What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24 NIV)
Ray Kurzweil intends to live forever. He is attempting to travel across a boundary in time that he calls the “singularity.”
By anyone’s definition, Ray Kurzweil is a genius. At the age of 13 he turned some old telephone relays into a device that could calculate square roots. At 14, he sold software to IBM that was distributed as standard equipment. He is known as the inventor of the Kurzweil Reading Machine. Stevie Wonder was his first customer.
But these days Kurzweil the inventor has become Kurzweil the futurist. His notion of the singularity is taken from the field of cosmology that describes a border in space and time beyond which the normal measurements of time do not apply (Black holes, for instance). Sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but Kurzweil is not dissuaded. He points to the rapid growth in human knowledge and the exponential increase in computing power over the past years and predicts a moment within 30 years when “superhuman intelligence” will be created.
Kurzweil’s view leans heavily on Moore’s law (Intel cofounder, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months) to justify this exponential increase in developing supercomputers that ultimately attain consciousness. He believes that when computers gain artificial intelligence they will have the capacity to improve themselves. This will create even greater leaps in computing improvement.
While some have predicted that this age of artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete (Remember the Terminator movies?), Kurzweil believes that AI’s (Artificial Intelligences) will be used to extend and improve our human brains. The singularity won’t destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immoralize us. We will deposit our consciousness into this machine AI and theoretically live forever (I think I saw an Original Series Star Trek on this. Spock had to use his Vulcan melding powers to get them back into their large colorful balls).
Kurzweil is 60 years old and he is working with a medical doctor to extend his life so that he doesn’t miss the day of the singularity. He really believes that death can be conquered by smart machines.
Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will become conscious, but the latest research into the human brain and what constitutes human consciousness makes this seem more and more unlikely. It is starting to appear that the human brain is much faster than first observed. It was once thought that the neuron was analgous to a single computer bit. But it turns out that each neuron is more like a supercomputer in and of itself. And the human brain has over 100 billion neurons. In addition, consciousness was once thought to be the result of the evolution of intelligence, the simple mathmatics of having enough neurons. But now scientists point to a kind of quantum physics that seems to place human consciousness as existing somehow above and beyond the simple sum of neurons.
Machines may become increasingly better at mathmatical computations, but it appears humanity will continue to be the only ones conscious of it.
I love science. I love stretching my intellect and dreaming of answers to questions about our existence and the universe. But I am satsified that my faith in Christ has already answered the question about life after death. I don’t have to place my faith in improved machines. I don’t have to work to delay the decomposition of my body. I plan to get a new one just like the Resurrected Christ’s.
I admire Kurzweil’s passion and commitment. Yet, I pity him. I pray that he would place his faith into the One greater than that which we would make with our own hands. Eternity is beyond our reach.
But Christ has offered it to us freely.
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”” , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!