The Singularity of Ray Kurzweil: He's Seen the Future, and the Machine Is Us

If you haven’t already downloaded the article into your brain, the Times blew the cover on the trans-humanist movement this weekend, just as a bunch of the devoted were gathering at Harvard for the H+ Summit, to hear from the movement’s de facto leader, inventor Ray Kurzweil.

Last year, Motherboard visited the man who gave the world text-to-speech technology and the musical synthesizer to talk about his vision of the post-Singularity future – a world in which humans will remake their own biology by filling their bodies with nanoscale machines that can repair cells and meld their minds with super-intelligent computers. The eventual goal is to become immortal, and perhaps resurrect the dead:

In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his father’s effects — photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and then possibly with Fredric’s DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his father.

By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.

Kurzweil, who uses a regimen of over 100 vitamins a day, many of them manufactured by one of his companies, in the hopes of living to see the Singularity – elaborates: “Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year. Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.”

Forget talk about the coming robot insurrection (see the work of another inventor, Yoshiyuki Sankai and his Cyberdyne Lab. Kurzweil is all techno-optimism.

To move ever faster into the future (he predicts the Singularity will arrive by the 2030s), in 2008 he helped establish the Singularity University. Based at the NASA Ames research center and backed by loads of Google money, it’s a veritable intellectual playpen for feisty, visionary – and often wealthy – Silicon Valley veterans and up-and-coming technological evangelists.

Even if Kurzweil and his following have garnered charges of elitism, solipsism, and unreasonable devotion for their immortalist ends, their means are likely going to be valuable for a planet hungry for energy and resources and ravaged by ecological problems and disease.

Not to mention, increasingly frustrated and perhaps dumbed-down by the torrent of information that makes up our modern world (remember: Google’s co-founders are big Singularity devotees). Once our brains are the computer, Kurzweil told us, "We’ll be able to explore, in great depth, different subjects and different skills.

“People say, “Gee, I don’t want to be a machine.” They’re thinking of the machines they know today, and that’s not the kind of machine I’m talking about. I’m talking about a machine—and we’ll probably need a different word by then—that’s just as subtle and supple and emotional as humans are today, and even more so.”

See also Kurzweil’s website, our interview with Aubrey de Grey, and a concept trailer for a film about transhumanism by Jason Silva, Turning Into Gods

PHOTO: Michael Meinhardt/Flickr