The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI  
by Ray Kurzweil | The Bodley Head/Penguin, 2024, 419 pages

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a book named Forgotten Science about overblown delusions of scientific hubris throughout history. One chapter featured a potted account of Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903), a rich Russian playwright with some very strange pseudo-scientific ideas about human evolution. According to Aleksandr, mankind was heading towards a future teleological evolutionary end-point in which we would end up by shedding our corporeal bodies entirely and becoming “human angels”, or pure disembodied thought-forms.

Here is an edited version of what I wrote about this distinctly over-optimistic fellow at the time:

“Ultimately, each human angel would be able to spread its wings and dwell in all places throughout the universe simultaneously, like gods. To conquer outer-space, however, we would first have to conquer actual physical space by no longer inhabiting three-dimensions at all. To do so, humanity would just have to start getting smaller and smaller until, eventually, we all simply disappeared. Becoming vegetarian would be a good start, Aleksandr thought, as eating only lettuce and grass would make us thinner and lighter, thus setting us out on the long road to spacelessness. We would do well, he said, to observe the humble house-fly; because they were so small, they were also “wonderfully mobile”, and, he calculated, could fly one hundred times their own body-length in a mere second. Over time, as humanity ate less and less, “consuming our own spaciousness” whilst we simultaneously consumed less meat, we too would become capable of such superb feats, developing insect-like wings, and so becoming able to “move through space with the velocity of a cannon-ball”. Eventually, we would shrink so small that we no longer had any dimensional existence whatsoever, at which point we would become entirely free from all spatial constraints, in our ultimate evolutionary end-form of human angels. Finally, mankind would enter into a state of total unity with Creation itself, as our mind merged with all the atoms and matter of the universe. Eating more lettuce, it seemed, would turn humanity into God. That’s quite a diet-plan.”

Surely such mad opium-dreams are now safely things of the past? Sadly not.

Short circuit

Ray Kurzweil is a leading Silicon Valley futurologist, inventor and computer scientist, who back in 2005 published a much-celebrated/derided book, The Singularity Is Near, predicting mankind’s future achievement of something called “the Singularity“, a point at which Artificial Intelligence (AI) would become so super-powerful it would essentially render our species as obsolete as Betamax.

Passing the Turing Test with flying colours (this being when a machine-mind becomes so intelligent it is capable of fooling real humans into thinking it is one of them, as with Mark Zuckerberg) this Singularity-level AI would soon become far more than human, leaving its flesh-and-blood creators behind in the intellectual dust.

Solving all our problems, it would allow mankind to merge his mind with it, before replacing our current bodies with brand-new machine-made ones, or else dispensing with them entirely, in favour of a purely incorporeal existence, as once predicted by Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin. Specifically, Kurzweil predicts our forthcoming disembodied minds will spread out through space to colonise the cosmos itself, thereby “turning ordinary matter into computronium”, whatever that is.

Now we are nearly 20 years on and, thanks to something called Moore’s Law – which, to simplify, argues society’s available affordable computing-power tends to double roughly every two years or so – AI has improved many thousandfold since the publication of Kurzweil’s previous book, as seen by recent much-heralded developments like ChatGPT. As such, Ray is now back with a self-explanatorily titled sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer, complete with laudatory dust-jacket quotes from fellow post-humans like Bill Gates, arguing the event in question is now imminent, meaning that, if you’re alive and under about 70-80 today, you are highly likely to be soon given the option of AI-assisted immortality.

But, if such wonders really ever did come to pass, would such modified super-beings even still deserve to be called human at all? Only gods are immortal and incorporeal, are they not? Yes, but the whole unspoken aim of such ideas is precisely to transform mankind into a race of gods.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Kurzweil’s basic idea rests upon the existence of “the Cloud”, that disembodied (from an ordinary user’s perspective: it actually resides in various physical global data-centres) area of the Internet where at present users can merely store online backups of their photos, documents and videos … but which eventually will also hold digital extensions of our very minds. Kurzweil describes this as us “directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the Cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power [our brains are little more than biological computers to Kurzweil] that our biology gave us.”

But … how precisely will this happen? What is the actual mechanism via which this will occur? Reading Ray’s book, I am none the wiser. I think he basically thinks “AI will work that out for us once the Singularity arrives”, which a cynic may say is just a convenient get-out clause for the fact he doesn’t really know the answer himself either. At present, we primitive, unaugmented meatheads possess only an “inability to comprehend such a radical shift with our current levels of intelligence.” Kurzweil’s closest explanation of the mechanics is as follows:

“At some point in the 2030s we will … [begin using AI-designed] microscopic devices [i.e., robots] called nanobots. These tiny electronics will connect the top layers of our neocortex to the cloud, allowing our neurons to communicate directly with simulated neurons hosted for us online. This won’t require some kind of sci-fi brain surgery – we’ll be able to send nanobots into the brain non-invasively through the capillaries … [Then] more layers [of simulated Cloud-neurons] can be stacked on top of that one (computationally speaking) for ever more sophisticated cognition. As this century progresses and the price-performance of computing continues to improve exponentially, the computing power available to our brains will too.”

Remember Nintendo’s primitive, 8-bit NES of the 1980s, with its crude, blocky sprites and bleep-bleep chip-tune soundtracks? That is our current primitive human brain today. Compare that to Nintendo’s current whizz-bang whatever-bit Switch console, with its ultra-realistic HD graphics and sound. That is our augmented Cloud-brain of tomorrow.

Ahead of the curve

Thanks to the imminent Singularity, our brainpower – and our civilisation itself – will follow Moore’s Law, on an ever-upwards exponential curve. In other words, Kurzweil believes in progress, but here given the protective sheen of “science” rather than political ideology: one of his chapters is actually called “Life Is Getting Exponentially Better”, which is presented as a scientifically verifiable fact, as opposed to merely a subjective (or outright deluded) value-judgement.

By this, he means things like GDP and average lifespans have increased over the past several decades, which I’m sure is true, but these represent quantitative, not qualitative, data: today’s TVs are, technologically speaking, far better than their predecessors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the programmes on them are similarly superior. Many people will feel them to be far worse, particularly Doctor Who.

And, likewise, just because you have far superior brainpower, it doesn’t necessarily mean your ideas will actually be any good: Stalin, Mao, Marx, et al, were all far more academically intelligent than the average dim-witted prole who licked the factory floor clean, but whose ideas ultimately did society the more damage?

Nonetheless, Kurzweil is a classic techno-progressive, and doesn’t seem to see too many dangers inherent in his work at all. In a promotional interview with The Guardian, Kurzweil described his fantasy of having a brand new Cloud-brain thus: “Think of it like having your phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question your brain will be able to go out to the cloud for an answer similar to the way you do on your phone now – only it will be instant, there won’t be any input or output issues, and you won’t realise it has been done (the answer will just appear).”

That sounds just great … until you question who (or what) precisely it will be that will be deciding which particular answers appear inside your brain as if by magic: the same ones who have recently decided that CO₂ is going to make the world end tomorrow, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was all perfectly above-board, and that people with penises can really be women? Presumably so, for AI’s initial programmers will presumably be progress-minded Silicon Valley-types like Kurzweil himself. This doesn’t sound like tech-enabled utopia to me, but tech-mandated dystopia.

Transgender transistors

Tellingly, the transhumanist Kurzweil brings in the cult’s current test-the-waters precursor movement of transgenderism to justify his strange, neo-Rosicrucian project: “People who are transgender have greater ability than ever before to make their physical bodies match their gender identity that they experience inside. Imagine how much more we’ll be able to shape ourselves when we can program our brains directly … Once our brains are backed up on a more advanced digital substrate, our self-modification powers can be fully realised. Our behaviours can align with our values, and our lives will not be marred by the failings of our biology.”

Yes, we will be not merely transgender, but trans-species too! “Biological life is suboptimal”, argues Kurzweil, so let’s use AI to hijack it and become our own self-modifying gods, using nanobots to remodel our physical frames like the avatars or Miis people create for use in online videogames, to create “virtual characters that are of a different age, gender, and even species from ourselves”, allowing us “to produce an optimised body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them.”

Wow! But how, precisely and specifically, will the nanobots allow us to do all this? Dunno, Ray once again doesn’t really seem to say. I suppose you just have to take it on trust that, once the Singularity arrives, the computers will work all that tedious minor stuff out for us. This is a bit like someone saying, “Once I’ve invented a time-machine, I’ll be able to fly into the year 5000 and bring back all the free cancer-cures.” Yes, great idea, H.G. Wells, but how are you going to invent that time-machine in the first place?