Initial Thoughts About "The Singularity is Near," by Ray Kurzweil

I picked up Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" for a second time today and read through the first chapter. I'm not exactly why/how I put the book down the first time but perhaps it was because the overall idea is so transformative and important that it takes a while to seep in. The premise is simply this: the pace of human-created technology is accelerating with the result of a "Singularity" sometime event occurring sometime near 2048.

Most people sort of implicitly agree that the pace of technology is indeed accelerating and yet seem unwilling to address the actual implications of this statement. I live in a world substantially different from the one my parents grew up in and a universe apart from the one my grandparents lived in. Even now, at 30 years old, and only 7 years removed from college, I meet with new college grads who have had an educational experience substantively different than my own.

In my first year at the University of Washington in 93-94, I took an "experimental" English course that changed my entire career trajectory. Prior to this time, I had thought I wanted to be a psychologist. After this class, I realized that I really wanted to study science fiction and spend my time understanding the social uses of technology and hopefully writing my own prescient science fiction novels that would explore these themes.

The class was an English course about the transforming power of technologies, especially information technologies. We read all the major thought leaders, learned about disruptive technologies, advances in communication, and new fringe theories of cyborgism. Of course, in a class like this, we wrote all of our papers on computer (this at a time when it was still common to be able to turn in handwritten papers and many students owned special word processing machines which were not full-fledged computers hooked up to the web). The "experimental" part of the class was that the class involved a sister-institution being taught the same curriculum hundreds of miles away at BYU. We had to collaborate with them on our assignments using nothing but email. Each of us had an email pen-pal at BYU with whom we composed all of our class papers.

For perspective, this was at a time when the internet, still in its relative infancy, was somewhat limited in its utility. Email consisted of single-colored text and keyboard-driven commands that controlled sending, receiving, etc. My key-learning from that little experiment (besides "don't choose to do your final paper on religion and technology when your pen-pal is a Mormon at BYU and you have very little common ground in that arena") was that collaborative technologies were indeed disruptive technologies that would greatly accelerate scholarship in the coming years. Now look, a scant 13 years later - students are IM-ing each other iterative works in progress, emailing to each other's mobile devices, huddling together in groups with their interconnected computers and devices. That's a lot of change and it's only getting faster year to year.

So what's this "Singularity" thingie that Ray is talking about and where will that put us? Kurzweil defines the Singularity as:

[...] a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.

Considering the size of this book, I may be riffing on it for some time. These are merely my initial thoughts.

I highly recommend reading the opening chapter (free as a PDF here), even if you only skim it for the Singularity principles at the end of the chapter. It's exciting, life-changing stuff that will impact everyone.