The wordcel/shape rotator dichotomy—a 21st-century update of the right-brain/left-brain taxonomy—may seem laughably reductive, but it’s only half ironic. When tech billionaire, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley favorite Marc Andreessen tweeted disparagingly about the other half—wordcels—he expressed a sentiment he seems to sincerely hold. His cohort of Digital Destroyers holds an entire field of human endeavor in contempt, which may explain why its inhabitants are so eager to give up their personhood and transform into machines.
Computer scientist and noted transhumanist Ray Kurzweil is less overtly dismissive of the arts than his peers, but he’s still a shape-shifter—and by all accounts a skilled one. His not-so-subtle title at Google is “principal researcher and AI visionary,” and he’s the author of a number of non-fiction books beloved by Silicon Valley tech fetishists. In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005), he offered controversial predictions of a strange near future in which machines take over, solving all the world’s problems and perhaps even having transcendental experiences along the way .
His impressive understanding of computing is demonstrated again in his unrelated and sometimes misleading new book, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. Kurzweil is a refreshingly clear expositor of complex technical concepts, but he suffers from the shape-rotator’s signature flaw: an inability to recognize the limits of his own understanding.
“The Singularity is Closer” is daunting to summarize – even for a wordcel like me – because it’s so sloppy and caring. Kurzweil makes strong claims on a wide range of topics, from personal identity to the nature of consciousness to the future of medicine. Far from the kind of disciplined treatise we might expect from a veteran programmer, this book is a mixture of free association and shameless simplification.
That doesn’t mean every part of it is sloppy or wrong. Kurzweil’s basic thesis—that “information technologies like computers become exponentially cheaper because each advance makes it easier to design the next stage of their own evolution”—is sensible, even wise. As he points out, “one dollar now buys about 600 trillion times more computing power than GPS development.”
Unfortunately, Kurzweil rarely confines himself to making claims about the mechanics and history of AI. Instead, he ventures into foreign territory with unfortunate results. History, he declares in the first chapter of the book, is nothing but the evolution of information processing, and it can be neatly and seamlessly mapped out into “six epochs, or the stages of the beginning of our universe.” In the sixth and final stage, “our intelligence spreads throughout the universe, turning ordinary matter into computronium, which is matter organized into the ultimate density of computation.” Kurzweil is spared the humiliation of trying to explain what this means because the sixth age and its mysteries remain in the distant future. We’re currently approaching the fifth, when we’ll “merge with AI and scale up with millions of times the computing power our biology gave us.”
A chapter in “The Singularity Is Nearer” is devoted to the proposition that life has been “getting exponentially better” for centuries, but Kurzweil expects that life will improve even more dramatically when the singularity arrives: when machines surpass their human counterparts creators. In this brave new world of super-intelligent computers, 3D printers will allow us to produce enough clothing and housing for everyone, and AI will pioneer techniques that allow us to grow crops more efficiently. Meanwhile, sophisticated machine learning programs will design innovative new drugs, and nanorobots will enter our bodies and kill any wayward cells, effectively treating cancer. “As AI unlocks unprecedented material abundance in countless fields,” Kurzweil writes, “the struggle for physical survival will fade into history.” There will even be a medicine of sorts for death itself: we’ll continue to converse with the robotic counterparts of our loved ones after they die .
Kurzweil graciously admits that there may be a few growing pains during these final eras. Jobs will be automated before new forms of markets emerge, and violence may break out in the meantime. People who struggle to adapt may be plagued by feelings of worthlessness or inferiority. Eventually, though, we’ll stop complaining and rejoice in our liberation from the burden of physicality: “Once our brains are archived on a more advanced digital substrate, our powers of self-change can be fully realized.” And when we turn on AI directly in his brain, he will not be a competitor, but “an extension of ourselves.”
“Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” gushes Bill Gates in a blurb on the back cover of The Singularity Is Nearer. Despite this endorsement, it’s reasonable to wonder if the Silicon Valley oracle is really that reliable. At one point he goes so far as to speculate that “with the advent of nanotechnology, we will be able to produce an optimized body at will: we will be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like a fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them.” Sometimes Kurzweil’s prophecies read like passages from messianic religious texts.
But even if his most outrageous technological predictions come true—even if we can cure cancer with nanobots and program ourselves to grow gills—heaven will remain elusive. Suppose 3D printers really do churn out enough food to support the world’s population, or AI really does invent cures for the most stubborn diseases. Why should we expect these life-saving commodities to be distributed fairly, given that our already ample supply of food reaches so few people and that so many of us lack access to the most basic health care? Kurzweil’s bland response – “we will need smart government policies to ease the transition and ensure that prosperity is widely shared” – is not satisfactory or particularly surprising.
From the first page of The Singularity Is Nearer, it’s clear that for Kurzweil, technological problems are the only ones that matter. Questions of political will and even ethical permissibility are afterthoughts. If the technology is available, then Kurzweil considers its adoption not just inevitable, but probably advisable. Progress is presented as an unstoppable force rather than the product of effort and ingenuity.
He notes, for example, that renewables “accounted for about 1.4 percent of global electricity generation” in 2000 and 12.85 percent in 2021—then confidently declares, “This progress will continue exponentially.” . Never mind that reactionary regimes, many of them climate change deniers, are poised to take (or have already taken) power in much of the Western world. Or that scientists are warning that we have already passed the point of no return. While the chart line is climbing, Kurzweil believes it will continue to climb.
“History gives us cause for deep optimism” when it comes to the expansion of the political franchise, too, as illustrated by a neat little chart tracing the “Spread of Democracy since 1800.” But this crude quantitative measure fails to register the many qualitative causes for concern, among them the erosion of LGBTQ rights and expanding restrictions on abortion. Democracy is a fragile achievement, a work in progress, not something that can be guaranteed by a trend line—and certainly not something that technology generates automatically.
However, this is clearly a good thing, unlike many of the more disturbing advances that Kurzweil welcomes with open arms. What if Kurzweil and his colleagues in Silicon Valley are alone in finding the prospect of merging with computers attractive? What if the rest of us are horrified at the idea of talking to AI facsimiles of our deceased loved ones? Indeed, many people have already chosen to give up even the technologies this book declares to be irresistible, such as the Metaverse. While Kurzweil worries about the most dramatic and fantastic ways AI can betray us—by allowing bioterrorists to create a deadly pathogen by replicating itself until the nanobots take over—he never spares a thought for the millions of banal ways which recent technological breakthroughs have already made life unbearable. It doesn’t matter to him that misinformation spreads like wildfire, or that neo-Nazis are radicalized on YouTube, or that teenage girls swept up in a flood of devilishly addictive images often develop eating disorders. We i can we’re using all these radical new technologies—and by his lights, that’s enough to prove that we should.
There is no doubt that artificial intelligence will soon overtake humans in many ways, and Kurzweil is right to suspect that society will change significantly when computers can do our laundry, diagnose our illnesses, and conduct trials of new drugs. A sober assessment of what computers can and cannot contribute to the human project is long overdue, but unfortunately The Singularity Is Nearer is no such thing. Better guidance for the future will have to take stock of the many aspects of personality that Kurzweil ignores or dismisses. He is right that life has improved in many ways, of course, but what is left out of his relentlessly futuristic picture are many valuable things that cannot be said to be “advancing”.
What about art? Kurzweil’s response is that he too would benefit from an upgrade. “Actors can now convey what their character is thinking through just their words and outward physical expressions,” but in virtual reality we’ll “have art that puts the raw, disorganized, nonverbal thoughts of the character—in all their ineffable beauty and complexity — directly into our brains.” If he had been paying attention in the last century, he might have realized that modernist writers using stream-of-consciousness methods, including Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, had solved this problem long ago.
What about the physical experience? In the “digital universe,” Kurzweil says, “many products will need no physical form at all, as the simulated versions will perform perfectly well in very realistic detail.” Among them: “a sensory-rich virtual beach vacation for the whole family “. Only someone with no connection to sensory pleasures could imagine that digital simulations would ever be adequate substitutes for the luxuries we can taste or touch.
The smug conclusion that “computers will be able to simulate human brains in any way we care to” only serves to reveal which parts of the brain Kurzweil himself is not interested in. Perhaps the shapeshifters are convinced that computers can surpass us because their own minds are so impoverished. If they’ve ever come across a painting or a poem, they’ve undoubtedly blinked at them in amiable bewilderment, wondering how they might be optimized.
The singularity is closer
