Ray Kurtzweil's
The Singularity in Near.
Publisher's Weekly: "What's arresting isn't the degree to which Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision
fails to convince—given the scope of his projections, that's inevitable—but the degree to which it seems downright plausible."
George Gilder's site is for pay; this is his free teaser from Telecosm:
(10/17/05): Introducing his dazzling new best seller, The Singularity is Near, and generously giving a copy to each of the attendees last month at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference, Ray Kurzweil acknowledged that macro-futurism, projecting Moore’s law in all directions, is much easier than micro, predicting what will happen to specific companies and technologies. Nonetheless, on stage the first night of Telecosm, Ray faced a skeptical micro question from yours truly on the dismal failure of several teams of robotic engineers last year to create a device that could negotiate a DARPA course through the Mojave desert without plunging off the road into a ditch or an infinite loop. In response, Ray confidently asserted that teams from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford would succeed in this task in October. Sure enough, he was on the button with this prophecy. So far, so good.
At the heart of his larger prophecies is the continued exponential progress of all the arts and sciences of information technology on beyond machines into a biological Singularity. Ray’s intriguing argument is that today’s exponential curves merely follow in the train of the original evolutionary curve, which also reveals an ever accelerating pace of advance—some 13 billion years from the exquisitely calibrated bang to the biosphere, with DNA processing in the eukaryotic (nucleated) cell, then the Cambrian explosion of life forms some 3 billion years ago, and then the rushed ascent of punctuated equilibrium to the emergence of man and Ray and the Telecosm list, after which things really start popping.
Discerned in all this heroic ascent is scant intelligence at all until the arrival of human technology, though the information processing underway in the some 300 trillions of cells in your body, each with some 6 billion base pairs of DNA programming, excels the output of all the world’s supercomputers with all their intricate software and firmware. As Ray points out (The Singularity is Near, p. 209), the ribosomes that translate DNA into amino acids accomplish 250 million billion “read” operations every second just in manufacturing the hemoglobin that carries oxygen from the lungs to body tissues. While the genes are digital, much of the biocomputing is inscrutably analog. But in another four decades, so Kurzweil calculates, digital machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence, precipitating the Singularity.
Humans, he predicts, will use the machines massively to extend our lifespans and to project the reach of our learning both into our own brains, mastering the mysteries of consciousness, and out into space, with an imperial march of human intelligence incarnate in our machines and in our newly bionic bodies. It is a grand and triumphant trajectory of thought on which Kurzweil is launched, and his argument is finely mounted and gracefully written, with much self-deprecating humor in artfully shaped “dialogs” at the end of each chapter. But as some attendees groused, it would be nice if by the time of the Singularity, or even before, Microsoft (MSFT) could get Windows to boot in less than four seconds and could avoid the darkened event horizons of its chronic blue screens. And after many projects at Caltech attempting to use neuromorphic models as the basis of electronic simulations of brain functions, Carver Mead observed that we still have no idea of the workings of the brain and nervous systems of a common housefly. As I describe in The Silicon Eye, it goes about its business, eluding the swatter and garnering chemical sustenance in the air, all on microwatts of power using means that remain beyond the grasp of our most sophisticated neuroscience.
