Singularity is Near, Chapter 1

Meditations on First Philosophyin which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between

the human soul and body

Ren Descartes

Copyright 20102015 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small dots enclose material that has been added, but can be read asthough it were part of the original text. Occasional bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicatesthe omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth.In his title for this work,Descartes is following a tradition (started by Aristotle) which uses first philosophy as a label for metaphysics.First launched: July 2004 Last amended: April 2007

Contents

First Meditation 1

Second Meditation 3

Third Meditation 9

Fourth Meditation 17

Fifth Meditation 23

Sixth Meditation 27

Meditations Ren Descartes First Meditation

First Meditation:On what can be called into doubt

Some years ago I was struck by how many false things Ihad believed, and by how doubtful was the structure ofbeliefs that I had based on them. I realized that if I wantedto establish anything in the sciences that was stable andlikely to last, I neededjust once in my lifeto demolisheverything completely and start again from the foundations.It looked like an enormous task, and I decided to wait untilI was old enough to be sure that there was nothing to begained from putting it off any longer. I have now delayedit for so long that I have no excuse for going on planningto do it rather than getting to work. So today I have set allmy worries aside and arranged for myself a clear stretch offree time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devotemyself, sincerely and without holding back, to demolishingmy opinions.

I can do this without showing that all my beliefs are false,which is probably more than I could ever manage. My reasontells me that as well as withholding assent from propositionsthat are obviously false, I should also withhold it from onesthat are not completely certain and indubitable. So all Ineed, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, is to findin each of them at least some reason for doubt. I can dothis without going through them one by one, which wouldtake forever: once the foundations of a building have beenundermined, the rest collapses of its own accord; so I willgo straight for the basic principles on which all my formerbeliefs rested.

Whatever I have accepted until now as most true hascome to me through my senses. But occasionally I havefound that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust

completely those who have deceived us even once.[The next paragraph presents a series of considerations back and

forth. It is set out here as a discussion between two people, but that isnthow Descartes presented it.]

Hopeful: Yet although the senses sometimes deceive usabout objects that are very small or distant, that doesntapply to my belief that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearinga winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in myhands, and so on. It seems to be quite impossible to doubtbeliefs like these, which come from the senses. Anotherexample: how can I doubt that these hands or this wholebody are mine? To doubt such things I would have to likenmyself to brain-damaged madmen who are convinced theyare kings when really they are paupers, or say they aredressed in purple when they are naked, or that they arepumpkins, or made of glass. Such people are insane, and Iwould be thought equally mad if I modelled myself on them.

Doubtful (sarcastically): What a brilliant piece of reason-ing! As if I were not a man who sleeps at night and often hasall the same experiences while asleep as madmen do whenawakeindeed sometimes even more improbable ones. Oftenin my dreams I am convinced of just such familiar eventsthat I am sitting by the fire in my dressing-gownwhen infact I am lying undressed in bed!

Hopeful: Yet right now my eyes are certainly wide openwhen I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and itisnt asleep; when I rub one hand against the other, I do itdeliberately and know what I am doing. This wouldnt allhappen with such clarity to someone asleep.

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Doubtful: Indeed! As if I didnt remember other occasionswhen I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts whileasleep! As I think about this more carefully, I realize thatthere is never any reliable way of distinguishing being awakefrom being asleep. This discovery makes me feel dizzy, [joke:]which itself reinforces the notion that I may be asleep!

Suppose then that I am dreamingit isnt true that I,with my eyes open, am moving my head and stretching outmy hands. Suppose, indeed that I dont even have hands orany body at all. Still, it has to be admitted that the visionsthat come in sleep are like paintings: they must have beenmade as copies of real things; so at least these general kindsof things eyes, head, hands and the body as a wholemustbe real and not imaginary. For even when painters try todepict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies,they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of realanimals, rather than inventing natures that are entirelynew. If they do succeed in thinking up something completelyfictitious and unrealnot remotely like anything ever seenbeforeat least the colours used in the picture must be real.Similarly, although these general kinds of things eyes,head, hands and so oncould be imaginary, there is nodenying that certain even simpler and more universal kindsof things are real. These are the elements out of which wemake all our mental images of thingsthe true and also thefalse ones.

These simpler and more universal kinds include body,and extension; the shape of extended things; their quantity,size and number; the places things can be in, the timethrough which they can last, and so on.

So it seems reasonable to conclude that physics, astron-omy, medicine, and all other sciences dealing with thingsthat have complex structures are doubtful; while arithmetic,geometry and other studies of the simplest and most general

thingswhether they really exist in nature or notcontainsomething certain and indubitable. For whether I am awakeor asleep, two plus three makes five, and a square has onlyfour sides. It seems impossible to suspect that such obvioustruths might be false.

However, I have for many years been sure that there isan all-powerful God who made me to be the sort of creaturethat I am. How do I know that he hasnt brought it aboutthat there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space,no shape, no size, no place, while making sure that all thesethings appear to me to exist? Anyway, I sometimes thinkthat others go wrong even when they think they have themost perfect knowledge; so how do I know that I myself dontgo wrong every time I add two and three or count the sidesof a square? Well, you might say, God would not let mebe deceived like that, because he is said to be supremelygood. But, I reply, if Gods goodness would stop him fromletting me be deceived all the time, you would expect it tostop him from allowing me to be deceived even occasionally;yet clearly I sometimes am deceived.

Some people would deny the existence of such a powerfulGod rather than believe that everything else is uncertain.Let us grant themfor purposes of argumentthat thereis no God, and theology is fiction. On their view, then, Iam a product of fate or chance or a long chain of causesand effects. But the less powerful they make my originalcause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to bedeceived all the timebecause deception and error seem tobe imperfections. Having no answer to these arguments, Iam driven back to the position that doubts can properly beraised about any of my former beliefs. I dont reach thisconclusion in a flippant or casual manner, but on the basisof powerful and well thought-out reasons. So in future, if Iwant to discover any certainty, I must withhold my assent

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Meditations Ren Descartes Second Meditation

from these former beliefs just as carefully as I withhold itfrom obvious falsehoods.

It isnt enough merely to have noticed this, though; I mustmake an effort to remember it. My old familiar opinionskeep coming back, and against my will they capture mybelief. It is as though they had a right to a place in mybelief-system as a result of long occupation and the law ofcustom. These habitual opinions of mine are indeed highlyprobable; although they are in a sense doubtful, as I haveshown, it is more reasonable to believe than to deny them.But if I go on viewing them in that light I shall never get outof the habit of confidently assenting to them. To conquerthat habit, therefore, I had better switch right around andpretend (for a while) that these former opinions of mine areutterly false and imaginary. I shall do this until I havesomething to counter-balance the weight of old opinion,and the distorting influence of habit no longer prevents mefrom judging correctly. However far I go in my distrustfulattitude, no actual harm will come of it, because my projectwont affect how I act, but only how I go about acquiringknowledge.

So I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cun-

ning demon has done all he can to deceive merather thanthis being done by God, who is supremely good and thesource of truth. I shall think that the sky, the air, theearth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things aremerely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for myjudgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes,or flesh, or blood or senses, but as having falsely believedthat I had all these things. I shall stubbornly persist in thistrain of thought; and even if I cant learn any truth, I shall atleast do what I can do, which is to be on my guard againstaccepting any falsehoods, so that the deceiverhoweverpowerful and cunning he may bewill be unable to affect mein the slightest. This will be hard work, though, and a kindof laziness pulls me back into my old ways. Like a prisonerwho dreams that he is free, starts to suspect that it is merelya dream, and wants to go on dreaming rather than wakingup, so I am content to slide back into my old opinions; Ifear being shaken out of them because I am afraid that mypeaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake,and that I shall have to struggle not in the light but in theimprisoning darkness of the problems I have raised.

Second Meditation:The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body

Yesterdays meditation raised doubtsones that are tooserious to be ignoredwhich I can see no way of resolving.I feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep

whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neitherstand on the bottom nor swim to the top. However, I shallforce my way up, and try once more to carry out the project

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Vedran D JankovicThat all external (the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, etc.) is a fictive obstacle to judgment appears a paradoxwouldnt the absence of all external eliminate this thing we call judgment? While one may not be able to deny the existence of the possibility (not to be confused with the possibility of existence) of this thing we call judgement (either qualia of some sort), the very existence of its praxis, that is, its effectiveness, seems to hinge on the existence of all aforementioned/external. On the other hand, if indeed these are the phantasmal phenomena impeding our judgment, our inquiry shifts toward the nonexistence weve been unable to judge. But at this point, the mere mention of this thing we call judgment must carry with itself all the external Descartes is keen to dismiss.

And even if the mind IS the only thing existing, these phenomena (the sky, the earth, the air) occurring in it (the mind) remain nevertheless the only milieu (even if phantasmal) upon which judgment is built.


that I started on yesterday. I will set aside anything thatadmits of the slightest doubt, treating it as though I hadfound it to be outright false; and I will carry on like that untilI find something certain, orat worstuntil I become certainthat there is no certainty. Archimedes said that if he hadone firm and immovable point he could lift the world witha long enough lever; so I too can hope for great things if Imanage to find just one little thing that is solid and certain.

I will suppose, then, that everything I see is fictitious. Iwill believe that my memory tells me nothing but lies. I haveno senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place areillusions. So what remains true? Perhaps just the one factthat nothing is certain!

[This paragraph is presented as a further to-and-fro argument be-tween two people. Remember that this isnt how Descartes wrote it.]

Hopeful: Still, how do I know that there isnt somethingnot on that listabout which there is no room for even theslightest doubt? Isnt there a God (call him what you will)who gives me the thoughts I am now having?

Doubtful: But why do I think this, since I might myselfbe the author of these thoughts?

Hopeful: But then doesnt it follow that I am, at least,something?

Doubtful: This is very confusing, because I have just saidthat I have no senses and no body, and I am so bound upwith a body and with senses that one would think that I cantexist without them. Now that I have convinced myself thatthere is nothing in the worldno sky, no earth, no minds,no bodiesdoes it follow that I dont exist either?

Hopeful: No it does not follow; for if I convinced myselfof something then I certainly existed.

Doubtful: But there is a supremely powerful and cunningdeceiver who deliberately deceives me all the time!

Hopeful: Even then, if he is deceiving me I undoubtedly

exist: let him deceive me all he can, he will never bring itabout that I am nothing while I think I am something. Soafter thoroughly thinking the matter through I conclude thatthis proposition, I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assertit or think it.

But this I that must existI still dont properly under-stand what it is; so I am at risk of confusing it with somethingelse, thereby falling into error in the very item of knowledgethat I maintain is the most certain and obvious of all. To getstraight about what this I is, I shall go back and think somemore about what I believed myself to be before I started thismeditation. I will eliminate from those beliefs anything thatcould be even slightly called into question by the arguments Ihave been using, which will leave me with only beliefs aboutmyself that are certain and unshakable.

Well, then, what did I think I was? A man. But what is aman? Shall I say a rational animal? No; for then I shouldhave to ask what an animal is, and what rationality iseachquestion would lead me on to other still harder ones, and thiswould take more time than I can spare. Let me focus insteadon the beliefs that spontaneously and naturally came to mewhenever I thought about what I was. The first such beliefwas that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole structureof bodily parts that corpses also haveI call it the body. Thenext belief was that I ate and drank, that I moved about,and that I engaged in sense-perception and thinking; thesethings, I thought, were done by the soul. [In this work the soul= the mind; it has no religious implications.] If I gave any thoughtto what this soul was like, I imagined it to be somethingthin and filmy like a wind or fire or etherpermeating mymore solid parts. I was more sure about the body, though,thinking that I knew exactly what sort of thing it was. IfI had tried to put my conception of the body into words, Iwould have said this:

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By a body I understand whatever has a definite shapeand position, and can occupy a region of space insuch a way as to keep every other body out of it; it canbe perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell,and can be moved in various ways.

I would have added that a body cant start up movementsby itself, and can move only through being moved by otherthings that bump into it. It seemed to me quite out ofcharacter for a body to be able to initiate movements, orto able to sense and think, and I was amazed that certainbodiesnamely, human onescould do those things.

But now that I am supposing there is a supremely pow-erful and malicious deceiver who has set out to trick me inevery way he cannow what shall I say that I am? Can Inow claim to have any of the features that I used to thinkbelong to a body? When I think about them really carefully,I find that they are all open to doubt: I shant waste timeby showing this about each of them separately. Now, whatabout the features that I attributed to the soul? Nutrition ormovement? Since now I am pretending that I dont have abody, these are mere fictions. Sense-perception? One needsa body in order to perceive; and, besides, when dreaming Ihave seemed to perceive through the senses many things thatI later realized I had not perceived in that way. Thinking? Atlast I have discovered itthought! This is the one thing thatcant be separated from me. I am, I existthat is certain.But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. But perhapsno longer than that; for it might be that if I stopped thinkingI would stop existing; and I have to treat that possibility asthough it were actual, because my present policy is to rejecteverything that isnt necessarily true. Strictly speaking, then,I am simply a thing that thinksa mind, or soul, or intellect,or reason, these being words whose meaning I have only justcome to know. Still, I am a real, existing thing. What kind of

a thing? I have answered that: a thinking thing.What else am I? I will use my imagination to see if I am

anything more. I am not that structure of limbs and organsthat is called a human body; nor am I a thin vapour thatpermeates the limbsa wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever Iimagine; for I have supposed all these things to be nothingbecause I have supposed all bodies to be nothing. Even ifI go on supposing them to be nothing, I am still something.But these things that I suppose to be nothing because theyare unknown to memight they not in fact be identical withthe I of which I am aware? I dont know; and just now Ishant discuss the matter, because I can form opinions onlyabout things that I know. I know that I exist, and I amasking: what is this I that I know? My knowledge of it cantdepend on things of whose existence I am still unaware; soit cant depend on anything that I invent in my imagination.The word invent points to what is wrong with relying onmy imagination in this matter: if I used imagination to showthat I was something or other, that would be mere invention,mere story-telling; for imagining is simply contemplatingthe shape or image of a bodily thing. [Descartes here relieson a theory of his about the psychology of imagination.] That makesimagination suspect, for while I know for sure that I exist, Iknow that everything relating to the nature of body includingimagination could be mere dreams; so it would be sillyfor me to say I will use my imagination to get a clearerunderstanding of what I amas silly, indeed, as to say Iam now awake, and see some truth; but I shall deliberatelyfall asleep so as to see even more, and more truly, in mydreams! If my mind is to get a clear understanding of itsown nature, it had better not look to the imagination for it.

Well, then, what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that?A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants,refuses, and also imagines and senses.

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That is a long list of attributes for me to haveand itreally is I who have them all. Why should it not be? Isnt itone and the same I who now

doubts almost everything,understands some things,affirms this one thingnamely, that I exist and think,denies everything else,wants to know more,refuses to be deceived,imagines many things involuntarily, andis aware of others that seem to come from the senses?

Isnt all this just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I amin a perpetual dream, and even if my creator is doing his bestto deceive me? Which of all these activities is distinct frommy thinking? Which of them can be said to be separate frommyself? The fact that it is I who doubt and understand andwant is so obvious that I cant see how to make it any clearer.But the I who imagines is also this same I. For even if (as Iam pretending) none of the things that I imagine really exist,I really do imagine them, and this is part of my thinking.Lastly, it is also this same I who senses, or is aware ofbodily things seemingly through the senses. Because I maybe dreaming, I cant say for sure that I now see the flames,hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; butI certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. Thiscannot be false; what is called sensing is strictly just thisseeming, and when sensing is understood in this restrictedsense of the word it too is simply thinking.

All this is starting to give me a better understandingof what I am. But I still cant help thinking that bodiesof which I form mental images and which the sensesinvestigateare much more clearly known to me than isthis puzzling I that cant be pictured in the imagination.It would be surprising if this were right, though; for it

would be surprising if I had a clearer grasp of things that Irealize are doubtful, unknown and foreign to menamely,bodiesthan I have of what is true and known namelymy own self. But I see what the trouble is: I keep driftingtowards that error because my mind likes to wander freely,refusing to respect the boundaries that truth lays down. Verywell, then; I shall let it run free for a while, so that whenthe time comes to rein it in it wont be so resistant to beingpulled back.

Let us consider the things that people ordinarily thinkthey understand best of all, namely the bodies that we touchand see. I dont mean bodies in generalfor our generalthoughts are apt to be confusedbut one particular body:this piece of wax, for example. It has just been taken fromthe honeycomb; it still tastes of honey and has the scent ofthe flowers from which the honey was gathered; its colour,shape and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold and can behandled easily; if you rap it with your knuckle it makes asound. In short, it has everything that seems to be neededfor a body to be known perfectly clearly. But as I speak thesewords I hold the wax near to the fire, and look! The taste andsmell vanish, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the sizeincreases; the wax becomes liquid and hot; you can hardlytouch it, and it no longer makes a sound when you strike it.But is it still the same wax? Of course it is; no-one deniesthis. So what was it about the wax that I understood soclearly? Evidently it was not any of the features that thesenses told me of; for all of them brought to me throughtaste, smell, sight, touch or hearinghave now altered, yetit is still the same wax.

Perhaps what I now think about the wax indicates whatits nature was all along. If that is right, then the wax wasnot the sweetness of the honey, the scent of the flowers, thewhiteness, the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body

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that recently presented itself to me in those ways but nowappears differently. But what exactly is this thing that Iam now imagining? Well, if we take away whatever doesntbelong to the wax (that is, everything that the wax could bewithout), what is left is merely something extended, flexibleand changeable. What do flexible and changeable meanhere? I can imaginatively picture this piece of wax changingfrom round to square, from square to triangular, and soon. But that isnt what changeability is. In knowing thatthe wax is changeable I understand that it can go throughendlessly many changes of that kind, far more than I candepict in my imagination; so it isnt my imagination thatgives me my grasp of the wax as flexible and changeable.Also, what does extended mean? Is the waxs extensionalso unknown? It increases if the wax melts, and increasesagain if it boils; the wax can be extended in many more ways(that is, with many more shapes) than I will ever bringbefore my imagination. I am forced to conclude that thenature of this piece of wax isnt revealed by my imagination,but is perceived by the mind alone. (I am speaking of thisparticular piece of wax; the point is even clearer with regardto wax in general.) This wax that is perceived by the mindalone is, of course, the same wax that I see, touch, andpicture in my imaginationin short the same wax I thoughtit to be from the start. But although my perception of itseemed to be a case of vision and touch and imagination, itisnt so and it never was. Rather, it is purely a scrutiny bythe mind alone formerly an imperfect and confused one,but now vivid and clear because I am now concentratingcarefully on what the wax consists in.

As I reach this conclusion I am amazed at how prone toerror my mind is. For although I am thinking all this outwithin myself, silently, I do it with the help of words, andI am at risk of being led astray by them. When the wax is

in front of us, we say that we see it, not that we judge it tobe there from its colour or shape; and this might make methink that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eyesees rather than from the perception of the mind alone. Butthis is clearly wrong, as the following example shows. If Ilook out of the window and see men crossing the square, asI have just done, I say that I see the men themselves, justas I say that I see the wax; yet do I see any more than hatsand coats that could conceal robots? I judge that they aremen. Something that I thought I saw with my eyes, therefore,was really grasped solely by my minds faculty of judgment[= ability or capacity to make judgments].

However, someone who wants to know more than thecommon crowd should be ashamed to base his doubts onordinary ways of talking. Let us push ahead, then, andask: When was my perception of the waxs nature moreperfect and clear? Was it when I first looked at the wax, andthought I knew it through my senses? Or is it now, after Ihave enquired more carefully into the waxs nature and intohow it is known? It would be absurd to hesitate in answeringthe question; for what clarity and sharpness was there inmy earlier perception of the wax? Was there anything in itthat a lower animal couldnt have? But when I consider thewax apart from its outward formstake its clothes off, so tospeak, and consider it nakedthen although my judgmentmay still contain errors, at least I am now having a perceptionof a sort that requires a human mind.

But what am I to say about this mind, or about myself?(So far, remember, I dont admit that there is anything to meexcept a mind.) What, I ask, is this I that seems to perceivethe wax so clearly? Surely, I am aware of my own self in atruer and more certain way than I am of the wax, and alsoin a much more distinct and evident way. What leads me tothink that the wax existsnamely, that I see it leads much

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more obviously to the conclusion that I exist. What I seemight not really be the wax; perhaps I dont even have eyeswith which to see anything. But when I see or think I see (Iam not here distinguishing the two), it is simply not possiblethat I who am now thinking am not something. Similarly,that I exist follows from the other bases for judging thatthe wax exists - that I touch it, that I imagine it, or anyother basisand similarly for my bases for judging thatanything else exists outside me. As I came to perceive thewax more distinctly by applying not just sight and touch butother considerations, all this too contributed to my knowingmyself even more distinctly, because whatever goes into myperception of the wax or of any other body must do evenmore to establish the nature of my own mind. What comesto my mind from bodies, therefore, helps me to know my

mind distinctly; yet all of that pales into insignificanceitis hardly worth mentioningwhen compared with whatmy mind contains within itself that enables me to knowit distinctly.

See! With no effort I have reached the place where Iwanted to be! I now know that even bodies are perceived notby the senses or by imagination but by the intellect alone,not through their being touched or seen but through theirbeing understood; and this helps me to know plainly thatI can perceive my own mind more easily and clearly than Ican anything else. Since the grip of old opinions is hard toshake off, however, I want to pause and meditate for a whileon this new knowledge of mine, fixing it more deeply in mymemory.

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Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Iam not sure when I first became aware of the Singularity. Id have to say itwas a progressive awakening. In the almost half century that Ive immersedmyself in computer and related technologies, Ive sought to understand themeaning and purpose of the continual upheaval that I have witnessed at manylevels. Gradually, Ive become aware of a transforming event looming in thefirst half of the twenty-first century. Just as a black hole in space dramaticallyalters the patterns of matter and energy accelerating toward its event horizon,this impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming everyinstitution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality.

What, then, is the Singularity? Its a future period during which the pace oftechnological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life willbe irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, thisepoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives,from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance ofour past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherentlychanges ones view of life in general and ones own particular life. I regardsomeone who understands the Singularity and who has reflected on its impli-cations for his or her own life as a singularitarian.1

I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obviousimplications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherentacceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continu-ation of biological evolution). After all, it took me forty years to be able to seewhat was right in front of me, and I still cannot say that I am entirely comfort-able with all of its consequences.

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace ofchange of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are

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expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts outalmost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected furyunexpected,that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory. (See the Linear vs.Exponential Growth graph on p. 10.)

Consider this parable: a lake owner wants to stay at home to tend to thelakes fish and make certain that the lake itself will not become covered with lilypads, which are said to double their number every few days. Month aftermonth, he patiently waits, yet only tiny patches of lily pads can be discerned,and they dont seem to be expanding in any noticeable way. With the lily padscovering less than 1 percent of the lake, the owner figures that its safe to take avacation and leaves with his family. When he returns a few weeks later, hesshocked to discover that the entire lake has become covered with the pads, andhis fish have perished. By doubling their number every few days, the last sevendoublings were sufficient to extend the pads coverage to the entire lake. (Sevendoublings extended their reach 128-fold.) This is the nature of exponentialgrowth.

Consider Gary Kasparov, who scorned the pathetic state of computer chessin 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled acomputer to defeat him only five years later.2 The list of ways computers cannow exceed human capabilities is rapidly growing. Moreover, the once narrowapplications of computer intelligence are gradually broadening in one type ofactivity after another. For example, computers are diagnosing electrocardio-grams and medical images, flying and landing airplanes, controlling the tacticaldecisions of automated weapons, making credit and financial decisions, andbeing given responsibility for many other tasks that used to require humanintelligence. The performance of these systems is increasingly based on inte-grating multiple types of artificial intelligence (AI). But as long as there is an AIshortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as aninherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of ourown creations.

This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ulti-mately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, andemotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.

Although impressive in many respects, the brain suffers from severe limita-tions. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal con-nections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. Butour thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several milliontimes slower than contemporary electronic circuits. That makes our physiolog-

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ical bandwidth for processing new information extremely limited compared tothe exponential growth of the overall human knowledge base.

Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriadof failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals theyrequire. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, andcircumscribed.

The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biologicalbodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be inour own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly differentstatement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand humanthinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century,the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions oftimes more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

We are now in the early stages of this transition. The acceleration of para-digm shift (the rate at which we change fundamental technical approaches) aswell as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology areboth beginning to reach the knee of the curve, which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable. Shortly after this stage, the trendquickly becomes explosive. Before the middle of this century, the growth ratesof our technologywhich will be indistinguishable from ourselveswill be sosteep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective,the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bringabout will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will bethe perspective of unenhanced biological humanity.

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biolog-ical thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is stillhuman but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction,post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtualreality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world,its simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend itsphysical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

Many commentators on these changes focus on what they perceive as a lossof some vital aspect of our humanity that will result from this transition. Thisperspective stems, however, from a misunderstanding of what our technologywill become. All the machines we have met to date lack the essential subtlety ofhuman biological qualities. Although the Singularity has many faces, its mostimportant implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceedthe refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.

T H E S I X E P O C H S 9


Vedran D Jankovic

Vedran D Jankovic

The Intuitive Linear View Versus the Historical Exponential View

When the first transhuman intelligence is created and launches itself intorecursive self-improvement, a fundamental discontinuity is likely to occur,the likes of which I cant even begin to predict.

MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

In the 1950s John von Neumann, the legendary information theorist, wasquoted as saying that the ever-accelerating progress of technology . . . gives theappearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the racebeyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.3 VonNeumann makes two important observations here: acceleration and singularity.The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands byrepeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding byrepeatedly adding a constant).

Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growthbecomes explosive.

The second is that exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly andvirtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive andprofoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebearsexpected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much


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like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but theywere at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that theylooked like no trend at all. As a result, observers expectation of an unchangedfuture was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous technological progressand the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surpris-ing than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized theimplications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time peri-ods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments becausethey are based on what I call the intuitive linear view of history rather thanthe historical exponential view. My models show that we are doubling theparadigm-shift rate every decade, as I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus thetwentieth century was gradually speeding up to todays rate of progress; itsachievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress atthe rate in 2000. Well make another twenty years of progress in just fourteenyears (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express thisanother way, we wont experience one hundred years of technological advancein the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousandyears of progress (again, when measured by todays rate of progress), or aboutone thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.4

Misperceptions about the shape of the future come up frequently and in avariety of contexts. As one example of many, in a recent debate in which I tookpart concerning the feasibility of molecular manufacturing, a Nobel Prizewinning panelist dismissed safety concerns regarding nanotechnology, pro-claiming that were not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities[devices constructed molecular fragment by fragment] for a hundred years. Ipointed out that one hundred years was a reasonable estimate and actuallymatched my own appraisal of the amount of technical progress required toachieve this particular milestone when measured at todays rate of progress (fivetimes the average rate of change we saw in the twentieth century). But becausewere doubling the rate of progress every decade, well see the equivalent of acentury of progressat todays ratein only twenty-five calendar years.

Similarly at Time magazines Future of Life conference, held in 2003 to cele-brate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, all of theinvited speakers were asked what they thought the next fifty years would belike.5 Virtually every presenter looked at the progress of the last fifty years andused it as a model for the next fifty years. For example, James Watson, thecodiscoverer of DNA, said that in fifty years we will have drugs that will allowus to eat as much as we want without gaining weight.

I replied, Fifty years? We have accomplished this already in mice by block-



Vedran D Jankovic

Vedran D Jankovic

ing the fat insulin receptor gene that controls the storage of fat in the fat cells.Drugs for human use (using RNA interference and other techniques we willdiscuss in chapter 5) are in development now and will be in FDA tests in severalyears. These will be available in five to ten years, not fifty. Other projectionswere equally shortsighted, reflecting contemporary research priorities ratherthan the profound changes that the next half century will bring. Of all thethinkers at this conference, it was primarily Bill Joy and I who took account ofthe exponential nature of the future, although Joy and I disagree on the importof these changes, as I will discuss in chapter 8.

People intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace of change increases over time, unexamined intuitionleaves one with the impression that change occurs at the same rate that we have experienced most recently. From the mathematicians perspective, the rea-son for this is that an exponential curve looks like a straight line when exam-ined for only a brief duration. As a result, even sophisticated commentators,when considering the future, typically extrapolate the current pace of changeover the next ten years or one hundred years to determine their expectations.This is why I describe this way of looking at the future as the intuitive lin-ear view.

But a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technologi-cal change is exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionaryprocess, of which technology is a primary example. You can examine the data indifferent ways, on different timescales, and for a wide variety of technologies,ranging from electronic to biological, as well as for their implications, rangingfrom the amount of human knowledge to the size of the economy. The acceler-ation of progress and growth applies to each of them. Indeed, we often find notjust simple exponential growth, but double exponential growth, meaning thatthe rate of exponential growth (that is, the exponent) is itself growing exponen-tially (for example, see the discussion on the price-performance of computingin the next chapter).

Many scientists and engineers have what I call scientists pessimism.Often, they are so immersed in the difficulties and intricate details of a con-temporary challenge that they fail to appreciate the ultimate long-term impli-cations of their own work, and the larger field of work in which they operate.They likewise fail to account for the far more powerful tools they will haveavailable with each new generation of technology.

Scientists are trained to be skeptical, to speak cautiously of current researchgoals, and to rarely speculate beyond the current generation of scientific pur-



suit. This may have been a satisfactory approach when a generation of scienceand technology lasted longer than a human generation, but it does not servesocietys interests now that a generation of scientific and technological progresscomprises only a few years.

Consider the biochemists who, in 1990, were skeptical of the goal of tran-scribing the entire human genome in a mere fifteen years. These scientists hadjust spent an entire year transcribing a mere one ten-thousandth of thegenome. So, even with reasonable anticipated advances, it seemed natural tothem that it would take a century, if not longer, before the entire genome couldbe sequenced.

Or consider the skepticism expressed in the mid-1980s that the Internetwould ever be a significant phenomenon, given that it then included only tens of thousands of nodes (also known as servers). In fact, the number ofnodes was doubling every year, so that there were likely to be tens of millions of nodes ten years later. But this trend was not appreciated by those who strug-gled with state-of-the-art technology in 1985, which permitted adding only afew thousand nodes throughout the world in a single year.6

The converse conceptual error occurs when certain exponential phenom-ena are first recognized and are applied in an overly aggressive manner withoutmodeling the appropriate pace of growth. While exponential growth gainsspeed over time, it is not instantaneous. The run-up in capital values (that is,stock market prices) during the Internet bubble and related telecommunica-tions bubble (19972000) was greatly in excess of any reasonable expectationof even exponential growth. As I demonstrate in the next chapter, the actualadoption of the Internet and e-commerce did show smooth exponentialgrowth through both boom and bust; the overzealous expectation of growthaffected only capital (stock) valuations. We have seen comparable mistakesduring earlier paradigm shiftsfor example, during the early railroad era(1830s), when the equivalent of the Internet boom and bust led to a frenzy ofrailroad expansion.

Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformationsthat will result from a single trend in todays world as if nothing else willchange. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result inoverpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustainhuman life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotech-nology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturingdevices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical productfrom inexpensive raw materials and information.

I emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because its the most



important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends. Mosttechnology forecasts and forecasters ignore altogether this historical exponen-tial view of technological progress. Indeed, almost everyone I meet has a linearview of the future. Thats why people tend to overestimate what can be achievedin the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details) but under-estimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored).

The Six Epochs

First we build the tools, then they build us.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

The future aint what it used to be.

YOGI BERRA

Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order. Ill discuss theconcept of order in the next chapter; the emphasis in this section is on the con-cept of patterns. I believe that its the evolution of patterns that constitutes theultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage orepoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to cre-ate the next. I conceptualize the history of evolutionboth biological andtechnologicalas occurring in six epochs. As we will discuss, the Singularitywill begin with Epoch Five and will spread from Earth to the rest of the uni-verse in Epoch Six.

Epoch One: Physics and Chemistry. We can trace our origins to a state thatrepresents information in its basic structures: patterns of matter and energy.Recent theories of quantum gravity hold that time and space are broken downinto discrete quanta, essentially fragments of information. There is controversyas to whether matter and energy are ultimately digital or analog in nature, butregardless of the resolution of this issue, we do know that atomic structuresstore and represent discrete information.

A few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, atoms began to form, aselectrons became trapped in orbits around nuclei consisting of protons andneutrons. The electrical structure of atoms made them sticky. Chemistry wasborn a few million years later as atoms came together to create relatively stablestructures called molecules. Of all the elements, carbon proved to be the mostversatile; its able to form bonds in four directions (versus one to three for



most other elements), giving rise to complicated, information-rich, three-dimensional structures.

The rules of our universe and the balance of the physical constants that gov-ern the interaction of basic forces are so exquisitely, delicately, and exactlyappropriate for the codification and evolution of information (resulting inincreasing complexity) that one wonders how such an extraordinarily unlikelysituation came about. Where some see a divine hand, others see our ownhandsnamely, the anthropic principle, which holds that only in a universethat allowed our own evolution would we be here to ask such questions.7

Recent theories of physics concerning multiple universes speculate that newuniverses are created on a regular basis, each with its own unique rules, but thatmost of these either die out quickly or else continue without the evolution ofany interesting patterns (such as Earth-based biology has created) becausetheir rules do not support the evolution of increasingly complex forms.8 Itshard to imagine how we could test these theories of evolution applied to earlycosmology, but its clear that the physical laws of our universe are preciselywhat they need to be to allow for the evolution of increasing levels of order andcomplexity.9


Information in atomic structures

Information in DNA

Information in neural patterns

Information in hardware and software designs

The methods of biology (including human intelligence) are integrated into the (exponentially expanding) human technology base

Patterns of matter and energy in the universe become saturated with intelligent processes and knowledge

Epoch 1 Physics and Chemistry

Epoch 2 Biology

Epoch 3 Brains

Epoch 4 Technology

Epoch 5 Merger of Technology and Human Intelligence

Epoch 6 The Universe Wakes Up

DNA evolves

Brains evolve

Technology evolves

Technology masters the methods of biology (including human intelligence)

Vastly expanded human intelligence (predominantly nonbiological) spreads through the universe

The Six Epochs of EvolutionEvolution works through indirection: it createsa capability and then uses that capability to evolve the next stage.


Epoch Two: Biology and DNA. In the second epoch, starting several billionyears ago, carbon-based compounds became more and more intricate untilcomplex aggregations of molecules formed self-replicating mechanisms, andlife originated. Ultimately, biological systems evolved a precise digital mecha-nism (DNA) to store information describing a larger society of molecules. Thismolecule and its supporting machinery of codons and ribosomes enabled arecord to be kept of the evolutionary experiments of this second epoch.

Epoch Three: Brains. Each epoch continues the evolution of informationthrough a paradigm shift to a further level of indirection. (That is, evolutionuses the results of one epoch to create the next.) For example, in the thirdepoch, DNA-guided evolution produced organisms that could detect informa-tion with their own sensory organs and process and store that information intheir own brains and nervous systems. These were made possible by second-epoch mechanisms (DNA and epigenetic information of proteins and RNAfragments that control gene expression), which (indirectly) enabled and definedthird-epoch information-processing mechanisms (the brains and nervous sys-tems of organisms). The third epoch started with the ability of early animals torecognize patterns, which still accounts for the vast majority of the activity inour brains.10 Ultimately, our own species evolved the ability to create abstractmental models of the world we experience and to contemplate the rationalimplications of these models. We have the ability to redesign the world in ourown minds and to put these ideas into action.

Epoch Four: Technology. Combining the endowment of rational and abstractthought with our opposable thumb, our species ushered in the fourth epochand the next level of indirection: the evolution of human-created technol-ogy. This started out with simple mechanisms and developed into elaborateautomata (automated mechanical machines). Ultimately, with sophisticatedcomputational and communication devices, technology was itself capable ofsensing, storing, and evaluating elaborate patterns of information. To comparethe rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of techno-logical evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added aboutone cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we areroughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year (see thenext chapter). Of course, neither brain size nor computer capacity is the soledeterminant of intelligence, but they do represent enabling factors.

If we place key milestones of both biological evolution and human techno-logical development on a single graph plotting both the x-axis (number of



years ago) and the y-axis (the paradigm-shift time) on logarithmic scales, wefind a reasonably straight line (continual acceleration), with biological evolu-tion leading directly to human-directed development.11

Countdown to Singularity: Biological evolution and human technologyboth show continual acceleration, indicated by the shorter time to the nextevent (two billion years from the origin of life to cells; fourteen years fromthe PC to the World Wide Web).


Time Before Present (Years)

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City-statesWriting, wheel

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Homo sapiens sapiens

Homo sapiensSpoken languageGenus Homo, Homo erectus,

specialized stone tools

Human ancestors walk uprightFamily Hominidae

Superfamily HominoideaPrimates

Class MammaliaReptiles

Cambrian explosion (body plans)

Life

Countdown to SingularityLogarithmic Plot


Linear view of evolution: This version of the preceding figure uses the samedata but with a linear scale for time before present instead of a logarithmicone. This shows the acceleration more dramatically, but details are not visible. From a linear perspective, most key events have just happenedrecently.

The above figures reflect my view of key developments in biological andtechnological history. Note, however, that the straight line, demonstrating thecontinual acceleration of evolution, does not depend on my particular selec-tion of events. Many observers and reference books have compiled lists ofimportant events in biological and technological evolution, each of which hasits own idiosyncrasies. Despite the diversity of approaches, however, if we com-bine lists from a variety of sources (for example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica,the American Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagans cosmic calendar, andothers), we observe the same obvious smooth acceleration. The following plotcombines fifteen different lists of key events.12 Since different thinkers assigndifferent dates to the same event, and different lists include similar or overlap-ping events selected according to different criteria, we see an expected thick-ening of the trend line due to the noisiness (statistical variance) of this data.The overall trend, however, is very clear.


Linear Plot


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Homo sapiensHomo sapiens sapiens

Art, early cities

Agriculture

Writing, wheelCity-states

Industrial revolutionPrinting, experimental method

Telephone, electricity, radioComputer

Personal computer

Eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms

0102x103x104x109 9 9 9

Countdown to Singularity


Fifteen views of evolution: Major paradigm shifts in the history of the world,as seen by fifteen different lists of key events. There is a clear trend ofsmooth acceleration through biological and then technological evolution.

Physicist and complexity theorist Theodore Modis analyzed these lists anddetermined twenty-eight clusters of events (which he called canonical mile-stones) by combining identical, similar, and/or related events from the differentlists.13 This process essentially removes the noise (for example, the variabilityof dates between lists) from the lists, revealing again the same progression:


Logarithmic Plot

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Carl Sagan

American Museum ofNatural HistoryEncyclopaedia Britannica

ERAPS at University ofArizonaPaul Boyer

Barrow and Silk

Jean Heidmann

IGPP Symposium

Phillip Tobias

David Nelson

Goran Burenhult (ed.)

Johanson and Edgar

Modis 2002

Richard Coren

Modis 2003

Paradigm Shifts for 15 Lists of Key Events


Canonical milestones based on clusters of events from thirteen lists.

The attributes that are growing exponentially in these charts are order andcomplexity, concepts we will explore in the next chapter. This accelerationmatches our commonsense observations. A billion years ago, not much hap-pened over the course of even one million years. But a quarter-million yearsago epochal events such as the evolution of our species occurred in time framesof just one hundred thousand years. In technology, if we go back fifty thousandyears, not much happened over a one-thousand-year period. But in the recentpast, we see new paradigms, such as the World Wide Web, progress from incep-tion to mass adoption (meaning that they are used by a quarter of the popula-tion in advanced countries) within only a decade.

Epoch Five: The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence.Looking ahead several decades, the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch.It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our ownbrains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability ofour technology. The fifth epoch will enable our human-machine civilization totranscend the human brains limitations of a mere hundred trillion extremelyslow connections.14


Logarithmic Plot


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Emergence of modern humansDifferentiation of human DNA typesDomestication of fire

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First stone toolsChimpanzees and humans diverge

First orangutanFirst hominoids

Asteroid collisionFirst mammals

First multicellular life

Life on EarthFirst eukaryotes

Rock art, protowriting

Invention of agriculture Techniques for starting fire

Development of the wheel, writingZero and decimals invented

Renaissance (printing press)Industrial revolution (steam engine)

DNA structure, transistor, nuclear energy

Modern physics

Milky Way

First flowering plants

Democracy

Cambrian explosion

Canonical Milestones


The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems andvastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligencethat evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitationsof biological evolution. But the Singularity will also amplify the ability to acton our destructive inclinations, so its full story has not yet been written.

Epoch Six: The Universe Wakes Up. I will discuss this topic in chapter 6, underthe heading . . . on the Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos. In the aftermath ofthe Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in humanbrains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturatethe matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matterand energy to provide an optimal level of computation (based on limits we willdiscuss in chapter 3) to spread out from its origin on Earth.

We currently understand the speed of light as a bounding factor on thetransfer of information. Circumventing this limit has to be regarded as highlyspeculative, but there are hints that this constraint may be able to be super-seded.15 If there are even subtle deviations, we will ultimately harness thissuperluminal ability. Whether our civilization infuses the rest of the universewith its creativity and intelligence quickly or slowly depends on its immutabil-ity. In any event the dumb matter and mechanisms of the universe will betransformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence, which will consti-tute the sixth epoch in the evolution of patterns of information.

This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe.

The Singularity Is Near

You know, things are going to be really different! . . . No, no, I mean reallydifferent!

MARK MILLER (COMPUTER SCIENTIST) TO ERIC DREXLER, AROUND 1986

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelli-gence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, thereseems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of stillmore intelligent entitieson a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy thatI see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and makeinventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its worktheworld acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humanshave the ability to internalize the world and conduct what if s in our



heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than naturalselection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at muchhigher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from ourhuman past as we humans are from the lower animals. From the humanpoint of view, this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules,perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope ofcontrol.

VERNOR VINGE, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY, 1993

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpassall the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design ofmachines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machinecould design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man would be left farbehind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that manneed ever make.

IRVING JOHN GOOD, SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE FIRSTULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE, 1965

To put the concept of Singularity into further perspective, lets explore the his-tory of the word itself. Singularity is an English word meaning a unique eventwith, well, singular implications. The word was adopted by mathematicians todenote a value that transcends any finite limitation, such as the explosion ofmagnitude that results when dividing a constant by a number that gets closerand closer to zero. Consider, for example, the simple function y = 1/x. As thevalue of x approaches zero, the value of the function (y) explodes to larger andlarger values.



A mathematical singularity: As x approaches zero (from right to left), 1/x(or y) approaches infinity.

Such a mathematical function never actually achieves an infinite value,since dividing by zero is mathematically undefined (impossible to calculate).But the value of y exceeds any possible finite limit (approaches infinity) as thedivisor x approaches zero.

The next field to adopt the word was astrophysics. If a massive star under-goes a supernova explosion, its remnant eventually collapses to the point ofapparently zero volume and infinite density, and a singularity is created at itscenter. Because light was thought to be unable to escape the star after it reachedthis infinite density,16 it was called a black hole.17 It constitutes a rupture in thefabric of space and time.

One theory speculates that the universe itself began with such a Singular-ity.18 Interestingly, however, the event horizon (surface) of a black hole is offinite size, and gravitational force is only theoretically infinite at the zero-sizecenter of the black hole. At any location that could actually be measured, theforces are finite, although extremely large.

The first reference to the Singularity as an event capable of rupturing thefabric of human history is John von Neumanns statement quoted above. In the1960s, I. J. Good wrote of an intelligence explosion resulting from intelligentmachines designing their next generation without human intervention. Ver-nor Vinge, a mathematician and computer scientist at San Diego State Univer-sity, wrote about a rapidly approaching technological singularity in an articlefor Omni magazine in 1983 and in a science-fiction novel, Marooned in Real-time, in 1986.19


Linear PlotA Mathematical Singularity

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My 1989 book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, presented a future headedinevitably toward machines greatly exceeding human intelligence in the firsthalf of the twenty-first century.20 Hans Moravecs 1988 book Mind Childrencame to a similar conclusion by analyzing the progression of robotics.21 In1993 Vinge presented a paper to a NASA-organized symposium that describedthe Singularity as an impending event resulting primarily from the advent ofentities with greater than human intelligence, which Vinge saw as the harbin-ger of a runaway phenomenon.22 My 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines:When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, described the increasingly inti-mate connection between our biological intelligence and the artificial intelli-gence we are creating.23 Hans Moravecs book Robot: Mere Machine toTranscendent Mind, also published in 1999, described the robots of the 2040s asour evolutionary heirs, machines that will grow from us, learn our skills, andshare our goals and values, . . . children of our minds.24 Australian scholarDamien Brodericks 1997 and 2001 books, both titled The Spike, analyzed thepervasive impact of the extreme phase of technology acceleration anticipatedwithin several decades.25 In an extensive series of writings, John Smart hasdescribed the Singularity as the inevitable result of what he calls MEST (mat-ter, energy, space, and time) compression.26

From my perspective, the Singularity has many faces. It represents thenearly vertical phase of exponential growth that occurs when the rate is soextreme that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed. Of course,from a mathematical perspective, there is no discontinuity, no rupture, and thegrowth rates remain finite, although extraordinarily large. But from our cur-rently limited framework, this imminent event appears to be an acute andabrupt break in the continuity of progress. I emphasize the word currentlybecause one of the salient implications of the Singularity will be a change in thenature of our ability to understand. We will become vastly smarter as we mergewith our technology.

Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely?Isnt there a point at which humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? For unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would 1,000 scientists, each1,000 times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operat-ing 1,000 times faster than contemporary humans (because the informationprocessing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? Onechronological year would be like a millennium for them.27 What would theycome up with?

Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become evenmore intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity). Theywould change their own thought processes to enable them to think even faster.



When scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a milliontimes faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in todays terms).

The Singularity involves the following principles, which I will document,develop, analyze, and contemplate throughout the rest of this book:

The rate of paradigm shift (technical innovation) is accelerating, rightnow doubling every decade.28

The power (price-performance, speed, capacity, and bandwidth) of infor-mation technologies is growing exponentially at an even faster pace, nowdoubling about every year.29 This principle applies to a wide range ofmeasures, including the amount of human knowledge.

For information technologies, there is a second level of exponentialgrowth: that is, exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth (theexponent). The reason: as a technology becomes more cost effective, moreresources are deployed toward its advancement, so the rate of exponentialgrowth increases over time. For example, the computer industry in the1940s consisted of a handful of now historically important projects. Todaytotal revenue in the computer industry is more than one trillion dollars,so research and development budgets are comparably higher.

Human brain scanning is one of these exponentially improving technolo-gies. As I will show in chapter 4, the temporal and spatial resolution andbandwidth of brain scanning are doubling each year. We are just nowobtaining the tools sufficient to begin serious reverse engineering (decod-ing) of the human brains principles of operation. We already have impres-sive models and simulations of a couple dozen of the brains severalhundred regions. Within two decades, we will have a detailed understand-ing of how all the regions of the human brain work.

We will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence withsupercomputers by the end of this decade and with personal-computer-size devices by the end of the following decade. We will have effective soft-ware models of human intelligence by the mid-2020s.

With both the hardware and software needed to fully emulate humanintelligence, we can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicatingintelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the endof the 2020s.30

When they achieve this level of development, computers will be able tocombine the traditional strengths of human intelligence with the strengthsof machine intelligence.

The traditional strengths of human intelligence include a formidable abil-ity to recognize patterns. The massively parallel and self-organizing nature



of the human brain is an ideal architecture for recognizing patterns that are based on subtle, invariant properties. Humans are also capable oflearning new knowledge by applying insights and inferring principlesfrom experience, including information gathered through language. A keycapability of human intelligence is the ability to create mental models ofreality and to conduct mental what-if experiments by varying aspects ofthese models.

The traditional strengths of machine intelligence include the ability toremember billions of facts precisely and recall them instantly.

Another advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that once a skill is mas-tered by a machine, it can be performed repeatedly at high speed, at opti-mal accuracy, and without tiring.

Perhaps most important, machines can share their knowledge at extremelyhigh speed, compared to the very slow speed of human knowledge-sharingthrough language.

Nonbiological intelligence will be able to download skills and knowledgefrom other machines, eventually also from humans.

Machines will process and switch signals at close to the speed of light(about three hundred million meters per second), compared to about onehundred meters per second for the electrochemical signals used in biologi-cal mammalian brains.31 This speed ratio is at least three million to one.

Machines will have access via the Internet to all the knowledge of ourhuman-machine civilization and will be able to master all of this knowledge.

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Twomachinesor one million machinescan join together to become oneand then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at thesame time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call thisfalling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.

The combination of these traditional strengths (the pattern-recognitionability of biological human intelligence and the speed, memory capacityand accuracy, and knowledge and skill-sharing abilities of nonbiologicalintelligence) will be formidable.

Machine intelligence will have complete freedom of design and architec-ture (that is, they wont be constrained by biological limitations, such asthe slow switching speed of our interneuronal connections or a fixed skullsize) as well as consistent performance at all times.

Once nonbiological intelligence combines the traditional strengths ofboth humans and machines, the nonbiological portion of our civilizations



intelligence will then continue to benefit from the double exponentialgrowth of machine price-performance, speed, and capacity.

Once machines achieve the ability to design and engineer technology ashumans do, only at far higher speeds and capacities, they will have accessto their own designs (source code) and the ability to manipulate them.Humans are now accomplishing something similar through biotechnol-ogy (changing the genetic and other information processes underlyingour biology), but in a much slower and far more limited way than whatmachines will be able to achieve by modifying their own programs.

Biology has inherent limitations. For example, every living organism mustbe built from proteins that are folded from one-dimensional strings ofamino acids. Protein-based mechanisms are lacking in strength and speed.We will be able to reengineer all of the organs and systems in our biologi-cal bodies and brains to be vastly more capable.

As we will discuss in chapter 4, human intelligence does have a certainamount of plasticity (ability to change its structure), more so than hadpreviously been understood. But the architecture of the human brain isnonetheless profoundly limited. For example, there is room for only aboutone hundred trillion interneuronal connections in each of our skulls. A keygenetic change that allowed for the greater cognitive ability of humanscompared to that of our primate ancestors was the development of a largercerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, how-ever, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involvesan inherent limit to the brains capacity. Machines will be able to reformu-late their own designs and augment their own capacities without limit. Byusing nanotechnology-based designs, their capabilities will be far greaterthan biological brains without increased size or energy consumption.

Machines will also benefit from using very fast three-dimensional molecu-lar circuits. Todays electronic circuits are more than one million timesfaster than the electrochemical switching used in mammalian brains.Tomorrows molecular circuits will be based on devices such as nanotubes,which are tiny cylinders of carbon atoms that measure about ten atomsacross and are five hundred times smaller than todays silicon-based tran-sistors. Since the signals have less distance to travel, they will also be ableto operate at terahertz (trillions of operations per second) speeds com-pared to the few gigahertz (billions of operations per second) speeds ofcurrent chips.

The rate of technological change will not be limited to human mental



speeds. Machine intelligence will improve its own abilities in a feedbackcycle that unaided human intelligence will not be able to follow.

This cycle of machine intelligences iteratively improving its own designwill become faster and faster. This is in fact exactly what is predicted bythe formula for continued acceleration of the rate of paradigm shift. Oneof the objections that has been raised to the continuation of the accelera-tion of paradigm shift is that it ultimately becomes much too fast forhumans to follow, and so therefore, its argued, it cannot happen. How-ever, the shift from biological to nonbiological intelligence will enable thetrend to continue.

Along with the accelerating improvement cycle of nonbiological intelli-gence, nanotechnology will enable the manipulation of physical reality atthe molecular level.

Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed atthe molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such asrespirocytes (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriadroles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to theextent that this task will not already have been completed through biotech-nology, such as genetic engineering).

Nanobots will interact with biological neurons to vastly extend humanexperience by creating virtual reality from within the nervous system.

Billions of nanobots in the capillaries of the brain will also vastly extendhuman intelligence.

Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (thishas already started with computerized neural implants), the machineintelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing allalong), at least doubling in power each year. In contrast, biological intelli-gence is effectively of fixed capacity. Thus, the nonbiological portion ofour intelligence will ultimately predominate.

Nanobots will also enhance the environment by reversing pollution fromearlier industrialization.

Nanobots called foglets that can manipulate image and sound waves willbring the morphing qualities of virtual reality to the real world.34

The human ability to understand and respond appropriately to emotion(so-called emotional intelligence) is one of the forms of human intelli-gence that will be understood and mastered by future machine intelli-gence. Some of our emotional responses are tuned to optimize ourintelligence in the context of our limited and frail biological bodies.Future machine intelligence will also have bodies (for example, virtual



bodies in virtual reality, or projections in real reality using foglets) inorder to interact with the world, but these nanoengineered bodies will befar more capable and durable than biological human bodies. Thus, someof the emotional responses of future machine intelligence will be re-designed to reflect their vastly enhanced physical capabilities.35

As virtual reality from within the nervous system becomes competitivewith real reality in terms of resolution and believability, our experienceswill increasingly take place in virtual environments.

In virtual reality, we can be a different person both physically and emo-tionally. In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be ableto select a different body for you than you might select for yourself (andvice versa).

The law of accelerating returns will continue until nonbiological intelli-gence comes close to saturating the matter and energy in our vicinity ofthe universe with our human-machine intelligence. By saturating, I meanutilizing the matter and energy patterns for computation to an optimaldegree, based on our understanding of the physics of computation. As weapproach this limit, the intelligence of our civilization will continue itsexpansion in capability by spreading outward toward the rest of the uni-verse. The speed of this expansion will quickly achieve the maximumspeed at which information can travel.

Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelli-gence. This is the destiny of the universe. (See chapter 6.) We will deter-mine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current dumb,simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics.

The length of time it will take the universe to become intelligent to thisextent depends on whether or not the speed of light is an immutable limit.There are indications of possible subtle exceptions (or circumventions) tothis limit, which, if they exist, the vast intelligence of our civilization atthis future time will be able to exploit.

This, then, is the Singularity. Some would say that we cannot comprehendit, at least with our current level of understanding. For that reason, we cannotlook past its event horizon and make complete sense of what lies beyond. Thisis one reason we call this transformation the Singularity.

I have personally found it difficult, although not impossible, to look beyondthis event horizon, even after having thought about its implications for severaldecades. Still, my view is that, despite our profound limitations of thought, wedo have sufficient powers of abstraction to make meaningful statements about



the nature of life after the Singularity. Most important, the intelligence that willemerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already ahuman-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human,even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the nexthigh-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection. Most of the intelligenceof our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological. By the end of this century,it will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than human intelli-gence.36 However, to address often-expressed concerns, this does not imply theend of biological intelligence, even if it is thrown from its perch of evolutionarysuperiority. Even the nonbiological forms will be derived from biologicaldesign. Our civilization will remain humanindeed, in many ways it will bemore exemplary of what we regard as human than it is today, although ourunderstanding of the term will move beyond its biological origins.

Many observers have expressed alarm at the emergence of forms of nonbio-logical intelligence superior to human intelligence (an issue we will explorefurther in chapter 9). The potential to augment our own intelligence throughintimate connection with other thinking substrates does not necessarily allevi-ate the concern, as some people have expressed the wish to remain unen-hanced while at the same time keeping their place at the top of the intellectualfood chain. From the perspective of biological humanity, these superhumanintelligences will appear to be our devoted servants, satisfying our needs anddesires. But fulfilling the wishes of a revered biological legacy will occupy onlya trivial portion of the intellectual power that the Singularity will bring.

MOLLY CIRCA 2004: How will I know when the Singularity is upon us? I mean, Illwant some time to prepare.

RAY: Why, what are you planning to do?MOLLY 2004: Lets see, for starters, Ill want to fine-tune my rsum. Ill want to

make a good impression on the powers that be.GEORGE CIRCA 2048: Oh, I can take care of that for you.MOLLY 2004: Thats really not necessary. Im perfectly capable of doing it myself. I

might also want to erase a few documentsyou know, where

Documents

Singularity is Near, Chapter 1