November 5, 1999
ARTS & IDEAS
The Soul of the Next New Machine: Humans
How the Wedding of Brain and Computer Could Change the Universe
By ROB FIXMER
hen Ray Kurzweil discusses human destiny, it is
not always clear whether he's talking about technology
or theology.
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Michael Lutch for The New York Times
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Ray Kurtzweil, author of a new book, "The Age of the Spiritual Machine: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence," in his Wellesley Hills, Mass., office.
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It is technology that defines his résumé; he has spent
34 of his 51 years inventing ingenious uses for artificial
intelligence. But like a priest caught playing in a physics
lab, he keeps coming up with inventions inspired by
aesthetics and social conscience.
For instance, when he was still in high school, he
wrote a program that composed music, while his latest
software, available at his Web site, writes poetry. In
between he created machines that read to the blind,
software that draws and paints, electronic keyboards
that produce the sounds of acoustical instruments and
one of the most advanced and commercially successful
forms of computer speech recognition.
All were concrete products of a restless mind consumed by the question of what will be. A more abstract
product of that vision is his latest book, "The Age of the
Spiritual Machine: When Computers Exceed Human
Intelligence" (Viking, 1999). In it, he looks at the exponential increase in calculating power since the turn of the
century and concludes that within 50 years, machines
will not only be smarter than humans but also smart
enough to persuade us that they are conscious beings in
their own right.
That assertion, not surprisingly, has drawn the
wrath of several prominent philosophers who question
his definitions of both intelligence and consciousness.
John R. Searle, the renowned University of California at Berkeley professor of philosophy, wrote in The
New York Review of Books that the fatal flaw in "Kurzweil's entire argument" is that "it rests on the assumption that the main thing humans do in their lives is
compute." In a phone interview this week he added:
"Kurzweil's proposals are preposterous science. I think
he got a little carried away and made massive philosophical errors, too."
But while the debates about what defines intelligence
and consciousness have gained the most public attention,
the far more compelling idea in the book is his prediction
that our progeny -- if not some of us alive today -- are
destined to be human-machine hybrids. Based on current
trends in computer and biological sciences, he says that a
superpowered intelligence will result from such a hybrid.
The merging of human brains and computer circuits, he
asserts, will enable the species to redesign itself and
determine not just its own destiny but the fate of the
universe. To become, in other words, God-like.
"In my view," Kurzweil writes in the book's
conclusion, "the primary issue is not the mass of the
universe or the possible existence of antigravity or of
Einstein's so-called cosmological constant. Rather the
fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one
which we will intelligently consider when the time is
right."
In his review Searle writes in an amazed tone:
"Kurzweil does not think he is writing a work of science
fiction or a parody or satire. He is making serious claims
that he thinks are based on solid scientific results."
Over dinner at a Boston hotel, Kurzweil insisted,
"This stuff isn't science fiction." His voice was soft,
almost emotionless, but the ideas emerged fully formed,
articulated with machinelike precision.
On this night, he was clearly multi-tasking -- answering questions and expounding on complex technologies without so much as a pause for a breath, his eyes all
the while parsing the salmon entree before him. (He
takes eating very seriously indeed. His previous book,
"The 10 Percent Solution for a Healthy Life," was about
nutrition, specifically about a low-fat diet he put together
to battle his own congenital heart disease.)
The "stuff" he's talking about is no less than a
physical hybrid of human beings and their technology. He
says the machines being created today are the beginning
of our metamorphosis from thinking mammal to all-knowing hybrid.
Biological evolution has already given way to much
more rapid and less random technological evolution,
Kurzweil argues. And within 30 years, he predicts, direct
links will be established between neurons in the human
brain and computer circuitry. The implications are mind-boggling. Such links would mean that the entire contents
of a brain could be "insubstantiated" -- copied (and
preserved) in an external database. Not only would the
brain's biological capacity be supplemented with enormous amounts of digital memory, it would also be linked
to vast information resources like the Internet at the
speed of thought.
And it would produce, through direct neural stimulation, a virtual reality indistinguishable from objective
reality.
Kurzweil cites medical treatments in which
silicon chips have been successfully implanted in human
brains, for example, to alleviate
symptoms of Parkinson's disease, or
been made to communicate with neurons, as they do in cochlear implants
for the deaf, as examples of primitive steps toward his predictions.
While these sorts of visions might
seem far-fetched, other respected futurists find Kurzweil's ideas
compelling. Marvin Minsky, Toshiba
professor of media arts and science
at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has called him "a leading futurist of our time," while the
techno-guru George Gilder says,
"This book makes all other roads to
the computer future look like goat
paths in Patagonia."
That Kurzweil's theories are
given a serious hearing is testament
to his credentials. Since his teenage
years he has been harnessing computer power to "pattern recognition," which Kurzweil describes
as "that part of the artificial intelligence field where we teach computers to recognize abstract patterns, a
capability that dominates human
thinking." In 1965, at age 17, his
music composing program won a
Westinghouse science award, a visit
to the White House and a spot as a
contestant on the old television game
show "I've Got a Secret." (Young
Ray's secret stumped the former
Miss America, Bess Myerson, but
was guessed by the second panelist,
the actor Henry Morgan.)
By the time he graduated from
M.I.T. in 1970, Kurzweil had already achieved his first business
success, having founded a computer
database service that helped high
school students choose the right college. That endeavor, which he sold
for $100,000, was followed by a string
of successful businesses built on his
inventions. Among his best-known is
the Kurzweil reading machine for
the blind, which was a true marvel
when it was introduced. CBS News
was so impressed with the device
that Walter Cronkite used it to deliver his signature sign-off, "And
that's the way it was, on Jan. 13,
1976."
Along the way, Kurzweil has
won a raft of accolades in both business and academia and received nine
honorary doctorates. Today, in addition to writing his next book, he is
developing Fat Kat, an artificial intelligence system that applies evolutionary algorithms to securities investment decisions.
In Kurzweil's vision of the
future, the man-machine hybrid will
be accomplished not through some
Frankenstein-like amalgam but
through an elegant technology: microscopic, self-replicating robots
called nanobots that will be introduced through the bloodstream and
will interact with individual neurons
throughout the brain.
"The idea," Kurzweil said, "is
to direct nanobots to travel through
every capillary in the brain, where
they will pass in very close proximity to every neural feature." This, he
says will enable the tiny machines to
scan each neuron and "build up a
huge database" -- basically, the entire contents of a brain.
"And all these nanobots would be
communicating with each other," he
said. "They'd basically be on a wireless network. They could also be on
the Web and communicating with
computers maintaining the database
outside the brain."
The breakthrough in nanotechnology came several years ago with the
discovery of the nanotube, a carbon
molecule of enormous strength. Just
about anything can be fabricated
from nanotubes, at many times the
strength and at a fraction of the
weight possible with conventional
materials.
What's more, nanotubes
have a far greater capacity for raw
computing power than the commonly used silicon. This combination of
features holds out the possibility of
building machines no larger than a
blood cell that are fully programmable and perhaps even able to construct replicas of themselves from
carbon atoms.
The size of the technology is
shrinking so rapidly, Kurzweil
says, that "within 30 years, both the
size and cost of this scenario will be
feasible."
Of course, such technology would
inevitably be accompanied by terrifying dangers. By scanning a brain
into a database, a person's most private thoughts and memories would
be vulnerable to intrusions by hackers. And wouldn't the brain also be
vulnerable to external control of information, thought processes and
even perceptions of reality?
"Those are real concerns,"
Kurzweil admits. "Organizations
like governments or religious or terrorist groups or just clever individuals could put nanobots in food or
water supplies, trillions of them.
These would then make their way
inside people and would monitor
their thoughts and even could control
them and place them into virtual
environments."
But he adds: "We won't be defenseless. We have these concerns
today at a primitive level with Trojan horses that make their way into
our computers."
In any case, Kurzweil says
there is no turning back. Once evolution produced a technological species, it locked us into a relentless
quest for understanding and control
of our universe.
"I tend to be optimistic, but that's
more of a personal orientation than
something I could scientifically argue for," he admits. "There definitely are dangers, and we do tend to
address them imperfectly, so there is
some possibility that this will fail."
