(IEEE) -- Across cultures,
classes, and aeons, people have yearned to transcend death.
Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of
the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe
that in the next several decades we’ll have computers
into which you’ll be able to upload your
consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you.
Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical
body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual
paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad
food, or poor cellphone reception.
Now you know why the singularity has also been called
the rapture of the geeks.
The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after
engineers build the first computer with
greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will
trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent
machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from
generation to generation in weeks or days rather than
decades or years. The availability of all that cheap,
mass-produced brilliance will spark explosive economic
growth, an unending, hypersonic, technoindustrial
rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial
Revolution look like a bingo game.
At that point, we will have been sucked well beyond
the event horizon of the singularity. It might be nice
there, on the other side—by definition, you can’t know
for sure. Sci-fi writers, though, have served up lots of
scenarios in which humankind becomes the prey, rather
than the privileged beneficiaries, of synthetic savants.
But the singularity is much more than a sci-fi
subgenre. A lot of smart people buy into it in one form
or another—there are versions that dispense with the
life-everlasting stuff. There are academic gatherings
and an annual conference at Stanford. There are
best-selling books, audiotapes, and videos. Scheduled
for release this summer is a motion picture, The Singularity Is
Near, starring the actress Pauley Perrette
and a gaggle of aging boffins who’ve never acted in a
movie. (Without any apparent irony, the picture’s
producers call it “a true story about the future.”)
There’s also a drumbeat of respectful and essentially
credulous articles in the science press. Unlike stories
about UFOs or zero-pollution energy sources, singularity
stories don’t exact from editors a steep payment in
self-respect. That’s because of the impressive
attainments—albeit usually in fields unrelated to
neuroscience or biology—of some of the people who chirp
about mind uploading and nanomachine organ repair. The
leading spokesman for the life-everlasting version of
the singularity is the entrepreneur and inventor Ray
Kurzweil, who’s also behind the movie The Singularity Is
Near and a recent book of the same title.
Why should a mere journalist question Kurzweil’s
conclusion that some of us alive today will live
indefinitely? Because we all know it’s wrong. We can
sense it in the gaping, take-my-word-for-it
extrapolations and the specious reasoning of those who
subscribe to this form of the singularity argument.
Then, too, there’s the flawed grasp of neuroscience,
human physiology, and philosophy. Most of all, we note
the willingness of these people to predict fabulous
technological advances in a period so conveniently short
it offers themselves hope of life everlasting.
This has all gone on too long. The emperor isn’t
wearing anything, for heaven’s sake.
The singularity debate is too rarely a real argument.
There’s too much fixation on death avoidance. That’s a
shame, because in the coming years, as computers become
stupendously powerful—really and truly ridiculously
powerful—and as electronics and other technologies begin
to enhance and fuse with biology, life really is going
to get more interesting.
So to produce this issue we invited articles from half
a dozen people who impressed us with their achievements
and writings on subjects central to the singularity
idea in all its loopy glory, encompassing not just
hardware and wetware but also economics, consciousness,
robotics, nanotechnology, and philosophy. And with a few
exceptions, we found people who are not on record as
either embracing singularity dogma or rejecting it.
On consciousness, we have John
Horgan, whose book The Undiscovered
Mind describes how the mind resists
explanation. We also have Christof
Koch and Giulio Tononi, neuroscientists
who specialize in consciousness. Rodney
Brooks, of MIT’s Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, weighs in on the
future of machine intelligence. IEEE Spectrum journalism
intern Sally
Adee reports on a wildly ambitious effort,
just gathering steam now, to map the human brain in
enough detail to learn its secrets—and eventually
re-create it. Robin
Hanson, an economist, describes a future in
which capitalist imperatives and technological
capabilities drive each other toward a society that the
word weird
doesn’t even begin to describe. Nanotechnology
researcher Richard
Jones, philosopher Alfred
Nordmann, and semiconductor researcher
Bill
Arnold all consider aspects of singularitarian
visions and explain where they’re myopic.
For the last word in this issue, we turned to the
computer scientist and science-fiction writer Vernor
Vinge. It was Vinge’s 1993 essay “The Coming
Technological Singularity” that launched the modern
singularity movement.
That movement has evolved since then into an array of
competing hypotheses and scenarios [for a rundown, see
“Who’s Who
in the Singularity,” in this issue But
central to them all is the paradoxical yet weirdly
compelling idea of a conscious machine. Arguably, no
other technology-related concept resonates with such
intellectual and philosophical force.
Consciousness seems mystical and inextricably linked
to organisms. What happens in the cerebral cortex that
turns objective information into subjective
experience—that turns chemical and neuronal activity in
the mouth and nose into the taste of watermelon?
pressure waves into the sound of an oboe? We don’t know,
but we will someday. No one argues that consciousness
arises from anything but biological processes in the brain.
The brain is nothing more, and nothing less, than a
very
powerful and very odd computer. Evolution has honed it
over millions of years to do a fantastic job at certain
things, such as pattern recognition and fine control of
muscles. The brain is deterministic, meaning that its
reactions and responses, including the sensations and
behavior of its “owner,” are determined completely by
how it is stimulated and by its own internal biophysics
and biochemistry. Given those facts, most mathematical
philosophers conclude that all the brain’s functions,
including consciousness, can be re-created in a
machine. It’s a matter of time.
Ah, but let’s face it—time is what really matters. If
you’re obsessed with your own mortality, the idea of a
computer blinking into consciousness 400 years from now
isn’t going to rock your world. You want the magic
moment to come, say, 25 years from now at most.
Unfortunately, that timetable grossly overestimates the
speed of technical progress. And it underestimates the
brain’s awesome intricacy, as Horgan argues in his
article. He, Koch, Tononi, and Adee all agree that
everything we know about the central issue of brain
research—how it creates consciousness, and therefore the
universe each one of us inhabits—adds up to almost nothing.
What we do know is that the brain’s complexity dwarfs
anything we’ve managed to fully understand, let alone
build. Koch, Tononi, and Brooks are all confident that
consciousness will arise in a machine, but they are less
sanguine about death-defying uploading, and especially
about it happening in time to allow people alive now to
preserve their minds in some sort of digitally created Eden.
Still, if you encounter my uploaded consciousness in a
virtual paradise 50 years from now, feel free to tell
me, “I told you so.”
I won’t mind a bit.
LINK: IEEE