An AI-Driven Posthuman Future
The Singularity Is Nearer purports to show how AI can usher in a new utopia, but it actually reveals an AI enthusiast's vision of humanity's end.
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI
By Ray Kurzweil, Viking, 2024 • 419 pages
The verdict: The Singularity Is Nearer, written by an intelligent, articulate and knowledgeable AI expert, reveals the terrifying implications of giving ourselves over to the false hope of overcoming human limitations.
WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS
Author Ray Kurzweil, Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google, predicts we will soon reach “singularity,” the point at which the human mind and artificial intelligence become one. As everyone—including the experts—struggles to understand AI and its dizzying developments, books such as this are key to grasping how the seductive potential of AI can induce us to deny our God-given human nature and the constraints, limits, and purposes God has established for us.
THE ARGUMENT
Kurzweil makes a convincing case that the “singularity,” the point at which humans will merge with AI, will come sometime around 2045. Here’s how he describes it: the singularity will “directly expand our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. Thus we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelligence and consciousness so profoundly that it’s difficult to comprehend.” He envisions two diametrically opposed possible outcomes: “If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social and political challenges these advances pose, by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better. Yet if we fail, our very survival is in question.”
Kurzweil’s focus is “reinventing Intelligence.” He describes progress being made regarding three key questions: (1) “how to digitally replicate the flexibility and abstraction power of the neocortex“ (the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functioning); (2) how to develop “noninvasive…nanoscale electrodes [that can be] inserted into the brain through the bloodstream” and enable increasing “brain-computer interfaces”; and (3), how to “use advanced AI” to “connect our neocortex to the cloud, allowing our neurons to communicate with simulated neurons hosted for us online.” Once those problems are solved, we will be able to merge with superintelligent AI, “ultimately expanding our intelligence millions-fold.”
“As artificial intelligence grows…we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us.” - Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Nearer
WHAT WORKS
The exponential growth of computing power explains Kurzweil’s belief in AI’s transformative potential. He speaks of “the law of accelerating returns: information technologies like computing get exponentially cheaper because each advance makes it easier to design the next stage of their own evolution.” One particularly striking example of this is that, measured in 2023 dollars, the “first computer, in 1935, could perform approximately 0.0000065 computations per second per dollar.” Now, the most advanced chips “can perform around 130 billion operations per second per dollar.” With numerous examples, Kurzweil shows how these advances have already led to continuous betterment in almost every area of life—health, education, poverty reduction, longevity, etc. With AI, he says, the improvements could surge to unimaginable levels.
WHAT DOESN’T
Brilliant and utterly ambitious, Kurzweil acknowledges many of AI’s risks. Yet he seems blind to the dire implications of attempting to overcome our inescapable limitations, including death. The book includes a particularly unsettling “conversation” he had with an AI-based “replicant” of his late father, which talked and responded as his father would have. “This is the first step in bringing my father back,” he writes. An imaginary dialogue between Kurzweil and a skeptical “Cassandra” concludes the book. She fears human extinction if a superintelligent AI comes to dominate and replace our biological brains. Confusing posthumanity with progress, Kurzweil responds: if we “merge with the intelligence we are creating, the AIs will become part of us…It is we who will be doing what AI does,” but “with added intelligence.”
THE BIGGER PICTURE
AI, with its mimicry of human language and consciousness, forces us to face the question of what it means to be human. Also, how do we safeguard our humanity in contending with a constantly developing and poorly understood technology, unprecedented in its character and implications? We dare not forget that, as Carl Trueman wrote, “human beings are created by God with a given set of dependencies and obligations, limits, and ends.” If we abandon our natural reverence for our God-givenness in order to chase posthuman dreams of superintelligent immortality, we stand to lose everything that is meaningful and beautiful about human life.
THE BOTTOM LINE
AI could bring tremendous good—and immeasurable evil. As Yuval Levin said, AI epitomizes the biblical idol: made by human hands, it has a mouth but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, and ears but cannot hear. It tempts us to idealize the God-like selves we imagine AI can transform us into, and thereby ultimately to forfeit our humanity. Essential reading, Singularity exemplifies the great perils of artificial superintelligence.
 | A guest post by
|
I have huge respect for Ray Kurzweil. He is one of the earliest technologists in voice recognition. In the early days Ray was decades ahead of most people in technology. He created, for example, Voice Recognition, even before there was AI. But my respect stops there.
Ray is typical of a genre of successful technologists who lack humility toward the infinitely deeper plane of existence. Ray's entire existence was built on his mathematical prowess and early recognition of LLM-type neural processes. As a person who was deep into theoretical physics and mathematics at the PhD level - before I was 21 years old, I am not blind to the limitations in having a deeply mathematical mind. It helped me in life. But unlike these folks, I discovered a great truth which I suspect they have not. "Even the smartest of people on earth are retards when compared to what they do not know." This concept is alien to those who do not accept God or the enormity of nature or the enormity of what one does not know. This basis of humility is lost on them. How do you explain the leaders of AI who declared with great certainty that AI would kill all jobs. We have seen this before.
They are very smart people but lack the wisdom many common folks have, no deep-mathematical mind needed.
Great minds that wander into the world of "worldwide prediction," armed with nothing other than a microscopic grasp of nature (given nature is infinite) often step in shit. They sidestep nature and humanity, things they know little about, as if not understanding something is equivalent to it not being there.
Unfortunately, this book just reinforces my belief that, as smart as Ray Kurzweil thinks he is, he is stupid when compared to what he does not know.
Trying to put (the infinitely dimensional) nature and humanity into a well-defined neural mathematical straight jacket is plain stupid.
Just my opinion. 🤷♂️
So well said. AI should not become part of us, we will become and become subsumed by it. AI is only a machine, a tool, with no soul, no morality, no judgment. It is a tool just as a hammer is a tool, and can never and should never be anything but what is it, a tool. AI has neither sentience nor cognition. At best it is a simulation, and one based what goes in is what comes out. And yet look at how we, humans, refer to it with human nomenclature like "Claude" and refer to it as he/she. It is a machine "it", a man made (& men are inherently flawed) "it" and that is all. JMO.