The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (59 page)

The Transformation to Nonbiological Experience

A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow, . . . and when it becomes great enough, and looks back . . . what fellow feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? The later being would be everything the original was, but vastly more.

                   —V
ERNOR
V
INGE

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

                   —W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL

I reported on brain uploading in
chapter 4
. The straightforward brain-porting scenario involves scanning a human brain (most likely from within), capturing
all
of the salient details, and reinstantiating the brain’s state in a different—most likely much more powerful—computational substrate. This will be a feasible procedure and will happen most likely around the late 2030s. But this is not the primary way that I envision the transition to nonbiological experience taking place. It will happen, rather, in the same way that all other paradigm shifts happen: gradually (but at an accelerating pace).

As I pointed out above, the shift to nonbiological thinking will be a slippery slope, but one on which we have already started. We will continue to have human bodies, but they will become morphable projections of our intelligence. In other words, once we have incorporated MNT fabrication into ourselves, we will be able to create and re-create different bodies at will.

However achieved, will such fundamental shifts enable us to live forever? The answer depends on what we mean by “living” and “dying.” Consider what we do today with our personal computer files. When we change from an older computer to a newer one, we don’t throw all our files away. Rather, we copy
them and reinstall them on the new hardware. Although our software does not necessarily continue its existence forever, its longevity is in essence independent of and disconnected from the hardware that it runs on.

Currently, when our human hardware crashes, the software of our lives—our personal “mind file”—dies with it. However, this will not continue to be the case when we have the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of information represented in the pattern that we call our brains (together with the rest of our nervous system, endocrine system, and other structures that our mind file comprises).

At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.

By the middle of the twenty-first century humans will be able to expand their thinking without limit. This is a form of immortality, although it is important to point out that data and information do not necessarily last forever: the longevity of information depends on its relevance, utility, and accessibility. If you’ve ever tried to retrieve information from an obsolete form of data storage in an old, obscure format (for example, a reel of magnetic tape from a 1970 minicomputer), you understand the challenges in keeping software viable. However, if we are diligent in maintaining our mind file, making frequent backups, and porting to current formats and mediums, a form of immortality can be attained, at least for software-based humans. Later in this century it will seem remarkable to people that humans in an earlier era lived their lives without a backup of their most precious information: that contained in their brains and bodies.

Is this form of immortality the same concept as a physical human, as we know it today, living forever? In one sense it is, because today one’s self is not a constant collection of matter, either. Recent research shows that even our neurons, thought to be relatively long lasting, change all of their constituent subsystems, such as the tubules, in a matter of weeks. Only our pattern of matter and energy persists, and even that gradually changes. Similarly, it will be the pattern of a software human that persists and develops and slowly alters.

But is that person based on my mind file, who migrates across many computational substrates and who outlives any particular thinking medium, really
me? This consideration takes us back to the same questions of consciousness and identity that have been debated since Plato’s dialogues (which we examine in the next chapter). During the course of the twenty-first century these will not remain topics for polite philosophical debates but will have to be confronted as vital, practical, political, and legal issues.

A related question: Is death desirable? The “inevitability” of death is deeply ingrained in human thinking. If death seems unavoidable, we have little choice but to rationalize it as necessary, even ennobling. The technology of the Singularity will provide practical and accessible means for humans to evolve into something greater, so we will no longer need to rationalize death as a primary means of giving meaning to life.

The Longevity of Information

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget it!” “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

                   —L
EWIS
C
ARROLL
,
T
HROUGH THE
L
OOKING
-G
LASS

The only things you can be sure of, so the saying goes, are death and taxes—but don’t be too sure about death.

                   —J
OSEPH
S
TROUT, NEUROSCIENTIST

I do not know sire, but whatever they will turn out to be I am sure you will tax them.

                   —M
ICHAEL
F
ARADAY, RESPONDING TO A QUESTION FROM THE
B
RITISH
E
XCHEQUER AS TO WHAT PRACTICAL USE COULD BE MADE OF HIS DEMONSTRATION OF ELECTROMAGNETISM

Do not go gentle into that good night, . . .
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
.

                   —D
YLAN
T
HOMAS

The opportunity to translate our lives, our history, our thoughts, and our skills into information raises the issue of how long information lasts. I’ve always revered knowledge and gathered information of all kinds as a child, an inclination I shared with my father.

By way of background, my father was one of those people who liked to store all the images and sounds that documented his life. Upon his untimely death at the age of fifty-eight in 1970, I inherited his archives, which I treasure to this
day. I have my father’s 1938 doctoral dissertation from the University of Vienna, which contains his unique insights into the contributions of Brahms to our musical vocabulary. There are albums of neatly arranged newspaper clippings of his acclaimed musical concerts as a teenager in the hills of Austria. There are urgent letters to and from the American music patron who sponsored his flight from Hitler, just before Kristallnacht and related historical developments in Europe in the late 1930s made such escape impossible. These items are among dozens of aging boxes containing a myriad of remembrances, including photographs, musical recordings on vinyl and magnetic tape, personal letters, and even old bills.

I also inherited his penchant for preserving the records of one’s life, so along with my father’s boxes I have several hundred boxes of my own papers and files. My father’s productivity, assisted only by the technology of his manual typewriter and carbon paper, cannot compare with my own prolificacy, aided and abetted by computers and high-speed printers that can reproduce my thoughts in all kinds of permutations.

Tucked away in my own boxes are also various forms of digital media: punch cards, paper-tape reels, and digital magnetic tapes and disks of various sizes and formats. I often wonder just how accessible this information remains. Ironically the ease of approaching this information is inversely proportional to the level of advancement of the technology used to create it. Most straightforward are the paper documents, which although showing signs of age are eminently readable. Only slightly more challenging are the vinyl records and analog tape recordings. Although some basic equipment is required, it is not difficult to find or use. The punch cards are somewhat more challenging, but it’s still possible to find punch-card readers, and the formats are uncomplicated.

By far the most demanding information to retrieve is that contained on the digital disks and tapes. Consider the challenges involved. For each medium I have to figure out exactly which disk or tape drive was used, whether an IBM 1620 circa 1960 or a Data General Nova I circa 1973. Then, once I’ve assembled the requisite equipment, there are layers of software to deal with: the appropriate operating system, disk information drivers, and application programs. And, when I run into the inevitable scores of problems inherent in each layer of hardware and software, just whom am I going to call for assistance? It’s hard enough getting contemporary systems to work, let alone systems for which the help desks were disbanded decades ago (if they ever existed). Even at the Computer History Museum most of the devices on display stopped functioning many years ago.
⁴¹

Assuming I do prevail against all of these obstacles, I have to account for the
fact that the actual magnetic data on the disks has probably decayed and that the old computers would still generate mostly error messages.
⁴²
But is the information gone? The answer is, Not entirely. Even though the magnetic spots may no longer be readable by the original equipment, the faded regions could be enhanced by suitably sensitive equipment, via methods that are analogous to the image enhancement often applied to the pages of old books when they are scanned. The information is still there, although very difficult to get at. With enough devotion and historical research, one might actually retrieve it. If we had reason to believe that one of these disks contained secrets of enormous value, we would probably succeed in recovering the information.

But mere nostalgia is unlikely to be sufficient to motivate anyone to undertake this formidable task. I will say that because I did largely anticipate this dilemma, I did make paper printouts of most of these old files. But keeping all our information on paper is not the answer, as hard-copy archives present their own set of problems. Although I can readily read even a century-old paper manuscript if I’m holding it in my hand, finding a desired document from among thousands of only modestly organized file folders can be a frustrating and time-consuming task. It can take an entire afternoon to locate the right folder, not to mention the risk of straining one’s back from moving dozens of heavy file boxes. Using microfilm or microfiche may alleviate some of the difficulty, but the matter of locating the right document remains.

I have dreamed of taking these hundreds of thousands of records and scanning them into a massive personal database, which would allow me to utilize powerful contemporary search-and-retrieve methods on them. I even have a name for this venture—DAISI (Document and Image Storage Invention)—and have been accumulating ideas for it for many years. Computer pioneer Gordon Bell (former chief engineer of Digital Equipment Corporation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and the Long Now Foundation are also working on systems to address this challenge.
⁴³

DAISI will involve the rather daunting task of scanning and patiently cataloging all these documents. But the real challenge to my dream of DAISI is surprisingly deep: how can I possibly select appropriate hardware and software layers that will give me the assurance that my archives will be viable and accessible decades from now?

Of course my own archival needs are only a microcosm of the exponentially expanding knowledge base that human civilization is accumulating. It is this shared specieswide knowledge base that distinguishes us from other animals. Other animals communicate, but they don’t accumulate an evolving and growing base of knowledge to pass down to the next generation. Since we are writing our precious heritage in what medical informatics expert Bryan Bergeron
calls “disappearing ink,” our civilization’s legacy would appear to be at great risk.
⁴⁴
The danger appears to be growing exponentially along with the growth of our knowledge bases. The problem is further exacerbated by the accelerating speed with which we adopt new standards in the many layers of hardware and software we employ to store information.

There is another valuable repository of information stored in our brains. Our memories and skills, although they may appear to be fleeting, do represent information, coded in vast patterns of neurotransmitter concentrations, interneuronal connections, and other relevant neural details. This information is the most precious of all, which is one reason death is so tragic. As we have discussed, we will ultimately be able to access, permanently archive, as well as understand the thousands of trillions of bytes of information we have tucked away in each of our brains.