The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
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bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, science, sociology, technology, philosophy-theology Imminent Metaphysics
The subtitle contains the entire thesis: an expectation that machines will allow human beings to escape the limitations of their physical bodies. This contention has been called ‘daring,’ ‘optimistic,’ ‘arresting,’ ‘really out there,’ ‘outrageous,’ ‘terrifying,’ and above all just ‘big.’ And certainly the idea that a machine can be linked to a brain to form what is effectively a new species is certainly that: Big. But in terms of bigness (as Trump would say) it’s a sideshow and not the main event. It’s just that the main event doesn’t sell nearly as many tickets.
Of course human beings already have transcended much of their biology long ago. Kurzweil’s own analysis in this and his previous books demonstrates this fact repeatedly. Humanity in its various sub-species did so through the core technology which he recognises as the source of just about all advances in human well-being and dispersion around the planet: the technology of language. It is language which permits both complicated and large-scale cooperation among individuals, and which allows experience to be codified and stored over generations. It is language - in the form of self-learning code - which is the foundation of the machines which Kurzweil envisions will be linked functionally to human brains in order to form a new sort of mind, a kind of Leibnizian monad, essentially disconnected from the world of its fellows, talking to itself in its own increasingly idiosyncratic language.
But there is an issue, or rather a central fact, of our current situation which Kurzweil ignores. Language is not the invention or the possession of an individual. It cannot be patented as a technology; it cannot be controlled in its development (despite the Academie Francaise and high school English teachers); and it requires a rather large population who implicitly assert its usefulness and right to survive. Language is a collective endeavour. Although it is a technology, it is not a machine. And, fatally for Kurzweil’s thesis, language has already freed the species Homo sapiens from the constraints of strict biology eons ago. It did so as a collective endeavour not as a connection between an individual human being and a machine.
Kurzweil (along with many others) are myopically fascinated by electronic machines and their coding. This is understandable. Machines are visible to everyone. They can be touched and measured and improved. They are the emblem of progress in industrial (or post-industrial) society. Language on the other hand is amorphous. It is visible only in its use, and then just barely as language-users habitually substitute things for words. Machines work; when they don’t they can be repaired. Languages work as well, but when language goes wrong, no one knows quite what to do about it. Machines may be complicated and their coded routines complex; but they are predictable in their operation even if surprise is the prediction. Language is largely a mystery; no one knows if it’s hard-wired in our genetic makeup or acquired randomly.
It is important to keep in mind that both machines and the human brain are shaped by language beyond their coding or genetic character. Certainly some genetic mutation in the history of our species allowed the transition from mere signalling to complex language-based communication. But from that moment (or evolutionary epoch), language transcended every individual who used it. Language was a communal technology or it didn’t exist at all. And it was the technology that allowed everything from cave painting to the Library of Congress. Language, that non-biological miracle of human existence, influenced genetic development itself, initially by setting rules about who could mate with whom, more recently through gene therapy.
So if there is a ‘singularity’ in our immediate future, it is not one of biological transcendence. It may, however, be one of a complete submission to the dominance of that which we have arrogantly presumed is our instrument. What Kurzweil describes is indeed a new species, perhaps one with an unlimited intellectual potential and an indefinite but very long lifespan. But this is a species whose entire world is language. It will have no other experience except in communication with other specific language-users. The species will not have transcended language, it will have been absorbed into it. The new species will be one entirely constituted by language. His book is “... predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence—to access our own source code, if you will—and then revise and expand it.”
As Kurzweil says, the world formed by this new species with the altered source code will be peaceful; conflict will be about words, only in words. Greed will be unnecessary; words are infinitely abundant. Culture will flourish; words underpin not just technology but writing and arts of all kinds. The needs of our composite machine/brain existence - fuel, food, climate control - will be catered for. All the rest of our emotional, sexual, and aesthetic needs will be supplied by the language of our coding, which will pursue its own evolutionary path, presumably at an accelerating rate.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Kurzweil’s vision is superficially similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noösphere.’ (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) Teilhard first used the term in his Cosmogenesis of 1922. Very much like Kurzweil, de Chardin adopted an evolutionary approach in his theological philosophy: the ‘geosphere’ of dead matter evolves the biosphere of living things, which generates the noösphere of pure reason. It is human cognition, that is to say, language, which is the driving force for the transition from the biosphere. Increasing complexity and consciousness creates a ‘layer’ of thought encircling the earth.
The difference between Kurzweil and de Chardin is that the phenomenon of the noösphere for Teilhard is communal. It emerges and is sustained through the interaction of minds not through the isolated, algorithmic cogitation of new kinds of minds. And Teilhard’s minds are not absorbed into the language from which they are constructed. The key relationship among minds for Teilhard is love, essentially existence for the sake of the other. That is, not for the sake of language as implied in Kurzweil’s vision. Rather, Teilhard’s vision is of what he calls the Omega Point, a state of perfect mutual regard and care. This state is not one of subordination to language but to each other through language. The evolution of language in that direction does not result in a transcendent new species living next to the old Homo sapiens, but in an entire society which transcends itself. Kurzweil, it occurs to me, is at heart an aesthete rather than a technologist; and his aesthetic is highly questionable.
This is all a matter of practical metaphysics, our imagining of that which lies beyond language. For most of modernity, by which I mean since the industrial revolution, metaphysics has been a field derided as philosophical self-abuse. The importance of all of Kurzweil’s work is its demonstration that metaphysics is an important social science. I understand his use of advances in electronic technology as a focal point. Among other things, it sells. Nevertheless, the significance of his own analysis is not about the new composite mind, it is about the relationship among minds and how these relationships can develop a world which is imminently liveable not transcendentally detached. This is a moral not a technical issue. I don’t know the answer to the situation he describes. But I think Teilhard has some good alternative suggestions.
The subtitle contains the entire thesis: an expectation that machines will allow human beings to escape the limitations of their physical bodies. This contention has been called ‘daring,’ ‘optimistic,’ ‘arresting,’ ‘really out there,’ ‘outrageous,’ ‘terrifying,’ and above all just ‘big.’ And certainly the idea that a machine can be linked to a brain to form what is effectively a new species is certainly that: Big. But in terms of bigness (as Trump would say) it’s a sideshow and not the main event. It’s just that the main event doesn’t sell nearly as many tickets.
Of course human beings already have transcended much of their biology long ago. Kurzweil’s own analysis in this and his previous books demonstrates this fact repeatedly. Humanity in its various sub-species did so through the core technology which he recognises as the source of just about all advances in human well-being and dispersion around the planet: the technology of language. It is language which permits both complicated and large-scale cooperation among individuals, and which allows experience to be codified and stored over generations. It is language - in the form of self-learning code - which is the foundation of the machines which Kurzweil envisions will be linked functionally to human brains in order to form a new sort of mind, a kind of Leibnizian monad, essentially disconnected from the world of its fellows, talking to itself in its own increasingly idiosyncratic language.
But there is an issue, or rather a central fact, of our current situation which Kurzweil ignores. Language is not the invention or the possession of an individual. It cannot be patented as a technology; it cannot be controlled in its development (despite the Academie Francaise and high school English teachers); and it requires a rather large population who implicitly assert its usefulness and right to survive. Language is a collective endeavour. Although it is a technology, it is not a machine. And, fatally for Kurzweil’s thesis, language has already freed the species Homo sapiens from the constraints of strict biology eons ago. It did so as a collective endeavour not as a connection between an individual human being and a machine.
Kurzweil (along with many others) are myopically fascinated by electronic machines and their coding. This is understandable. Machines are visible to everyone. They can be touched and measured and improved. They are the emblem of progress in industrial (or post-industrial) society. Language on the other hand is amorphous. It is visible only in its use, and then just barely as language-users habitually substitute things for words. Machines work; when they don’t they can be repaired. Languages work as well, but when language goes wrong, no one knows quite what to do about it. Machines may be complicated and their coded routines complex; but they are predictable in their operation even if surprise is the prediction. Language is largely a mystery; no one knows if it’s hard-wired in our genetic makeup or acquired randomly.
It is important to keep in mind that both machines and the human brain are shaped by language beyond their coding or genetic character. Certainly some genetic mutation in the history of our species allowed the transition from mere signalling to complex language-based communication. But from that moment (or evolutionary epoch), language transcended every individual who used it. Language was a communal technology or it didn’t exist at all. And it was the technology that allowed everything from cave painting to the Library of Congress. Language, that non-biological miracle of human existence, influenced genetic development itself, initially by setting rules about who could mate with whom, more recently through gene therapy.
So if there is a ‘singularity’ in our immediate future, it is not one of biological transcendence. It may, however, be one of a complete submission to the dominance of that which we have arrogantly presumed is our instrument. What Kurzweil describes is indeed a new species, perhaps one with an unlimited intellectual potential and an indefinite but very long lifespan. But this is a species whose entire world is language. It will have no other experience except in communication with other specific language-users. The species will not have transcended language, it will have been absorbed into it. The new species will be one entirely constituted by language. His book is “... predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence—to access our own source code, if you will—and then revise and expand it.”
As Kurzweil says, the world formed by this new species with the altered source code will be peaceful; conflict will be about words, only in words. Greed will be unnecessary; words are infinitely abundant. Culture will flourish; words underpin not just technology but writing and arts of all kinds. The needs of our composite machine/brain existence - fuel, food, climate control - will be catered for. All the rest of our emotional, sexual, and aesthetic needs will be supplied by the language of our coding, which will pursue its own evolutionary path, presumably at an accelerating rate.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Kurzweil’s vision is superficially similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noösphere.’ (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) Teilhard first used the term in his Cosmogenesis of 1922. Very much like Kurzweil, de Chardin adopted an evolutionary approach in his theological philosophy: the ‘geosphere’ of dead matter evolves the biosphere of living things, which generates the noösphere of pure reason. It is human cognition, that is to say, language, which is the driving force for the transition from the biosphere. Increasing complexity and consciousness creates a ‘layer’ of thought encircling the earth.
The difference between Kurzweil and de Chardin is that the phenomenon of the noösphere for Teilhard is communal. It emerges and is sustained through the interaction of minds not through the isolated, algorithmic cogitation of new kinds of minds. And Teilhard’s minds are not absorbed into the language from which they are constructed. The key relationship among minds for Teilhard is love, essentially existence for the sake of the other. That is, not for the sake of language as implied in Kurzweil’s vision. Rather, Teilhard’s vision is of what he calls the Omega Point, a state of perfect mutual regard and care. This state is not one of subordination to language but to each other through language. The evolution of language in that direction does not result in a transcendent new species living next to the old Homo sapiens, but in an entire society which transcends itself. Kurzweil, it occurs to me, is at heart an aesthete rather than a technologist; and his aesthetic is highly questionable.
This is all a matter of practical metaphysics, our imagining of that which lies beyond language. For most of modernity, by which I mean since the industrial revolution, metaphysics has been a field derided as philosophical self-abuse. The importance of all of Kurzweil’s work is its demonstration that metaphysics is an important social science. I understand his use of advances in electronic technology as a focal point. Among other things, it sells. Nevertheless, the significance of his own analysis is not about the new composite mind, it is about the relationship among minds and how these relationships can develop a world which is imminently liveable not transcendentally detached. This is a moral not a technical issue. I don’t know the answer to the situation he describes. But I think Teilhard has some good alternative suggestions.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ January 17, 2020
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