- The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
- Penguin (2024)
Ray Kurzweil, who is 76, wears the latest in Silicon Valley fashion: a Mickey Mouse watch, colourful suspenders and a righteous belief that humans should be able to live forever.
For two decades the inventor, futurist, computer geek and Google engineer has expressed an almost religious desire to meld with the consciousness of machines, or what he calls the Singularity.
When once asked if God exists, Kurzweil replied, “Not yet.”
In fact, Kurzweil swallows scores of pills every day with the hope that they will extend his life long enough to defy biology and allow him to join the brave new world of “immortal software-based humans” where intelligence moves at the speed of light. In such places gods are made real.
He predicts that this glorious event will happen soon, around 2030, with the help of AI, which, he predicts, will force a major rupture in human history for those who can afford it. Kurzweil embraces the AI revolution as a sort of electronic Rapture. On this remarkable subject Kurzweil has written a new bestseller: The Singularity Is Nearer.
In simple terms, Kurzweil hopes to “solve” death. That is the aim of the growing Silicon Valley cult of transhumanism. One summary: “Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.”
The implication is plain: humans are weak, inefficient, imperfect, messy, stupid and too often bored, and our tired planet can’t contain us. Just as communism promised to elevate workers, the Singularity vows to take mortals to Mount Olympus and beyond to the stars. Or as they say in Silicon Valley, Kurzweil has an “abundance mindset,” which assumes everything is possible.
The only concession Kurzweil makes to reality in his forecasts is the unpredictability of AI. “If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t anticipate what it is going to do.” Or whom it will serve. Or how much energy it might consume.
As a consequence, Kurzweil could jack himself into immortality only to find himself trapped in a Pornhub site or transported to a world where video game cannibals dine on frail old men for sport. AI might even decide that Kurzweil and his ilk make an imperfect battery source à la The Matrix.
And just what will Kurzweil do if he finds living forever in his eternal program dull? Then again, odds are that revolution and famine will eventually unplug his internet-of-things life-support system. Screen to black.
In the thrall of techno-gospel
The media generally regards Kurzweil as a far-sighted visionary and futurist. Call me old school, but I find the notion of banishing death and extending life about as inviting as booking a vacation rental in one of Dante’s nine circles of hell.
But let’s get real. Kurzweil isn’t talking about science. He is selling an evangelical faith in technology, and a largely totalitarian one at that. Like most transhumanists, Kurzweil doesn’t go around asking ordinary people if they think immortality is desirable or even a good idea for a genocidal species that is deconstructing the biosphere. He just assures us that immortality is as inescapable as autonomous cars, killer drones and constant surveillance.
People won’t notice the transformation to higher-tech living, reasons Kurzweil, because it will just become the sensible thing to do. In the coming technological paradise, resistance is futile. We are the exceptional species that cosmetically changes who and what we are.
More than 50 years ago Jacques Ellul, the French social critic and radical Christian, warned that overdependence on technology would take us to this quiet tyranny. He predicted that technology would become a self-evolving force intent on separating human beings from their humanity and their natural home, the biological world.
Ellul’s prophetic cautions remain largely unread and misunderstood. Meanwhile a great many billionaires, politicians and corporations work tirelessly to denigrate “technophobia and unnecessary prohibitions” that stand in the way of their nature-destroying agendas. Welcome to the new libertarianism.
The social critic Nassim Taleb has written that Kurzweil and other men of his ilk — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bryan Johnson and Mark Zuckerberg — share similar characteristics. These techno-optimists dress like nerds, lack charm, mistake data for parables, fetishize over the future, disregard history, obsess over new technologies, eschew traditional wisdom, avoid literature, praise speed and admire the power of algorithms.
For these boy-like adults (and they are largely men), technology is progress, and progress demands growth. More growth just means more technology and more people to serve it. Only more technology can solve the problems created by more technology. Regulation is bad because it impedes progress. The precautionary principle has no role in decision-making because it, too, slows down progress. Democracy is an artifact, and an inefficient one at that.
Kurzweil and members of his high-tech crowd share another notion. They assume humans can control and direct technology to positive ends.
George Dyson, a technology historian and son of futurist physicist Freeman Dyson, has dared raise the rather obvious alternative prospect. In his book Analogia he writes: “Nature’s answer to those who seek to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build systems whose nature is beyond programmable control.”
Down with death!
Kurzweil’s vision of fending off death while creating a new and better human also isn’t very original. It stinks of Leninism and other utopian projects.
In the 1920s, one Bolshevik group called themselves the God Builders and envisioned a world where machine automation would make it easier to create a worker’s paradise. (Bad ideas rarely go away.)
One of these Russian God Builders, the polyglot Alexander Bogdanov, experimented with blood transfusions and proposed to reverse the aging process. He thought the blood of fresh youth could revitalize the aging veins of grumpy elders. Not surprisingly, Bogdanov died of a botched blood transfusion that he performed on himself in 1928. (Blood transfusions, by the way, remain a thing among tech billionaires.)
The Bolshevik quest against death took other forms. When Lenin died in 1924, a group of scientists known as the Immortalization Commission were charged with the task of preserving the man’s appearance. By hiding biological decay with elixirs of embalming fluids and early forms of refrigeration, they believed they were ensuring the endless appeal of Lenin’s revolutionary ideas.
In his wonderful telling of this story titled The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, the philosopher John Gray explained the point of this tedious work: “Eventually all of humankind could look forward to scientifically guaranteed immortality, but the process of technological resurrection would begin with the most valuable of human beings — Lenin.”
So Kurzweil’s obsession and that of the transhumanists is really nothing new. Gray counters with a perspective rarely spoken in Silicon Valley: “The advance of knowledge cannot deliver humans from themselves, and if they use science to direct the course of evolution the result will be to engender monsters.”
Energy vampires
Then there’s the essential component of energy, a challenge that Kurzweil dismisses with a wave of the hand. Life requires energy, but eternal life demands even greater quantities on a vampiric scale. It will take a fleet of nuclear plants and a host of gas plants to keep singular people like Kurzweil floating around in software programs.
AI programs and data centres already require so much energy that companies are lining up to make deals with old and new nuclear power plants. Microsoft even resurrected the aging Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its “hyperscaled” needs.
One study suggests that at current rates of energy consumption, information and communication technologies could account for 14 per cent of the world’s carbon footprint by 2040. And that’s without animating the dead or extending human lives.
How death cheaters will find their energy is just one of many thorny related questions. Should immortals be allowed to consume more energy than mortals? What happens if, in order to sustain Kurzweil and his immortal ilk, we must cannibalize energy from homes and hospitals? Will energy and its limits define a new class system: the endlessly undead elite and the rest of us?
Brains out of balance
Kurzweil’s uncritical embrace of AI and immortality also tells us something about technology’s conquest of the human brain, whose functioning is divided into left and right sides. The more we intertwine with machines, the more we become creatures of the left brain’s way of operating.
Noted psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist sees in this evolution an existential threat. In his book The Master and His Emissary, he explains that the left hemisphere has evolved over millions of years to reduce things and favour manipulation — “grabbing, getting and controlling” — while the right aims to comprehend the bigger picture. Both hemispheres need to work in harmony and temper each other. But in certain environments, and at certain historical times, the left hemisphere forgets its role as servant and becomes dominant. It overwhelms the right.
Our collective retreat from nature has unwittingly invited this dictatorship. Walking in the woods engages both hemispheres of the brain. While the left looks for details, the right connects with the presence of living things. In contrast, a technological society largely feeds one hemisphere: the left. It acts like a radio station with only one channel that sees the world as a lifeless, mechanical, two-dimensional, geometric construct. It cares little for courage, magnanimity, wisdom or generosity.
In a recent essay McGilchrist despairs of this state of affairs. He writes that the right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality, saying “delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent, grosser and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere than after damage to the left.”
He adds that without the right hemisphere to rely on, the left hemisphere is at sea. “It denies the most obvious facts, lies, and makes stuff up when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And it is relentlessly, vacuously cheerful in the face of disaster.” In other words, Kurzweil’s dream of living indefinitely is pretty much a left-brain construct. Indeed, “AI, like the left hemisphere, has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context — or even scale and extent — changes everything,” writes McGilchrist. Transhumanism, then, is not a solution but a raging testament to our current deranged predicament.
The ancient Greeks told cautionary stories about quests for immortality. They named them acts of hubris. Hubris, of course, invariably involves some form of violence, and dishonours the true. Ultimately, it represents a deliberate act of godlike arrogance against life itself.
The gods had a good reason to condemn Sisyphus to rolling a large boulder up a hill every day. The cunning king killed travellers, played tricks on the unwary and wanted to avoid death. He even tied up Thanatos, the personification of death, and threw him in a box. In the absence of death, the sick and ailing with pain could not pass into another world. Livestock could not be butchered for meat. No living thing could die and so the world filled up with animals and people.
Finally, Ares, the god of war, had enough. He released Thanatos, restoring the cycle of life and death. The gods then punished Sisyphus’s arrogance with eternal hard labour.
We may have it in our power, still, to avoid our own similarly bleak reckoning. But that would mean rejecting the hubris of those trying to make us believe we can stash death in a sterile box of wires and microchips.
As one upheaval follows another in our tech-heavy civilization, we could decide that the future of human intelligence and creativity depends on respecting biology rather than melding with machines. Some of us, sooner or later, may openly rebel and embrace an organic and low-tech existence. A life unplugged, one that accepts limits, paradoxically offers a realistic version of human freedom.
As John Gray has written, utopian visions, whether fascism, communism, globalism or the Singularity, invariably promise “dreams of collective deliverance.” But in waking life, they “are found to be nightmares.”
