The Singularity is Near: The End of Time as We Have Known It
What is the Singularity?
Ray Kurzweil’s prescient book, “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” written in 2005 is a fascinating and well researched and well reasoned book, whether you agree with the author’s points or not. It presents a utopian angle on the merger of human and artificial intelligence, even as it points out some troublesome possibilities along the way.
Singularity refers to a theoretical point in the future when the current rate of exponential technological growth takes on a completely vertical growth rate. Evolution and technological progress would basically move infinitely upwards, in virtually no time. Some might actually label that “The end of time”, and it would certainly be an amazing change to time as we have experienced it to now.
Consider that the rate of the experience of subjective time seems to be directly influenced by the rate of computation. With enough computation power or intelligence a virtually infinite amount of calculation and action can be performed within a billionth of a billionth of a second. Once we reach this state of Singularity, human experience and subjectivity will be so radically changed as to be unrecognizable from our current state of consciousness.
This concept of the Singularity, in terms of the basic effect upon human consciousness, is that with the speeding up of thought and a basically infinite computing potential from our current levels of comprehension, subjective time would be similarly expanded beyond our comprehension. It would be the end of time as we know it. All knowing, relative to our current understanding, would take place in an instant. A second of our current time would contain all time, all lifetimes, and the ability to experience them.
This book is sure to be a touch point for much discussion and reference about the evolution of consciousness and technology well through the coming decade. The picture of the future that Kurweil paints in the 652 pages of “The Singularity is Near,” is too detailed and intriguing to be dismissed without some real thought. From the potential of computation to rival and even surpass human intelligence, to nanotechnology applications within the human body, to the merger of technology and spirituality, Kurzweil presents a fascinating vision of a utopian future where humanity and technology evolve together into a point beyond comprehension.
If the arguments made by Kurzweil are even close to the mark, his book will be still be current reading right up to the moment when the Singularity makes it and all that has come before, redundant. The end of time as we have known it is surely a physics adventure well worth pondering. How many ancient cultures such as the Mayan have computed or predicted an “end of a time cycle” coming up in December 21, 2012? This book lays out dramatic possiblities for a quantum jump in the experience of time in our very age in scientific yet readable language.
