Want to become a brain in the cloud?

Want to become a brain in the cloud?

Kurzweil’s “Singularity” is a future where Google will infiltrate our brain matter and veins

Companies like Google literally infiltrate our brains and veins, merging human intelligence with the cloud

We should take this seriously. The Singularity is Nearer is a book that offers a glimpse into how human life, according to popular future predictions, could become something that can be stored in the cloud. And of course, technology does not exist without commercial service providers. While it doesn’t say so explicitly, Kurzweil’s new book envisions a future where companies like Google literally infiltrate our brains and veins. Disclosure: Ray Kurzweil is not just a respected futurist and engineer but also holds a leadership position at Google.

The Singularity is Nearer The Singularity is Nearer – Ray Kurzweil serves as an update to Kurzweil’s previous book, The Singularity is Near, published nearly twenty years ago. As the author proudly notes, it’s not a revision of his earlier predictions but a confirmation. (For a list of his forecasts across different works, see Wikipedia.) The central theme is the merging of machine intelligence with humans, culminating in a point (the “singularity”) where machine intelligence surpasses the combined power of all human brains. The timing of this new book is well chosen, given the public release of ChatGPT and its competitors over the last two years, which have likely surprised many of us with the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Nanobots: A Path to Enhanced Intelligence and Immortality

The concept, in a nutshell: computing power continues to get cheaper and cheaper. “One dollar today buys about 11,200 times as much computing power, adjusted for inflation, as it did in 2005.” And this trend will continue. Soon, it will be feasible for computers to surpass the human brain in sheer computational capacity. This will allow them to function as extensions of our own brains. The extension will take the form of a direct connection between our neocortex and the cloud. (Note: this assumes that human intellectual activity can be reduced to the processes occurring in the neocortex.) The connection will be established almost non-invasively, through microscopic devices called nanobots, which will be introduced into the brain via the capillaries. Once inside, they will communicate directly with simulated neurons hosted in the cloud. This, according to Kurzweil, will mark a new step in evolution. “In the past, we added roughly one cubic inch of brain matter every 100,000 years, but with digital computation, we are doubling price-performance every sixteen months.”

Digital Replication and Ending Ageing

By 2040, Kurzweil believes, we will be ‘able to back up our mind files digitally

Becoming smarter—much smarter—is just one step in Kurzweil’s vision. The other, even more astounding achievement he predicts is immortality. Immortality will come in two forms. The first is the “replicant”: a digital version of a person who has died, re-enacted by machines. This concept goes far beyond the AI-generated avatars we see today. By 2040, Kurzweil believes, we will be “able to back up our mind files digitally.” The brain’s information will be preserved digitally, and Kurzweil claims this information is not just a collection of data but the essence of a person’s identity. As replicants, people will continue to exist even after death in the biological sense.

The second form focuses on ending ageing. Kurzweil predicts that by 2030, medical nanobots will be able to “conduct cellular-level maintenance and repair throughout the body.” Cancer will be eradicated, as these nanobots will “examine each individual cell and determine whether it is cancerous or not, and then destroy all the malignant ones.” DNA transcription errors, a major cause of ageing, will be prevented and even reversed. While this may seem far off, Kurzweil claims that by 2030, “the most diligent and informed people will reach ‘longevity escape velocity’—a tipping point at which we can add more than a year to our remaining life expectance for each calendar year that passes.”. (To anyone who wonders what “diligent and informed” stands for: Kurzweil himself is said to take 100 pills a day in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry.) What Supplements does Ray Kurzweil take and why? — TRANSCEND

Philosophical and Ethical Questions: Unanswered in the Singularity

All of this sounds fantastic, and it raises many technological and philosophical questions. Kurzweil does address some of these in his book, such as the debate over artificial consciousness. However, he leaves other issues, like the role of emotions or relationships in human identity, untouched. What also goes unexamined are the questions of corporate power and control. If our minds and bodies fuse with information technology, they will fuse with technology providers such as Google. That this might be perceived as scary, does not seem to be worth a line throughout the book.

Does Rising Technology Lift All Boats?

Kurzweil also deals with the macro-economic outlook at great length. Climate change and ecological problems are solved as minor issues on the way.  One obvious point of criticism might be that only the wealthy will profit from superbrain-power and longevity. Kurzweil doesn’t think so. Almost half of the book is devoted to show how “exponentially improving information technology is a rising tide that lifts all the boats of the human condition”. Kurzweil and his at least sixteen co-authors (who are listed as members of the “Kurzweil team” in the acknowledgement pages) have spared no effort to pile up statistical evidence of how, globally, technological progress has made possible a better life, especially for the least well-off.

While stagnant wages in developed countries are a real issue, Kurzweil points out that “even if your normal wages stayed flat over the past two decades, you can now buy many thousands of times more computing power with them”. Therefore, he concludes, you are richer in a sense.

Thus, a horizon of expectation is set. Against that horizon, other things are getting ever more expensive: those things and services which cannot be produced ever more efficiently. Labour-intensive services like health care, teaching and the like become less and less affordable for individual consumers and to society. Economists describe this phenomenon as “cost disease”. Kurzweil’s age of the singularity will be a future where old-style teaching and health care will be a luxury accessible only for very wealthy people.

A Reality Check: Technology vs. Infrastructure in 2024

One last observation: when I started reading the book, I was on a train from Berlin to Munich. The train—or rather, the journey, since I had to change trains unexpectedly—was several hours late due to a series of technical and managerial problems. This is the usual state of long-distance travel with German Railways these days. Decades of underinvestment in infrastructure, combined with staffing shortages, have led to frequent system breakdowns. This is the reality in 2024. From this perspective, technological progress seems like something that happens only in books.

Kurzweil offers an answer to this too. “Wars and other political problems make large infrastructure projects impractical.” As a result, centralized technological fixes aren’t always the solution. The alternative is technologies that empower individuals to solve problems themselves (his example: water purification). The private solution for long-distance travel, by this logic, is cars or airplanes. But what we have today is congestion, pollution, and urban spaces dominated by cars. It’s not a solution, and many cities are trying to change this. The “singularity” doesn’t appear to have an answer for these kinds of problems.