Ray Kurzweil, The Futurist March-April 2006

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The Future of Human-Machine Intelligence

We stand on the threshold of the most profound and transformative event in the
history of humanity, the "Singularity."

What is the Singularity? From my perspective, the Singularity is a future period
during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching
that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. We will
combine our brain power-the knowledge, skills, and personality quirks that make
us human-with our computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and
create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today.

This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine
intelligence and rapid innovation in the fields of gene research as well as
nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the
biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality. These
technological revolutions will allow us to transcend our frail bodies with all
their limitations. Illness, as we know it, will be eradicated. Through the use
of nanotechnology, we will be able to manufacture almost any physical product
upon demand, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and pollution will vanish.
Human existence will undergo a quantum leap in evolution. We will be able to
live as long as we choose. The coming into being of such a world is, in essence,
the Singularity.

How is it possible we could be so close to this enormous change and not see it?
The answer is the quickening nature of technological innovation. In thinking
about the future, few people take into consideration the fact that human
scientific progress is exponential: It expands by repeatedly multiplying by a
constant (10 to times 10 times 10 and so on) rather than linear; that is,
expanding by repeatedly adding a constant (10 plus 10 plus 10, and so on). I
emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because it's the most
important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends.

Our forebears expected what lay ahead of them to resemble what they had already
experienced, with few exceptions. Because they lived during a time when the rate
of technological innovation was so slow as to be unnoticeable, their
expectations of an unchanged future were continually fulfilled. Today, we have
witnessed the acceleration of the curve. Therefore, we anticipate continuous
technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. We see the
future as being different from the present. But the future will be far more
surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly
internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change is itself
accelerating.

Exponential growth starts out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the
knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. My models
show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate for technology innovation
every decade. In other words, the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to
today's rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about
20 years of progress at the rate of 2000. We'll make another "20 years" of
progress in just 14 years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven
years. To express this another way, we won't experience 100 years of
technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order
of 20,000 years of progress (again, when measured by today's progress rate), or
progress on a level of about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the
twentieth century.

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