Thursday, I went to a film screening of Transcendent Man, followed by a Q&A with the director and Ray Kurzweil himself. Very interesting stuff. I encourage you to get your hands on it; at the least it'll give you some things to think about. I wanted to get down a handful of somewhat disparate comments.
Kurzweil is adamant that he thinks all of humanity's poetic posturing in accepting death is a convenient lie, something that made us more able to accept something over which we had no control. Now, we're getting to the point where it may not be so impossible. Either way, living forever seems just as terrifying to me as dying, but yeah.
I worry that Kurzweil paints far too rosy of a picture of this future. There are people interviewed in the documentary (one particularly greasy-haired cowboy hat-wearing techie comes to mind) that agree with the general principles that Kurzweil lays out, but see something much more sinister as the likely outcome. I'm more inclined to agree with them.
Also, I think there will be incredible problems with power dynamics between the inevitable haves and have-nots. During the Q&A, someone asked something to the effect of "what does this do for inequality around the world?" I thought that Kurzweil's answer, in which he largely shrugged off the possibility of greater inequality by appealing to the spread and penetration of cell phones, was weak. One of the key premises of his idea of the Singularity is that technology will be able to improve itself on its own. The exponential growth of this technology will happen under a very compressed timeframe, as Kurzweil says when he argues that in the coming century we won't see 100 years of progress, but 20,000.
It's slightly reassuring that cell phones have become so ubiquitous, but I think the key difference between that and the logical conclusion of what Kurzweil is predicting is that the gap in ability and time will be so great for the Singularity that it could enable a group of people to cement their lead very quickly, potentially even make it impossible for anyone to catch up with them. Then, it seems, we'd have 1984. Orwell's vision of the future as: "imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." Very bad result. Kurzweil did not reassure me.
Another worry was tied to his flippant response to someone who asked about a potential war between the haves and have-nots, something to the effect of "such a war wouldn't last long". The side with such superior technology, of course, would win. Even if we didn't face a war between the groups, a similar thing would still happen. Imagine that we are able to become effectively immortal, if we choose. There will likely be a sizable portion of people who choose not to, for a whole host of reasons. The end result, of course? Those people die out. Either through war or through life choices, it seems like humanity's legacy will be decided by the group that embraces these changes.
As someone asked, what can we do to ensure that humanity's legacy will reflect everyone, and not just the early adapters? Looking around the room, I felt panic in thinking that only nerds with long hair, overenthusiastic guys with sideburns and leather jackets, aging people terrified of death, and pretentious urban jackasses will be the people who choose to adopt these technologies, therefore making them humanity's future.
A question that I imagine he gets a lot is that if this is the inevitable path of technology and it occurs in a relatively short period of time, how come we don't see galactic engineering on the scale that he describes by looking at the sky? Surely we're not the only species ever to make it far. Well, Kurzweil thinks we're probably the first, otherwise we would see galaxies being transformed from our vantage point here on Earth. After all, someone does have to be first. The other possibility would be that some is occurring but too far away for the light to have reached us yet. It's kind of a crazy idea, but I respect that he accepts it as the logical conclusion of his work.
I know that PZ Myers, a highly respected biologist and ID critic, is highly critical of Kurzweil (see here and here, for example), accusing him of lacking a basic understanding of biology and how the brain works. I think Myer's accusations of Kurzweil's theories and followers of smacking of New Age techno-spiritualism is pretty on, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong. Also, I think it's fair to question the timeline that Kurzweil lays out.
Arguing, however, against Kurzweil on the basis of "the brain is way too complicated to replicate" sounds incredibly weak to me. People arguing that "x is way too complicated to do z" do not have a strong historical track record. And, if you buy into the physical universe being, well, physical, how could you ever make a fundamental exception for the human brain as somehow above and beyond anything else? The same criticism can be applied at the level of the neuron for those who argue that there's something fundamentally different about neurons that means they could never be replicated by a non-neuron material (although that presumes that artificial intelligence somehow isn't allowed to co-opt organic construction material).
One thing that all of this had made me think a lot more about is a short story called The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (full text here). Written in 1956. I read it maybe like 10 years ago and it's really stuck with me since. Touches on a lot of things that Kurzweil talks about, but from a perspective decades before. It also underscores what I think is the illusion of "meeting our energy needs". For me, it also highlights some of the logical inevitability of some of the stuff that Kurzweil talks about (barring self-destruction), even if his timing is off.
So, interesting stuff. The first I heard of Kurzweil was Our Lady Peace's Spiritual Machines back in high school. I still haven't read much of anything Kurzweil has actually written, so I should probably get around to that. I have to say that with his prophesying, single-mindedness, and eccentricities like popping hundreds of vitamin supplements a day, part of me hopes that his timing is off just as a spite.
The documentary ends with Kurzweil talking about spirituality and humanity's destiny. "Does God exist? I would say: not yet".
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