The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (36 page)
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Authors: Ray Kurzweil
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Fringe Science, #Retail, #Technology, #Amazon.com
Perhaps the most important question will be whether or not an uploaded human brain is really you. Even if the upload passes a personalized Turing test and is deemed indistinguishable from you, one could still reasonably ask whether the upload is the same person or a new person. After all, the original person may still exist. I’ll defer these essential questions until
chapter 7
.
In my view the most important element in uploading will be our gradual transfer of our intelligence, personality, and skills to the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. We already have a variety of neural implants. In the 2020s we will use nanobots to begin augmenting our brains with nonbiological intelligence, starting with the “routine” functions of sensory processing and memory, moving on to skill formation, pattern recognition, and logical analysis. By the 2030s the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and
by the 2040s, as I pointed out in
chapter 3
, the nonbiological portion will be billions of times more capable. Although we are likely to retain the biological portion for a period of time, it will become of increasingly little consequence. So we will have effectively uploaded ourselves, albeit gradually, never quite noticing the transfer. There will be no “old Ray” and “new Ray,” just an increasingly capable Ray. Although I believe that uploading as in the sudden scan-and-transfer scenario discussed in this section will be a feature of our future world, it is this gradual but inexorable progression to vastly superior nonbiological thinking that will profoundly transform human civilization.
S
IGMUND
F
REUD:
When you talk about reverse engineering the human brain, just whose brain are you talking about? A man’s brain? A woman’s? A child’s? The brain of a genius? A retarded individual? An “idiot savant”? A gifted artist? A serial murderer?
R
AY:
Ultimately, we’re talking about all of the above. There are basic principles of operation that we need to understand about how human intelligence and its varied constituent skills work. Given the human brain’s plasticity, our thoughts literally create our brains through the growth of new spines, synapses, dendrites, and even neurons. As a result, Einstein’s parietal lobes—the region associated with visual imagery and mathematical thinking—became greatly enlarged
.
121
However, there is only so much room in our skulls, so although Einstein played music he was not a world-class musician. Picasso did not write great poetry, and so on. As we re-create the human brain, we will not be limited in our ability to develop each skill. We will not have to compromise one area to enhance another
.
We can also gain insight into our differences and an understanding of human dysfunction. What went wrong with the serial murderer? It must, after all, have something to do with his brain. This type of disastrous behavior is clearly not the result of indigestion
.
M
OLLY
2004:
You know, I doubt it’s just the brains we’re born with that account for our differences. What about our struggles through life, and all this stuff I’m trying to learn?
R
AY:
Yes, well, that’s part of the paradigm, too, isn’t it? We have brains that can learn, starting from when we learn to walk and talk to when we study college chemistry
.
M
ARVIN
M
INSKY:
It’s true that educating our AIs will be an important part of the process, but we can automate a lot of that and greatly speed it up. Also, keep in mind that when one AI learns something, it can quickly share that knowledge with many other AIs
.
R
AY:
They’ll have access to all of our exponentially growing knowledge on the Web, which will include habitable, full-immersion virtual-reality environments where they can interact with one another and with biological humans who are projecting themselves into these environments
.
S
IGMUND:
These AIs don’t have bodies yet. As we have both pointed out, human emotion and much of our thinking are directed at our bodies and to meeting their sensual and sexual needs
.
R
AY:
Who says they won’t have bodies? As I will discuss in the human body version 2.0 section in
chapter 6
, we’ll have the means of creating nonbiological yet humanlike bodies, as well as virtual bodies in virtual reality
.
S
IGMUND:
But a virtual body is not a real body
.
R
AY:
The word “virtual” is somewhat unfortunate. It implies “not real,” but the reality will be that a virtual body is just as real as a physical body in all the ways that matter. Consider that the telephone is auditory virtual reality. No one feels that his voice in this virtual-reality environment is not a “real” voice. With my physical body today, I don’t directly experience someone’s touch on my arm. My brain receives processed signals initiated by nerve endings in my arm, which wind their way through the spinal cord, through the brain stem, and up to the insula regions. If my brain—or an AI’s brain—receives comparable signals of someone’s virtual touch on a virtual arm, there’s no discernible difference
.
M
ARVIN:
Keep in mind that not all AIs will need human bodies
.
R
AY:
Indeed. As humans, despite some plasticity, both our bodies and brains have a relatively fixed architecture
.
M
OLLY
2004:
Yes, it’s called being human, something you seem to have a problem with
.
R
AY:
Actually, I often do have a problem with all the limitations and maintenance that my version 1.0 body requires, not to mention all the limitations of my brain. But I do appreciate the joys of the human body. My point is that AIs can and will have the equivalent of human bodies in both real and virtual-reality environments. As Marvin points out, however, they will not be limited just to this
.
M
OLLY
2104:
It’s not just AIs that will be liberated from the limitations of version 1.0 bodies. Humans of biological origin will have the same freedom in both real and virtual reality
.
G
EORGE
2048:
Keep in mind, there won’t be a clear distinction between AIs and humans
.
M
OLLY
2104:
Yes, except for the MOSHs (Mostly Original Substrate Humans) of course
.
CHAPTER FIVE
GNR
Three Overlapping Revolutions
There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. . . .But what would happen if technology continued to evolve so much more rapidly than the animal and vegetable kingdoms? Would it displace us in the supremacy of earth? Just as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race.... We are daily giving [machines] greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.
—S
AMUEL
B
UTLER
, 1863 (
FOUR YEARS AFTER PUBLICATION OF
D
ARWIN’S
T
HE
O
RIGIN OF
S
PECIES
)
Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate.
—S
AMUEL
B
UTLER
, 1863
LETTER
, “D
ARWIN
A
MONG THE
M
ACHINES
”
1
T
he first half of the twenty-first century will be characterized by three overlapping revolutions—in Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics. These will usher in what I referred to earlier as Epoch Five, the beginning of the Singularity. We are in the early stages of the “G” revolution today. By understanding the information processes underlying life, we are starting to learn to reprogram our biology to achieve the virtual elimination of disease, dramatic expansion of human potential, and radical life extension. Hans Moravec points out, however, that no matter how successfully we fine-tune our DNA-based biology, humans will remain “second-class robots,” meaning that
biology will never be able to match what we will be able to engineer once we fully understand biology’s principles of operation.
2
The “N” revolution will enable us to redesign and rebuild—molecule by molecule—our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact, going far beyond the limitations of biology. The most powerful impending revolution is “R”: human-level robots with their intelligence derived from our own but redesigned to far exceed human capabilities. R represents the most significant transformation, because intelligence is the most powerful “force” in the universe. Intelligence, if sufficiently advanced, is, well, smart enough to anticipate and overcome any obstacles that stand in its path.
While each revolution will solve the problems from earlier transformations, it will also introduce new perils. G will overcome the age-old difficulties of disease and aging but establish the potential for new bioengineered viral threats. Once N is fully developed we will be able to apply it to protect ourselves from all biological hazards, but it will create the possibility of its own self-replicating dangers, which will be far more powerful than anything biological. We can protect ourselves from these hazards with fully developed R, but what will protect us from pathological intelligence that exceeds our own? I do have a strategy for dealing with these issues, which I discuss at the end of
chapter 8
. In this chapter, however, we will examine how the Singularity will unfold through these three overlapping revolutions: G, N, and R.
Genetics: The Intersection of Information and Biology
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
—J
AMES
W
ATSON AND
F
RANCIS
C
RICK
3
After three billion years of evolution, we have before us the instruction set that carries each of us from the one-cell egg through adulthood to the grave.
—D
R
. R
OBERT
W
ATERSTON
, I
NTERNATIONAL
H
UMAN
G
ENOME
S
EQUENCING
C
ONSORTIUM
4
Underlying all of the wonders of life and misery of disease are information processes, essentially software programs, that are surprisingly compact. The entire human genome is a sequential binary code containing only about eight hundred million bytes of information. As I mentioned earlier, when its massive redundancies are removed using conventional compression techniques, we are left with only thirty to one hundred million bytes, equivalent to the size of an
average contemporary software program.
5
This code is supported by a set of biochemical machines that translate these linear (one-dimensional) sequences of DNA “letters” into strings of simple building blocks called amino acids, which are in turn folded into three-dimensional proteins, which make up all living creatures from bacteria to humans. (Viruses occupy a niche in between living and nonliving matter but are also composed of fragments of DNA or RNA.) This machinery is essentially a self-replicating nanoscale replicator that builds the elaborate hierarchy of structures and increasingly complex systems that a living creature comprises.
Life’s Computer
In the very early stages of evolution information was encoded in the structure of increasingly complex organic molecules based on carbon. After billions of years biology evolved its own computer for storing and manipulating digital data based on the DNA molecule. The chemical structure of the DNA molecule was first described by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick in 1953 as a double helix consisting of a pair of strands of polynucleotides with information encoded at each position by the choice of nucleotides.
6
We finished transcribing the genetic code at the beginning of this century. We are now beginning to understand the detailed chemistry of the communication and control processes by which DNA commands reproduction through such other complex molecules and cellular structures as messenger RNA (mRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA), and ribosomes.
At the level of information storage the mechanism is surprisingly simple. Supported by a twisting sugar-phosphate backbone, the DNA molecule contains up to several million rungs, each of which is coded with one letter drawn from a four-letter alphabet; each rung is thus coding two bits of data in a one-dimensional digital code. The alphabet consists of the four base pairs: adenine-thymine, thymine-adenine, cytosine-guanine, and guanine-cytosine. The DNA strings in a single cell would measure up to six feet in length if stretched out, but an elaborate packing method coils them to fit into a cell only 1/2500 of an inch across.
Special enzymes can copy the information on each rung by splitting each base pair and assembling two identical DNA molecules by rematching the broken base pairs. Other enzymes actually check the validity of the copy by checking the integrity of the base-pair matching. With these copying and validation steps, this chemical data-processing system makes only about one error in ten billion base-pair replications.
7
Further redundancy and error-correction codes are built into the digital data itself, so
meaningful mutations resulting from base-pair replication errors are rare. Most of the errors resulting from the one-in-ten-billion error rate will result in the equivalent of a “parity” error, which can be detected and corrected by other levels of the system, including matching against the corresponding chromosome, which can prevent the incorrect bit from causing any significant damage.
8
Recent research has shown that the genetic mechanism detects such errors in transcription of the male Y chromosome by matching each Y chromosome gene against a copy on the same chromosome.
9
Once in a long while a transcription error will result in a beneficial change that evolution will come to favor.
In a process technically called translation, another series of chemicals put this elaborate digital program into action by building proteins. It is the protein chains that give each cell its structure, behavior, and intelligence. Special enzymes unwind a region of DNA for building a particular protein. A strand of mRNA is created by copying the exposed sequence of bases. The mRNA essentially has a copy of a portion of the DNA letter sequence. The mRNA travels out of the nucleus and into the cell body. The mRNA codes are then read by a ribosome molecule, which represents the central molecular player in the drama of biological reproduction. One portion of the ribosome acts like a tape-recorder head, “reading” the sequence of data encoded in the mRNA base sequence. The “letters” (bases) are grouped into words of three letters each called codons, with one codon for each of twenty possible amino acids, the basic building blocks of protein. A ribosome reads the codons from the mRNA and then, using tRNA, assembles a protein chain one amino acid at a time.
The notable final step in this process is the folding of the one-dimensional chain of amino acid “beads” into a three-dimensional protein. Simulating this process has not yet been feasible because of the enormous complexity of the interacting forces from all the atoms involved. Supercomputers scheduled to come online around the time of the publication of this book (2005) are expected to have the computational capacity to simulate protein folding, as well as the interaction of one three-dimensional protein with another.
Protein folding, along with cell division, is one of nature’s remarkable and intricate dances in the creation and re-creation of life. Specialized “chaperone” molecules protect and guide the amino-acid strands as they assume their precise three-dimensional protein configurations. As many as one third of formed protein molecules are folded improperly. These disfigured proteins must immediately be destroyed or they will rapidly accumulate, disrupting cellular functions on many levels.
Under normal circumstances, as soon as a misfolded protein is formed, it is tagged by a carrier molecule, ubiquitin, and escorted to a specialized proteosome, where it is broken back down into its component amino acids for recycling into new (correctly folded) proteins. As cells age, however, they produce less of the energy needed for optimal function of this mechanism. Accumulations of these misformed proteins aggregate into particles called protofibrils, which are thought to underlie disease processes leading to Alzheimer’s disease and other afflictions.
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The ability to simulate the three-dimensional waltz of atomic-level interactions will greatly accelerate our knowledge of how DNA sequences control life and disease. We will then be in a position to rapidly simulate drugs that intervene in any of the steps in this process, thereby hastening drug development and the creation of highly targeted drugs that minimize unwanted side effects.
It is the job of the assembled proteins to carry out the functions of the cell, and by extension the organism. A molecule of hemoglobin, for example, which has the job of carrying oxygen from the lungs to body tissues, is created five hundred trillion times each second in the human body. With more than five hundred amino acids in each molecule of hemoglobin, that comes to 1.5 × 10
19
(fifteen billion billion) “read” operations every minute by the ribosomes just for the manufacture of hemoglobin.
In some ways the biochemical mechanism of life is remarkably complex and intricate. In other ways it is remarkably simple. Only four base pairs provide the digital storage for all of the complexity of all human life and all other life as we know it. The ribosomes build protein chains by
grouping together triplets of base pairs to select sequences from only twenty amino acids. The amino acids themselves are relatively simple, consisting of a carbon atom with its four bonds linked to one hydrogen atom, one amino (–NH
2
) group, one carboxylic acid (–COOH) group, and one organic group that is different for each amino acid. The organic group for alanine, for example, has only four atoms (CH
3
–) for a total of thirteen atoms. One of the more complex amino acids, arginine (which plays a vital role in the health of the endothelial cells in our arteries) has only seventeen atoms in its organic group for a total of twenty-six atoms. These twenty simple molecular fragments are the building blocks of all life.
The protein chains then control everything else: the structure of bone cells, the ability of muscle cells to flex and act in concert with other muscle cells, all of the complex biochemical interactions that take place in the bloodstream, and, of course, the structure and functioning of the brain.
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