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The Singularity is Near: Difference between revisions
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Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resembling of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, [[The Singularity Is Near]]. For if ever a man were committed overtly – fervently, even – to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: on one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit. | Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resembling of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, [[The Singularity Is Near]]. For if ever a man were committed overtly – fervently, even – to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: on one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit. | ||
Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence he terms the “singularity”, a point at which he expects that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, he seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away. | Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence {{sex|he}} terms the “singularity”, a point at which {{sex|he}} expects that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, {{sex|he}} seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away. | ||
Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place. | Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place. | ||
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Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true – but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution – we got from Stephenson’s rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent century or so the train’s evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the “S” curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They aren’t exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of “S” curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single “parabola of best fit” has heavy resonances of the planetary “epicycle”, a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit “misbehaving” data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model. | Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true – but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution – we got from Stephenson’s rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent century or so the train’s evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the “S” curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They aren’t exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of “S” curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single “parabola of best fit” has heavy resonances of the planetary “epicycle”, a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit “misbehaving” data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model. | ||
If this is right, then Kurzweil’s corollary assumption – that there is a technological nirvana to which we’re ever more quickly headed – commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future – when the universe “wakes up”, as he puts it – will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption. | If this is right, then Kurzweil’s corollary assumption – that there is a technological nirvana to which we’re ever more quickly headed – commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future – when the universe “wakes up”, as {{sex|he}} puts it – will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption. | ||
And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil’s breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just four years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet: | And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil’s breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just four years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet: | ||