The Singularity and Its Discontents
The world is undergoing an unprecedented demographic, economic, and environmental transformation today. The rapid aging of the global population comes just as mankind has become a primarily urban species for the first time in its history. Adding to this mix, of course, is the forceful arrival of giant emerging markets onto the world stage.
As a result, there is now a great race under way between the forces of development and those of degradation. The fate of people and the planet hangs in the balance, and the outcome is not preordained. Even so, society can tip the scales in favor of a positive outcome—if somehow mankind could find ways of accelerating the pace of innovation directed toward the grand global challenges (as opposed to, or at least in addition to, coming up with yet another triple-decker bacon-taco burger).
But can we really speed up innovation in this way? Actually, some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and thinkers—including leading lights of Silicon Valley—are convinced that today’s disruptions herald the arrival of a new golden age of innovation. This chapter describes the quiet but powerful confluence of technologies accelerating innovation today that could help tame the world’s most wicked problems.
Some prognosticators claim these trends will inevitably lead humanity to a glorious postbiological future, and perhaps even to immortality. That seems fanciful, if not absurd. But one does not have to believe such claims to acknowledge that the convergence of key technology trends, in fields ranging from materials science to synthetic genomics to artificial intelligence, is accelerating global innovation and speeding the global economy toward a postindustrial world.
Thirty years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. The former, a libertarian at the Cato Institute think tank, was skeptical of the gloomy claims made by the latter, a Stanford University ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering resulting from gross overpopulation. Thumbing his nose at such notions of resource scarcity, Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Ehrlich would go down in price over the following decade. History shows that the supposed “population bomb” did not explode, and the world did not, in fact, run out of resources. Simon handily won the bet.
Ah, but that did not silence the nabobs of negativity. A growing chorus of doom now argues that the world cannot possibly feed ten billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail, and that the world is heading for an unavoidable climate calamity. Those are genuine crises confronting the world, but is humanity’s fate really so gloomy?
Nonsense, argue the techno-optimists. Matt Ridley, a noted British science writer, boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness. The key, he insists, is continued technological progress.
And some think the floodgates are about to open on such progress. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished inventor and author of The Singularity Is Near, argues that there is an unprecedented confluence of disruptive technologies coming—in fields ranging from communications to synthetic genomics—that will dramatically improve the human condition. He even predicts that machines will surpass humans in intelligence in a few decades when the species will cross a momentous and irreversible point: the Singularity. This will herald not a posthuman world, he insists, but rather a postbiological one: “As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe-wide awakening.” Imperfect memories and extinguishable bodies will then be beautifully augmented by spiritual machines that enhance and prolong lives—perhaps, he dares to say, raising the prospect of immortality.
Time even put the Singularity on its cover in early 2011, declaring in large letters that 2045 will be “the year that man becomes immortal.*” Careful readers would have noticed the asterisk, which offered caveats, but the flattering profile of Kurzweil inside the magazine only reinforced the view that his notions are to be taken seriously. To Kurzweil’s claim of immortality, the article’s author added this additional eye-catching promise: “So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast . . . all that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness—not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.”
Shortly after that cover story came out, John Kelly, the head of research at IBM, declared that “we are at a moment where computers and computer technology now have approached humans.” That grand claim came on the eve of a major test of computing prowess. His firm had shocked many back in 1997 when its Big Blue computer beat Garry Kasparov, a Russian grandmaster, at chess. But winning at chess is a trivial task compared to understanding the complexities and idiosyncrasies of human speech.
So the firm developed Watson, a supercomputer it thinks is capable of understanding natural language. To put this claim to the test, the firm arranged for its creation to compete (without accessing the Internet) on Jeopardy!, the television game show known for using clever clues and coy wordplay that even humans struggle to understand at times. In the contest, televised in late February 2011, Watson trounced the two most successful previous champions of that game on its way to a convincing victory.
One man who was not at all surprised by this was Kurzweil, who has long predicted the rise of intelligent machines. It turns out that he leads an influential cabal of techno-optimists—a group that includes leading figures in Silicon Valley, scientific grandees, and even the first chief information officer of the Obama administration—that believes mankind is headed for a glorious, postbiological era that will follow the Singularity. On this view, humans will coevolve with machines until artificial intelligence inevitably surpasses the human kind (by 2029, on his calculation).
That is heady stuff, but what exactly is the Singularity? The week that Time put Kurzweil on its cover, Wikipedia—the current avatar of collective human insight—offered this reasonable definition for the term, which is borrowed from astrophysics: “a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict. Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity, such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, define the concept in terms of the technological creation of super-intelligence, and allege that a postsingularity world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of super-intelligent entities.”
Everyone knows about Moore’s law, which holds that the number of transistors that can be squeezed cheaply onto a computer chip will double every eighteen months to two years. This rule of thumb has held good for five decades, and thanks to a confluence of technological advances, magically seems likely to hold good for at least another couple of decades. Kurzweil’s journey as a futurist began when he examined the progress in other realms of modern technology, and found that they too have been quietly improving at such astonishing rates. Whether it is the speed of microprocessors, the cost of computing power, the volume of DNA sequencing, the growth in Internet connectivity, or a host of other variables, he found the same explosive growth.
This law of accelerating returns, as it is known, underpins the modern digital economy and provides the strongest scientific support for his forecasts for the future. This idea of an ever-expanding universe of opportunity is widely held in technology circles. Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired magazine and leading technology futurist, agrees with Kurzweil on this rather radical notion of increasing returns. In his book New Rules for a New Economy, he argues that as the interconnectedness of people and objects increases “the consequences of those connections multiply out even faster, so that initial successes aren’t self-limiting, but self-feeding.”
Dystopians, Unite
Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, though, there are some who are skeptical that these impressive trends actually add up to the Singularity. The naysayers even dared to gather once inside the Googleplex, the quirky California headquarters of the search firm, to ventilate their objections to this notion. At that private meeting held in 2010, which included leading scientists and technologists as well as science fiction writers, some argued that the movement had become New Age kookery rather than serious science. Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist and former president of the august Santa Fe Institute, has even publicly dismissed the Singularity as complete “bullshit.”
Other critics, such as Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, agree with Kurzweil about the rapid technological change to come, but warn that this could lead to a dystopia of nanobots run amok and other techno-horrors. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a theorist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), has put the danger this way: “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” He and a band of like-minded futurists are working on developing a first generation of AI creatures that are explicitly friendly toward human beings, reasoning that they would get an evolutionary head start on any malicious superintelligent creatures that might follow.
Transcendent Man, a documentary released in 2011 about Kurzweil and his ideas, gave voice to a number of such critiques. To his credit, Kurzweil has been open to criticism over the years. Indeed, much of his recent writings has been devoted to responding to challenges and to putting his earlier predictions to a reality check. A recent essay on his website devotes some 150-odd pages of analysis to weighing up his earlier predictions and critiques of them, and argues that he got 78 percent of his predictions right. Had he left it there, it might have persuaded many fair-minded observers, but he could not resist adding that “most of the rest was wrong only by time frame.”
On the worrisome point about technology’s unintended dangers, he readily accepts that innovation can be a double-edged sword—just look at man’s taming of fire, he says. But he insists that the risks, if properly managed, are more than outweighed by the rewards—just as man’s mastery of fire has brought us much more gain than pain. He serves as an advisor to the American government on bioterrorism (he has been honored by several presidents for his innovations), and he acknowledges that a biological attack by some rogue group is inevitable. The way forward, he insists, is to develop rapid response systems to tackle new threats—much as global Internet SWAT teams now crush nascent computer viruses as quickly as they emerge. “The Internet has never been taken down by such attacks—not even once—and we can do the same for other threats,” he insists.
That seems sensible enough, but push Kurzweil a bit more and one reaches trickier terrain. In response to questions about the religious implications of his confidence in science’s ability to extend human life indefinitely, Kurzweil provides the provocative closing line of that documentary film: “Does God exist? I would say not yet.” That smacks of insufferable hubris, scoffs one critic, who denounces him as a “pseudo-religious crackpot.” One renowned futurist who counts herself as Kurzweil’s friend says, “Ray’s just having the world’s most public midlife crisis.”
Such notions send even techno-spiritualists such as Kevin Kelly into fits. He thinks the Singularity vision is a useful inspirational myth, but the God talk has him denouncing Kurzweil as a “modern-day prophet” who simply gets it “wrong.” His magazine ran a damning critique of the Singularity notion back in 2008, offering numerous scientific arguments to suggest that superintelligence will prove far harder a nut to crack than imagined by the Singularitarians: “An algorithm is only a set of instructions, and even the most sophisticated machine executing the most elaborate instructions is still an unconscious automaton. Philosophy aside, a constellation of recent scientific findings indicates that no matter how fast CPUs become in future decades, they’ll be no more aware than a toaster.”
Ouch. Clearly, even the best-informed scientists still disagree about the rate at which artificial intelligence will encroach on human intelligence. Still, even if the bigger claims made for the Singularity are not realized, there is good reason to think Kurzweil is right in his most important argument: the world is entering a period of accelerating global innovation. If these efforts are directed at problems such as climate change and chronic diseases, then it is just possible that the human condition could improve dramatically this century. After all, that is precisely what happened over the twentieth century thanks to such technological marvels as electrification and vaccination.
Hail, Homo Evolutis
But what if the biggest breakthroughs come in improving the species itself? Some technology experts think humans might even evolve into a fitter, stronger, smarter, and better-looking species in coming decades—a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. “Forget the Singularity—biology will trump technology!” insists Juan Enriquez, an author and biotechnology expert. Enriquez and Steve Gullans argue in “Homo Evolutis,” a striking essay, that the breathtaking advances seen today in biotechnology, gene therapy, epigenetics, proteomics, and myriad related fields are turbocharging evolution itself. “The idea of a rapid evolution of our species into a species that directly and deliberately guides its own evolution, and that of other species, is no longer completely outlandish because it is not one technology, government, company, region or discipline that is driving speciation.”
They predict that this will force a rethink of politically correct nostrums maintaining that all humans are created the same. Instead, they posit that “a robust moral position embraces diversity as one of humanity’s greatest assets.” As genomics advances, for example, scientists are discovering that some humans (often in some parts of the world) are born with the ability to be superior sprinters, high-altitude climbers, and so on. If one’s rival in the Tour de France inherited such a genetic trait through sheer dumb luck of parentage, is it really cheating if one uses gene therapy to obtain such a trait (in a manner that cannot be traced)? What if your child’s classmate genetically inherited a superior ability to do higher-order math or to master complex languages and you had the chance to give your hardworking child a painless treatment that would level the playing field?
As with Kurzweil’s forecasts for machine superintelligence and postbiological bodies, this argument raises hackles from some in the scientific establishment. Even if the prognosticators are wrong about the pace of change, though, they may turn out to be right about the direction. What is more, any such hyperevolution will raise uncomfortable questions about what it means to be a human.
There is reason to think all of this talk about exponential progress in technology and biology is not just the stuff of science fantasy. The OECD, a research body not given to flights of fancy, recently published a detailed look at trends in science and technology. It argued that “converging trends in nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics and computing are creating unprecedented capacities to manipulate nature. This is even changing what ‘natural’ means.” The agency’s experts note that the Korean government now has a robot ethics charter, and that a study commissioned by the British armed forces concludes “an implantable information chip could be wired directly into the human user’s brain by 2035 . . . in the longer term, technology convergence may permit enhancement of healthy people.”
William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has analyzed productivity growth in computing over time. He observes that there has been a phenomenal increase in computing power over the past century. Depending on the standard used, it has skyrocketed since the days of manual computing by a factor of 1.7 trillion to 76 trillion. Looking to the future, he observes that “aside from humans, computers and software are the ultimate general purpose technology . . . with the potential for penetrating and fundamentally changing virtually every corner of economic life.” At current rates of improvement, he says provocatively, computers are approaching the complexity and computational capacity of the human brain.
The OECD’s Andrew Wyckoff points out why this matters so much in an age of wicked problems. While governance and other underlying factors matter greatly, he argues that technological innovation can and must play a critical role in tackling thorny societal challenges. For example, the 2030 Water Resources Group, an independent nongovernmental outfit, has estimated, based on current trends, that in two decades the world’s thirst for fresh water will exceed likely supply by 40 percent. Better end-use efficiency of the sort already seen in some parts of the agricultural and industrial sectors could help, as would new supply infrastructure, but a big shortfall still seems likely.
New technologies can help close that gap: “The outputs of biotechnology research [such as genetically modified crops] are helping to meet the challenge of doubling food production sustainably by 2050 while using approximately the same area of arable land, fewer resources (particularly fossil fuel, water and nitrogen), and at the same time mitigating climate change.” Though the technology for genetic modification of crops is denounced by environmentalists, it is estimated to have delivered net economic benefits in 2008 of $9.2 billion, evenly split between farmers in the rich world and the poor world.
Such a level-headed endorsement of today’s technology revolution should make clear that the world stands on the cusp of a new golden age for innovation. After all, it is precisely such a culture of continuous improvement—which began in earnest with the industrial revolution and which promises to speed up yet again if Kurzweil’s predictions of a new postindustrial revolution are correct—that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. It is easy to forget that the twentieth century marked a period of unprecedented economic growth that lifted masses of people out of abject poverty. It also brought technological marvels such as modern pharmaceuticals and other advances in public health that tackled many preventable diseases. The result has been a great enhancement of human welfare and longer, better lives for most people living in most places on earth.
But of course the twentieth century’s advances did not solve all of the world’s problems—and there are plenty of new, twenty-first-century global challenges now confronting humanity. Mindful that market forces may not necessarily direct the coming innovation revolution at those wicked problems, Kurzweil has decided to help forge the future. With help from the founders of Google and other Internet-age figures, he launched Singularity University in 2009. This remarkable interdisciplinary institute, housed on a NASA campus near Silicon Valley, aims to churn out inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors who will tap into tomorrow’s disruptive technology trends to take on such problems as water scarcity, neglected tropical diseases, and climate change. Every summer, the school takes in several dozen extremely bright, entrepreneurially minded students for its accelerated graduate program. The students are dynamos from a variety of backgrounds and geographies, and they are exposed to some of the world’s leading technologists with the aim of accomplishing “ten to the ninth plus”: coming up with technology-based solutions to big problems that will positively impact at least a billion people within ten years.
“We need to be more ambitious in taking on the world’s grand challenges!” So declares Peter Diamandis, the dynamic force behind the X Prize Foundation (a charity that aims to kick-start innovation in areas such as clean energy and space travel by sponsoring incentive prizes, a topic covered in the next chapter) and a cofounder of Singularity University. The aim of the institution, he explains, is to open the eyes of the world’s best and brightest to the leapfrogs made possible by exponentially advancing innovation, and to instill a passion to change the world. He shares Kurzweil’s belief that humanity is on the verge of a knowledge explosion. For almost all of history, he argues, humans toiled in ignorance. But since the industrial revolution, science and technology have advanced and the human condition has improved dramatically. And we are just scratching the surface of what is possible, he insists, if only we dare to dream: “Humans have advanced rapidly for just a hundred of our 100,000 years on earth—we still know nothing!”
A Very Sexy Idea
Whenever one hears extraordinary claims being made, it is only right to be a bit skeptical. History provides lots of examples of technological marvels supposedly just round the corner—jetpacks for everyone!—that somehow fail to materialize. And even linear trends, never mind exponential ones, rarely continue forever. Rather, technological progress has often come in fits and starts, with dramatic leaps forward for a while and then a bit of wheel spinning while inventions diffuse slowly through the economy. This happens because once in a while some promising set of technologies attracts so much attention and money that it leaps forward. This happened with the space program thanks to the Apollo moon shot and nuclear science thanks to the Manhattan Project, and with computers and the Internet thanks to the investment capital that poured into this area before and after the bursting of the great technology bubble a decade ago.
So merely pointing to impressive growth trends today does not prove that technology will continue to improve in a reliably dramatic fashion. It may not. Even so, there is a deeper reason to share in the techno-optimists’ view of the future: the evolutionary basis for innovation. Humans are the only species capable of breakthrough innovation. Some other animals do use tools, and some ants do specialize at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies generation after generation. Only humans innovate continuously and cleverly.
Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps something about the chemistry of big brains leads us to tinker. Others have suggested that mastery of language or the capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Matt Ridley, a zoologist by training, believes the explanation lies not within the human brain but outside: innovation is a social phenomenon. In The Rational Optimist, he argues cheekily that the way the human collective brain grows is by “ideas having sex.”
This theory is, in a way, the offspring that would result if the ideas of Charles Darwin could somehow have mated with those of Adam Smith. On this view, trade is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods but also the exchange of ideas. Trade also encouraged specialization, since it rewarded individuals and communities to focus on areas of comparative advantage. And such specialists—in contrast with their generalist rivals or ancestors—had the time and the incentive to develop better methods and technologies to do tasks.
Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation, humiliating servitude, and grinding poverty. And yet, despite the pessimistic proclamations of Paul Ehrlich and many other pundits, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue time and again. Ample statistical evidence shows that life has indeed gotten better for most people in most places on most metrics. Whether one measures air and water pollution in California, vaccination rates in Bangladesh, or life expectancy in Japan, this conclusion is indisputable. Rising incomes played a big role in this, but even more credit must go to innovation. So argues Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development in Getting Better: “The biggest success of development has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making the things that really matter—things like health and education—cheaper and more widely available. It is the invention and spread of technology and ideas that have, literally, reduced the cost of living.”
The reason Ehrlich and the related Club of Rome camp of thinkers got it wrong several decades ago was because they saw worrisome trends and forecast linearly to doomsday. But such a view ignores the role of feedback loops and market responses, which inevitably lead to the robust interplay of scarcity, price signals, substitution, investment, invention, and diffusion. Once innovation is taken into account, development turns out to be a dynamic dance. And now, mankind has the chance to build on that insight in this new century as it takes on poverty, neglected and chronic diseases, climate change, and other grand global challenges.
What is most exciting about the Singularity vision is this: the hard evidence and exponential technology trends on which its extrapolations are based suggest that the current heated pace of global innovation is not only going to continue but may well accelerate dramatically in coming years. Asked if he thought the wave of technological progress brought by the Internet revolution was cresting, Bill Gates responds animatedly: “Absolutely not!”
It is hard to offer precise measurements, he notes, but the pace of technological change is more rapid today than at any point in history with the exception of perhaps the Victorian age of invention. What is more, he insists, there is no plateau in sight. Gates believes huge advances are coming in fields ranging from advanced computer modeling and materials science to communications and agricultural technologies that suggest even better days may lie ahead. When one takes into account the radical ways that innovation itself is being innovated, as the next section on open innovation explains, his big claim actually seems quite plausible. As Paul Saffo, a forecaster of large-scale change at Discern Analytics, observes wisely: “Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in S curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change.” Never mistake a clear view for a short distance, he adds.
In the end, it seems pretty plain that the global pace of innovation is picking up today. That is the broad trend that underpins many of the other trends described in this book, especially the breathtaking move toward open innovation described in the next chapter. As the speed of change picks up, it will inevitably disrupt many lives and business models even as it creates huge new opportunities for improving lifestyles and cultivating economic growth. If enough entrepreneurs seize upon exponential technologies to come up with novel solutions to wicked problems, then today’s accelerating pace of innovation could even usher in a brighter future for humanity.
On this view, the future looks bright. Still, some are taking no chances. In his final Jeopardy! answer, one of the human contestants conceded defeat to IBM’s supercomputer by scribbling a cheeky line from The Simpsons: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” One hopes that Watson was amused.