"But one day your pajamas will wake you up in the morning with a gentle massage and temperature change as they discuss with your coffee maker which sort of blend is most appropriate given your night's sleep, the day's weather, and the angry email from your boss waiting in your in-box."
-- That's a great quote! Really made me laugh and then wonder ...
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Ray Kurzweil's vision of a 'Singularity' has attracted some followers, but don't expect it anytime soon.
May 18, 2009 | Updated: 6:20 p.m. ET May 18, 2009
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I once believed in the imminence of superhuman intelligence. In 1981, when I was still in college, I took a science-writing class at Columbia University from the journalist Pamela McCorduck. She had just written Machines Who Think (note the mischievous "Who"), a book about the efforts of Marvin Minsky and other artificial-intelligence pioneers to create conscious, autonomous computers that would leave mere humans in their cognitive dust. This research, which McCorduck often enthused over in class, helped persuade me to become a science journalist. What could be cooler than witnessing this giant leap forward in the evolution of consciousness?
My youthful infatuation with AI gives me a somewhat jaded perspective on the prophecies of some modern scientists, notably the computer entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, that we are on the verge of a "Singularity." In physics, a "singularity" is an event or place, like the big bang or a black hole, where the laws of physics are stretched to the breaking point. Singularitarians (which some call themselves) have adopted the term to describe a radical transformation of consciousness that will result from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence as well as nanotechnology, biotechnology and neuroscience.
At first, Singularitarians say, we may become cyborgs, as WiFi-equipped brain chips, nanobots and genetic modifications soup up our intelligence, perception and memory. Eventually, we may abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and transform our psyches into giant software programs, like Vista but presumably less buggy. We will then "upload" ourselves into computers and dwell forever in cyberspace. Our transformation into immortal, God-like cyberbeings will supposedly take place not millennia or centuries from now but within the next few decades.
Kurzweil makes his case by showing graph after graph documenting the explosive progress over the past few decades in information technologies, including computers, the Internet, cell phones and so on. These advances are indeed astounding. The problem is, some crucial scientific endeavors have made little or no progress over the past few decades. For example, artificial-intelligence researchers, including Kurzweil himself, have invented programs that can read text, translate languages, recognize speech, interpret cardiograms and play championship-level chess. But they haven't come to close to creating the kind of artificial intelligence depicted in countless sci-fi films, from the cute R2D2 of Star Wars to the evil HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Marvin Minsky, who served as an adviser for 2001, noted recently that computers still lack the common sense of a 4-year-old child; they can't even tell the difference between cats and dogs. "I wish I could tell you that we have intelligent machines," Minsky lamented, "but we don't."
Singularitarians such as Kurzweil insist that scientists will soon "reverse-engineer" the brain so that they understand exactly how it works. Many neuroscientists assume that, just as computers operate according to a machine code, so the brain's performance must depend on a "neural code"; this is the set of rules, syntax or algorithms that transforms electrical impulses emitted by brain cells into perceptions, memories, meanings, intentions. Researchers are trying to decode the brain by probing it with ever-more-powerful technologies, such as magnetic-resonance imaging, positron-emission tomography and microelectrodes.
Cracking the neural code should yield all sorts of benefits. First, the brain's programming tricks could be transferred to computers to make them smarter. Moreover, given the right interface, our brains and computers could communicate as readily as Macs and PCs. Eventually, our personal software could be extracted from our bodies for uploading into computers.
If a neural code exists, however, neuroscientists still have no idea what it is. Far from converging on a solution, scientists cannot agree whether information is represented primarily by signals from individual neurons, or brain cells, by oscillations of many neurons firing in tandem, by even higher-level waves of chaotic electrical activity sweeping through the brain or all of the above.
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