In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity--assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential. 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 expanding biological capacity with nonbiological intelligence in the cloud; how life is improving with declines in areas such as poverty and violence; and the growth of technologies such as renewable energy and 3-D printing, which can be applied to everything from clothes to building materials to growing human organs. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact unemployment and the safety of autonomous cars, and After Life technology, which will reanimate people who have passed away through a combination of data and DNA.

The Singularity is Nearer Book Review

It's tricky to review The Singularity is Nearer impartially, as I suspect it very much depends on whether you have already read The Singularity is Near. If not, there will be a lot of fascinating information showing how technology has been growing exponentially for thousands of years (long, long before Moore's Law was ever dreamt up) and how it impacts many aspects of society, and so I'd highly recommend it.

However if you have read the original, and generally keep up with advances in AI and medical technology, there may not be much new. And that makes sense as The Singularity is Near looked forward to the singularity - beyond which it is impossible to contemplate what will happen once humanity has merged with a superintelligence. So, 19 years on, Ray Kurzweil can't really predict another 19 years into the future, beyond the singularity, so has to make do with updating forecasts and putting more detail into recent progress and near-future prospects.

Having said that, I'll still make the following points. There is a big focus on consciousness and the brain which acts as a long warm-up to the concept of mind uploading and what will be required to achieve that. Kurzweil also spends some time on philosophical questions, not just on the prospect of a benevolent or malevolent superintelligence, but also on the questions of existence, such as the chances of a life-friendly universe existing.

Beyond the technology, but all affected by it, he goes into a lot of detail about how life has improved overtime (for example, access to water and education, and the reduction in violence), but this may be of less interest to those focussed on the future.

A whole chapter (there are only eight) is on health and well-being, so as expected, it is a major focus of the book. If longevity is your obsession, then this is the chapter for you - explaining how AI and nanotechnology will improve our understanding of, and generate cures for, ageing. As always with Ray Kurzweil, these aren't just wild ideas, but forecasts based on how much computing power we would need to accomplish each feat. I half take back what I said at the beginning, even if you've already read The Singularity is Near, it's probably worth buying the book just for this chapter to better understand what is coming in the next few years.

Highlights

Here are 101 key points from The Singularity is Nearer (mainly focussed on health, it would have been a lot more otherwise!):

• With brains, we added roughly one cubic inch of brain matter every 100,000 years, whereas with digital computation we are doubling price-performance about every sixteen months.
  
• My prediction that we’ll create an AI that could pass the Turing test this by 2029 has been consistent since my 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines,
• If the training data is labelled correctly only 60 percent of the time, a neural net can still learn its lessons with an accuracy well over 90 percent.
• A given action in the cerebellum— like a frog’s ability to precisely catch a fly with its tongue— persists in a species until a population with an improved action outcompetes it via natural selection.
• the neocortex was capable of a new type of thinking: it could invent new behaviours in days or even hours.
• With a frontal cortex we went beyond just being an advanced animal and became a philosophical one.
• Moore’s law is just one instance of the more fundamental force I call the law of accelerating returns (LOAR)
• AlphaZero defeated all human challengers at chess but also defeated all other chess-playing machines, and did so after only four hours of training.
• It is language that enables us to connect vastly disparate domains of cognition and allows high-level symbolic transfer of knowledge.
• DeepMind unveiled Gato— a single neural network that can tackle tasks ranging from playing video games or chatting via text to captioning images or controlling a robot arm.
• Humour seems quintessentially human because it draws on so many different elements.
• GPT-4's most important advance was its ability to reason organically about hypothetical situations by understanding the relationships between objects and actions— a capability known as world modelling.
• In 1993, I had a debate with my own mentor Marvin Minsky. I argued that we needed about 10^14 calculations per second to begin to emulate human intelligence.
• Cutting humans out of the loop of AI development will unlock stunning rates of progress.
• Frontier, the world’s top supercomputer as of 2023, can perform on the order of 10^18 operations per second.
• Computers will be able to simulate human brains in all the ways we might care about within the next two decades or so.
• DARPA is working on a long-term project called Neural Engineering System Design, which aims to create an interface that can connect to one million neurons for recording and can stimulate 100,000 neurons.
• We might eventually have art that puts a character’s raw, disorganized, nonverbal thoughts— in all their inexpressible beauty and complexity— directly into our brains.
• If there’s a plausible chance that an entity you mistreat might be conscious, the safest moral choice is to assume that it is.
• Our understanding of exactly how neural processes “bubble up” into the decisions we consciously perceive remains quite limited.
• Copying our mind files to a remote backup storage system will be a powerful protection against any accident or disease that might damage our brain.
• One type of AI avatar that we can create, called a “replicant” (to borrow a term from Blade Runner), will have the appearance. behaviour, memories, and skills of a person who has passed away, living on in a phenomenon I call After Life.
• By 2020, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot could run, jump, and tumble across an obstacle course with greater agility than most humans.
• In the early 2040s, nanobots will be able to go into a living person’s brain and make a copy of all the data that forms the memories and personality of the original person.
• Most aspects of life will be getting exponentially better in the coming decades.
• Most of the good things happening in the world are very gradual processes, so it is very difficult for these stories to rise to the level of urgency that would make them, for example, a front-page story.
• Economic cycles go up and down; wealth can be gained and lost. But technological change is essentially permanent.
• Today the worldwide literacy rate is nearly 87 percent, and developed countries often boast figures above 99 percent.
• Today more than 90 percent of the earth’s population has electricity.
• The first transformative communication technology enabled by electricity was radio.
• By 1997 TV use had peaked, at 98.4 percent of households.
• By 2017– 2021 about 93.1 percent of US households had computers.
• As of 2022 around two-thirds of the world’s population has at least one smartphone.
• We have nearly tripled life expectancy in the past thousand years, and doubled it in the past two centuries.
• By the end of this decade we will be able to start the process of augmenting and ultimately replacing slow, underpowered human trials with digital simulations.
• Costs have plunged from about $ 50 million per genome in 2003 to as low as $ 399 in early 2023.
• In the 2030s we will reach the third bridge of radical life extension: medical nanorobots with the ability to intelligently conduct cellular-level maintenance and repair throughout our bodies.
• From 1990 to 2013 there was an astonishing 95 percent drop in East Asia’s extreme poverty.
• Increasing material prosperity has a mutually reinforcing relationship with declining violence.
• Exposure to lead in car exhaust and household paints adversely affected children’s cognitive development.
• Pinker estimates that violent deaths overall have fallen by a factor of somewhere around five hundred since prehistoric times.
• Over the past decade we have been using supercomputing to discover new materials for both solar cells and energy storage—
• Information technology has a long track record of making societies more democratic.
• When Gutenberg introduced the printing press, it soon became vastly cheaper to share ideas.
• Influential as Moore's law has been, it is just one exponential computing paradigm among several— so far including electromechanical relays, vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits.
• During the late 2020s we will start to be able to print out clothing and other common goods with 3D printers, ultimately for pennies per pound.
• Renewables could theoretically achieve complete coverage of world electricity needs by 2041.
• We are starting to make exponential gains in the price efficiency and quantity of energy storage as well.
• In 1990, about 24 percent of the world’s people did not have regular access to relatively safe sources of drinking water.
• In general, decentralized technologies will define the 2020s and beyond in many areas.
• Corn production in the United States uses land more than seven times as efficiently as a century and a half ago.
• As vertical agriculture becomes less expensive and more widespread, it will lead to great reductions in pollution and emissions.
• 3D printing of both building modules and the smaller objects that go into a building will dramatically lower the construction costs of homes and offices.
• Biological life is suboptimal because evolution is a collection of random processes optimized by natural selection.
• By the end of the 2020s biological simulators will be sufficiently advanced to generate key safety and efficacy data in hours rather than the years that clinical trials typically require.
• Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have been used for the regeneration of tracheas, craniofacial bones, retinal cells, peripheral nerves, and cutaneous tissue, as well as tissues from major organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys.
• Nanorobots not only will be programmed to destroy all types of pathogens but will be able to treat metabolic diseases.
• By around 2030, the most diligent and informed people will reach “longevity escape velocity”— a tipping point at which we can add more than a year to our remaining life expectancy for each calendar year that passes.
• Technologies start out being expensive with limited function. By the time they are perfected, they are affordable to almost everyone.
• Waymo’s self-driving vehicles have travelled well over 20 million fully autonomous mile and has now honed its algorithms with more than 20 billion miles of simulated driving.
• As truck drivers lose their jobs to automation, there will be less need for people to do truckers’ payroll and for retail workers in roadside convenience stores and motels.
• More than half of all occupations had a greater than 50 percent likelihood of being automatable.
• In the United States, the annual number of hours worked by each worker has fallen from just over 2,900 in 1870 to around 1,765 as of 2019.
• As food prices become less dependent on human labour and scarce natural resources, poverty will not prevent people from accessing a plentiful supply of healthy and nutritious fresh food.
• From 1992 to 2012, as computerization transformed factory production, the hourly output of the average manufacturing worker doubled.
• Instead of reducing or increasing the amount of skill required to perform a certain task, artificial intelligence can often take over the task entirely.
• Augmented reality will be projected constantly onto our retinas from our glasses and contact lenses. It will also resonate in our ears and ultimately harness our other senses as well.
• In 2018 I predicted that we would effectively have universal basic income (UBI) or its equivalent by the early 2030s in developed countries.
• As we enter an era of abundance, our main struggle will be for purpose and meaning.
• Death takes from us all the things that in my view give life meaning.
• One of the great challenges of adapting to technological changes is that they tend to bring diffuse benefits to a large population, but concentrated harms to a small group.
• It has been the purpose of technology since stone tools to extend our reach physically and intellectually.
• Doctors still do many things that are known to work without fully understanding how they work.
• In 2023 the first drug designed end-to-end by AI entered phase II clinical trials to treat a rare lung disease.
• AI can learn from more data than a human doctor ever could.
• Thanks to simulation, candidate COVID-19 vaccines can be designed in less than a minute and digitally validated within one hour.
• AI will scale up to modelling ever larger systems in simulation— from proteins to protein complexes, organelles, cells, tissues, and whole organs.
• The FDA is now incorporating simulation results in its regulatory approval process.
• We will be making meaningful progress on to digitize the entire human body at essentially molecular resolution by the end of the 2020s.
• AI-powered systems will be able to suggest treatment before someone even knows they’re sick.
• the AI powering robotic surgeons will be able to learn from the experience of any surgery that system performs, anywhere in the world.
• The future is clear: minds based only on the organic substrates of biological brains can’t hope to keep up with minds augmented by nonbiological precision nanoengineering.
• Theoretically, then, a perfectly efficient one-litre nanologic computer would provide the equivalent of about 10,000 times 10 billion human beings (or about 100 trillion human beings) in terms of brain capability.
• We are on track for nanotechnology concepts using atom-by-atom placement to be implemented sometime in the 2030s.
• Drexler’s 2013 estimates for the total cost for a molecular manufacturing process fall around $ 2 per kilogram, no matter what’s being made.
• At around age 110, the bodies of the oldest people start breaking down in ways that are qualitatively different from the aging of younger senior citizens.
• We need the ability to repair damage from aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues.
• Medical nanorobots will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies.
• Eventually, using nanobots for body maintenance and optimization should prevent major diseases from even arising.
• Nanobots built from diamondoid gears and rotors would be thousands of times faster and stronger than biological materials, and designed from scratch to perform optimally.
• The final years until the Singularity will also heighten peril for our species.
• As AI itself reaches and surpasses human capabilities, it will need to be carefully aligned with beneficial purposes and specifically designed to avert accidents and thwart misuse.
• Smarter command-and-control systems can significantly reduce the risk of sensor malfunctions causing inadvertent use of nuclear weapons.
• No matter how destructive an individual nanobot might be, it has to be able to self-replicate to create a truly global catastrophe.
• The main immune system defence against grey goo would be “blue goo”— nanobots that would neutralize their gray counterparts.
• If AI is smarter than its human creators, it could potentially find a way around any precautionary measures that have been put in place.
• There are three broad categories of peril from superintelligent AI: misuse, outer misalignment, and inner misalignment.
• As of 2023, all major military powers have declined to endorse the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
• “Fundamentalist humanism”: opposition to any change in the nature of what it means to be human.
• Even if we lived hundreds of years, we would not exhaust all the knowledge there is to gain, and all the culture there is to consume.
• While AI is creating new technical threats, it will also radically enhance our ability to deal with those threats.