Why you Shouldn’t Take the 'Singularity' Seriously

The New York Times business section recently ran a long article on Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity movement. Kurzweil is a successful inventor-entrepreneur best-known lately for his dramatic prophecies about trends in science and technology. He claims that advances in AI, nanotech, biotech, computer science and neuroscience are bearing us toward a radical transformation of our minds and bodies that he and others call the Singularity.

Believers squabble over how exactly the Singularity will unfold. Will we just genetically enhance ourselves? Become human-machine cyborgs? Totally synthetic robots? Digitize our psyches and download them into cyberspace? All the predictions entail superintelligence and immortality, and the latter has been Kurzweil’s major emphasis lately. Kurzweil “intends to live for hundreds of years ,” the Times notes, “and resurrect the dead, including his own father.” Together with Terry Grossman, a physician, Kurzweil recently wrote Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever and created Ray & Terry’s health-supplements company.

Bill Gates has recommended Kurzweil’s books. Other admirers include Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and Peter Diamandis, who heads the X Prize Foundation, which promotes space travel. Celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz and motivational guru Tony Robbins appear in Kurzweil’s new film “The Singularity Is Near.” (Kurzweil is also the subject of a documentary called “Transcendent Man.”) Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, helped Kurzweil establish a “Singularity University” at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. According to the Times, “executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for position” to take courses on “promising technologies” for as much as $25,000 each. Kurzweil also consults for the Pentagon.

The Times article implies that because smart, accomplished people believe in the Singularity, it should be taken seriously. The Times does mention a Singularity skeptic, Jonathan Huebner, a physicist. He faults Kurzweil’s analysis of technology trends, asserting that the rate of technological innovation peaked in 1873 or 1916, depending on how you measure it. Huebner sounds even less credible than Kurzweil.

My skepticism is based on simple comparisons of Kurzweil’s claims to what is actually happening in science. For example, Kurzweil contends that reverse-engineering the brain should not be that difficult. “The brain is at least 100 million times simpler than it appears because the design is in the genome,” he says on the blog “Posthumans. “The compressed genome is only about 50 million bytes,” which is “a level of complexity we can handle.”

Actually, the major trend in both neuroscience and genetics over the past decade or two has been the discovery of deeper and deeper levels of complexity, which have thwarted medical applications. This theme emerged in several Times articles published just before and after the lengthy Kurzweil profile. An excellent two-part report by Nicholas Wade and Andrew Pollack exposes how the decoding of the human genome has yielded little or no medical payoff. “Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits,” Wade states. He adds that “after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.”

Pollack adds that “not only has there been no pharmacopeia, but some experts say the Human Genome Project might have at least temporarily bogged down the drug industry with information overload.” In a separate article, Pollack reports on how a string of recent failures of “targeted cancer therapies” serve as a reminder of “how devilishly complex cancer can be and how much more remains to be understood.” Treatments for brain disorders aren’t faring any better; the Wall Street Journal reports that “attempts to find treatments for Alzheimer's disease have produced scant results and a long string of busts.” These stories show that predictions of immortality are a bit premature.

When I debated Kurzweil at the 2008 Singularity Summit, a revival meeting for the faithful, he seemed all too sincere. But his Singularity prophecy is so out of synch with reality that I’m beginning to wonder if even he takes it seriously. Maybe he believed it once and now he’s just spouting it to peddle his books, lectures, consulting, health-food supplements, university courses and films. But whether or not he takes himself seriously, no one else should.

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