wide an array of emotional and spiritual experiences as their human progenitors. These claims are largely accepted.
Molly is Kurzweil’s foil. She is his alter ego—“the woman I would want to be,” he says. Molly reports from the year 2029 that she is having an affair with her personal assistant. “George is a different person every day,” she says admiringly. “He just grows and learns constantly. He downloads whatever knowledge he wants from the Web and it becomes part of him. He’s so smart and intense, and very spiritual.” It also turns out that George, because of mind-machine sensory inputs, can make Molly smile in every possible way.
“I’m awfully happy for you,” the Kurzweil character says. Then he thinks of Molly’s husband. “But how does Ben feel about you and George?” he asks.
“He wasn’t too crazy about it, that’s for sure,” replies Molly.
“But you’ve worked it out?”
“We’ve worked it out, all right. We broke up three years ago.”
Put Kurzweil’s 2029 in context here. Suppose you decide to go out and buy a new home today. The year 2029 will come well before you pay off your 30-year mortgage. If you have a newborn child, this is the world Kurzweil says she will be entering before she is old enough to get her medical degree.
After Kurzweil finishes describing the world of 2029, he really torques out. He takes his inexorable Curve logic out to 2099. If nothing else, his predictions demonstrate what happens when you claim exponential acceleration will never level off. In this view, the change encountered over the course of the 21st century has been like ten centuries in one.