The Singularity is Near?

Ray Kurzweil is a smart man. He’s an inventor, author, businessman, futurist and pioneer in the fields of voice recognition, character recognition and digital music synthesis. He’s started several companies, including Kurzweil Educational Systems, which makes software for scanning and reading text. His biggest idea yet, expressed in his book “The Singularity Is Near” (which will be released as a film in 2010) is that our society is rapidly heading toward a point where technology will be changing so fast that life will be changed radically for humanity.

Years ago there was a book called “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler, and it made the point that the pace of change in modern society was accelerating. Toffler said that the 20th century had brought more change in every area of life than any other century before, and that the changes were coming faster all the time.

I remember reading that book in the early 1970s and thinking that Toffler was exaggerating. There must have been other eras in humanity’s history where change had occurred at least as rapidly as in our time. What about the Industrial Revolution, where in the space of a generation whole communities went from being farmers to factory workers? Or the Black Plague, when a third of Europe was wiped out in a few years, and whole cities were depopulated?

Now I look back and shake my head at how wrong I was. When I read “Future Shock” there were no personal computers. No cell phones. Hardly any cable television yet. No fax machines. No Internet. No organ transplants, no artificial hips, knees, or anything else. No biotech industry at all. The video game industry did not exist. Indeed, there are more than a few multi-billion dollar industries today that were not even dreamed of in science fiction novels back in the 1970s.

Socially, there has been rapid change also. In 1970 there were no women politicians on the national level in the U.S. Men were in positions of power in every field. The Vietnam War was still going on, and gas prices were low — only 30 cents a gallon. Families ate dinner together every night, and divorce was still a rarity. The gay and lesbian world was unknown to many people in the mainstream.

Looking back, I see the pace of life has definitely accelerated. We are constantly called upon to adapt, to learn new skills, to move beyond what we knew before, to meet new people and interact with them. In my freelance writing business, I now deal regularly with people in France, Brazil, and other countries around the world without ever leaving my house. Technology is changing constantly, and you have to scramble to adapt to it.

And now we have people who say the pace of change is getting even faster. The Ray Kurzweil books say advances in technology will come at an ever increasing rate in this century, culminating at a point where artificial intelligence occurs among machines. When this happens, and machines become smarter than humans, they will be able to create ever-smarter versions of themselves. Technology will change at breakneck speed at that point, and the world will change in fundamental ways.

Is Kurzweil right that the singularity is near? Ray Kurzweil is a very smart man, and I’m not smart enough to disagree with him about this. There are some thinkers who do disagree with him, and say his reasoning is flawed. Even the ones who disagree most vehemently, though, admit that the pace of change is speeding up. Technology will continue to shape our lives in profound ways, and we will have to adapt more and more. How much will we be able to change and still keep our humanity? Will we be willing to make the changes that we are called upon to make? Will we look back 35 years from now the way I look back on 1970 and say, “Who would have predicted this? Who could have foreseen it?”

These are interesting times we live in.