The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI - Hardcover

Kurzweil, Ray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399562761 ISBN 13: 9780399562761

Verlag: Viking, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come

Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and its vision of an exponential future have spawned a worldwide movement. Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have largely come true, with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public.

In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity—assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining the exponential growth of technology—that, in the near future, will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by connecting our brains to the cloud; how exponential technologies are propelling innovation forward in all industries and improving all aspects of our well-being such as declining poverty and violence; and the growth of renewable energy and 3-D printing. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact employment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which aims to virtually revive deceased individuals through a combination of their data and DNA.

The culmination of six decades of research on artificial intelligence, The Singularity Is Nearer is Ray Kurzweil’s crowning contribution to the story of this science and the revolution that is to come.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years – longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a GRAMMY® Award for outstanding achievement in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has written five best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

In my 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, I set forth my theory that convergent, exponential technological trends are leading to a transi­tion that will be utterly transformative for humanity. There are several key areas of change that are continuing to accelerate simultaneously: computing power is becoming cheaper, human biology is becoming better understood, and engineering is becoming possible at far smaller scales. As artificial intelligence grows in ability and information be­comes more accessible, we are integrating these capabilities ever more closely with our natural biological intelligence. Eventually nanotech­nology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the compu­tational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelli­gence and consciousness so profoundly that it’s difficult to comprehend. This event is what I mean by the Singularity.

The term “singularity” is borrowed from mathematics (where it refers to an undefined point in a function, like when dividing by zero) and physics (where it refers to the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole, where the normal laws of physics break down). But it is important to remember that I use the term as a metaphor. My predic­tion of the technological Singularity does not suggest that rates of change will actually become infinite, as exponential growth does not imply infinity, nor does a physical singularity. A black hole has gravity strong enough to trap even light itself, but there is no means in quantum mechanics to account for a truly infinite amount of mass. Rather, I use the singularity metaphor because it captures our inability to compre­hend such a radical shift with our current level of intelligence. But as the transition happens, we will enhance our cognition quickly enough to adapt.

As I detailed in The Singularity Is Near, long-term trends suggest that the Singularity will happen around 2045. At the time that book was published, that date lay forty years—two full generations—in the future. At that distance I could make predictions about the broad forces that would bring about this transformation, but for most read­ers the subject was still relatively far removed from daily reality in 2005. And many critics argued then that my timeline was overopti­mistic, or even that the Singularity was impossible.

Since then, though, something remarkable has happened. Progress has continued to accelerate in defiance of the doubters. Social media and smartphones have gone from virtually nonexistent to all-day com­panions that now connect a majority of the world’s population. Algo­rithmic innovations and the emergence of big data have allowed AI to achieve startling breakthroughs sooner than even experts expected—from mastering games like Jeopardy! and Go to driving automobiles, writing essays, passing bar exams, and diagnosing cancer. Now, power­ful and flexible large language models like GPT‑4 and Gemini can trans­late natural-language instructions into computer code—dramatically reducing the barrier between humans and machines. By the time you read this, tens of millions of people likely will have experienced these capabilities firsthand. Meanwhile, the cost to sequence a human’s ge­nome has fallen by about 99.997 percent, and neural networks have begun unlocking major medical discoveries by simulating biology dig­itally. We’re even gaining the ability to finally connect computers to brains directly.

Underlying all these developments is what I call the law of acceler­ating returns: information technologies like computing get exponen­tially cheaper because each advance makes it easier to design the next stage of their own evolution. As a result, as I write this, one dollar buys about 11,200 times as much computing power, adjusting for inflation, as it did when The Singularity Is Near hit shelves.

The following graph, which I’ll discuss in depth later in the book, summarizes the most important trend powering our technological civi­lization: the long-term exponential growth (shown as a roughly straight line on this logarithmic scale) in the amount of computing power a con­stant dollar can purchase. Moore’s law famously observes that transis­tors have been steadily shrinking, allowing computers to get ever more powerful—but that is just one manifestation of the law of accelerating returns, which already held true long before transistors were invented and can be expected to continue even after transistors reach their phys­ical limits and are succeeded by new technologies. This trend has de­fined the modern world, and almost all the coming breakthroughs discussed in this book will be enabled by it directly or indirectly.

So we have kept on schedule for the Singularity. The urgency of this book comes from the nature of exponential change itself. Trends that were barely noticeable at the start of this century are now actively impacting billions of lives. In the early 2020s we entered the sharply steepening part of the exponential curve, and the pace of innovation is affecting society like never before. For perspective, the moment you’re reading this is probably closer to the creation of the first superhuman AI than to the release of my last book, 2012’s How to Create a Mind. And you’re probably closer to the Singularity than to the release of my 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Or, measured in terms of human life, babies born today will be just graduating college when the Singularity happens. This is, on a very personal level, a different kind of “near” than it was in 2005.

That is why I’ve written this book now. Humanity’s millennia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint. In the introduction to The Singularity Is Near, I wrote that we were then “in the early stages of this transition.” Now we are entering its culmination. That book was about glimpsing a distant horizon—this one is about the last miles along the path to reach it.

Luckily, we can now see this path much more clearly. Although many technological challenges remain before we can achieve the Sin­gularity, its key precursors are rapidly moving from the realm of theo­retical science to active research and development. During the coming decade, people will interact with AI that can seem convincingly human, and simple brain–computer interfaces will impact daily life much like smartphones do today. A digital revolution in biotech will cure diseases and meaningfully extend people’s healthy lives. At the same time, though, many workers will feel the sting of economic disruption, and all of us will face risks from accidental or deliberate misuse of these new capabilities. During the 2030s, self-improving AI and maturing nano­technology will unite humans and our machine creations as never before—heightening both the promise and the peril even further. If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social, and political challenges posed by these advances, by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better. Yet if we fail, our very survival is in question. And so this book is about our final approach to the Singularity—the opportunities and dangers we must confront together over the last generation of the world as we knew it.

To begin, we’ll explore how the Singularity will actually happen, and put this in the context of our species’ long quest to reinvent our own intelligence. Creating sentience with technology raises important...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399562761
• ISBN 13: 9780399562761
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: VIKING; https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Zeitfracht Medien GmbH; info-medien@zeitfracht.de; ; Ferdinand-Jühlke-Straße 7; Erfurt; 99095; Deutschland