Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity: visionary genius or pseudoscientific crank?

by Massimo Pigliucci

Everyone keeps telling me that Ray Kurzweil is a genius. Kurweil has certainly racked up a number of impressive accomplishments. Kurzweil Computer Products produced the first optical character recognition system (developed by designer-engineer Richard Brown) in the mid-‘70s, and another of his companies, Kurzweil Music Systems, put out a music synthesizer in 1984. A few years later Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (the guy really likes to see his name in print) designed a computerized speech recognition system further developed by Kurzweil Educational Systems (see what I mean?) for assistance to the disabled. Other ventures include Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet, Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies, and Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader. In short, the man has a good sense of business and self-promotion — and there is nothing wrong with either (within limits).

However, the reason I’m writing about him is because of his more recent, and far more widely publicized, role as a futurist, and in particular as a major mover behind the Singularitarian movement, a strange creature that has been hailed as both a visionary view of the future and as a secular religion. Another major supporter of Singularitarianism is philosopher David Chalmers, by whom I am equally underwhelmed, and whom I will take on directly in the near future in the more rarefied realm of academic publications.

Back to Kurzweil. I’m not the only one to have significant problems with him (and with the idea of futurism in general, particularly considering the uncanny ability of futurists to get things spectacularly and consistently wrong). John Rennie, for instance, published a scathing analysis of Kurzweil’s much taunted “prophecies,” debunking the notion and showing that the guy has alternatively being wrong or trivial about his earlier visions of the future.

(Here is a taste of what Rennie documented, from a “prediction” Kurzweil made in 2005: “By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.” Oops. Apparently the guy doesn’t know that one should never, ever make predictions that might turn out to be incorrect in one’s own lifetime. Even the Seventh Day Adventists have learned that lesson!)

It is pretty much impossible to take on the full Kurzweil literary production, the guy writes faster than even I can, and I fully expect a book length rebuttal to this post, if he comes across it in cyberspace (the man leaves no rebuttal unrebutted). Instead, I will focus on a single detailed essay he wrote entitled “Superintelligence and Singularity,” which was originally published as chapter 1 of his The Singularity is Near (Viking 2005), and has been reprinted in an otherwise insightful collection edited by Susan Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy.

In the essay in question, Kurzweil begins by telling us that he gradually became aware of the coming Singularity, in a process that, somewhat peculiarly, he describes as a “progressive awakening” — a phrase with decidedly religious overtones. He defines the Singularity as “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” Well, by that definition, we have been through several “singularities” already, as technology has often rapidly and irreversibly transformed our lives.

The major piece of evidence for Singularitarianism is what “I [Kurzweil] have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).” He continues by acknowledging that he understands how so many people don’t get it, because, you see, “after all, it took me forty years to be able to see what was right in front of me.” Thank goodness he didn’t call it the Kurzweil law of accelerating returns, though I’m sure the temptation was strong.

Irritating pomposity aside, the first obvious serious objection is that technological “evolution” is in no logical way a continuation of biological evolution — the word “evolution” here being applied with completely different meanings. And besides, there is no scientifically sensible way in which biological evolution has been accelerating over the several billion years of its operation on our planet. So much for scientific accuracy and logical consistency.

Kurzweil proceeds with a simple lesson meant to impress on us the real power of exponential growth, which he claims characterizes technological “evolution.” If you check out the original essay, however, you will notice that all of the diagrams he presents to make his case (Figs. 1-6) are simply made up by Kurzweil, either because they do not show any actual data (Fig. 1) or because they are an arbitrary assemblage of “canonical milestones” lined up so to show that there has been progress in the history of the universe (Figs. 2-6).

For instance, in Fig. 6 we have a single temporal line where “Milky Way,” “first flowering plants,” “differentiation of human DNA type” (whatever that means), and “rock art” are nicely lined up to fill the gaps between the origin of life on earth and the invention of the transistor. In Figs. 3 and 4, a “countdown to Singularity” is illustrated by a patchwork of evolutionary and cultural events, from the origin of reptiles to the invention of art, again to give the impression that — what? There was a PLAN? That the Singularity was inherent in the very fabric of the universe?

Now, here is a bit that will give you an idea of why some people think of Singularitarianism as a secular religion: “The Singularity will allow us to transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want.” Indeed, Fig. 2 of that essay shows a progression through (again, entirely arbitrary) six “epochs,” with the next one (#5) occurring when there will be a merger between technological and human intelligence (somehow, a good thing), and the last one (#6) labeled as nothing less than “the universe wakes up” — a nonsensical outcome further described as “patterns of matter and energy in the universe becom[ing] saturated with intelligence processes and knowledge.” This isn’t just science fiction, it is bad science fiction.

There are several unintentionally delightfully ironic sentences scattered throughout Kurzweil’s essay: “The future is widely misunderstood ... The future will be far more surprising than most people realize,” etc. Of course, “most” people doesn’t include our futurist genius, despite the fact that he has already been wrong about the future, and spectacularly so.

And then there is pure nonsense on stilts: “we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade.” What does that even mean? Paradigm shifts in philosophy of science (a la Thomas Kuhn) are a fairly well understood — if controversial — concept. But outside of it, the phrase has simply come to mean any major change arbitrarily defined. Again, not the stuff of rigorous analysis, and far less of serious predictions.

And there is more, much more: “a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technological change is exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process.” First, it is highly questionable that one can even measure “technological change” on a coherent uniform scale. Yes, we can plot the rate of, say, increase in microprocessor speed, but that is but one aspect of “technological change.” As for the idea that any evolutionary process features exponential growth, I don’t know where Kurzweil got it, but it is simply wrong, for one thing because biological evolution does not have any such feature — as any student of Biology 101 ought to know.

Kurzweil’s ignorance of evolution is manifested again a bit later, when he claims — without argument, as usual — that “Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order. ... It’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of the world. ... Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.” I swear, I was fully expecting a scholarly reference to Deepak Chopra at the end of that sentence. Again, “evolution” is a highly heterogeneous term that picks completely different concepts, such as cosmic “evolution” (actually just change over time), biological evolution (which does have to do with the creation of order, but not in Kurzweil’s blatantly teleological sense), and technological “evolution” (which is certainly yet another type of beast altogether, since it requires intelligent design). And what on earth does it mean that each epoch uses the “methods” of the previous one to “create” the next one? Techno-mystical babble this is.

In his description of the progression between the six epochs, Kurzweil dances a bit too close to the infamous anthropic principle, when he says “The rules of our universe and the balance of the physical constants ... are so exquisitely, delicately and exactly appropriate ... that one wonders how such an extraordinary unlikely situation came about.” Can you say Intelligent Design, Ray? This of course had to follow a paragraph including the following sentence: “we do know that atomic structures store and represent discrete information.” Well, only if one adopts such a general definition of “information” that the word entirely loses meaning. Unless of course one has to force the incredibly chaotic and contingent history of the universe in six nicely lined up epochs that start with “Physics and Chemistry: information in atomic structures.”

The jump from epoch 2 (biology and DNA) to 3 (brains) is an almost comical reincarnation of the old scala naturae, the great chain of being that ascended from minute particles and minerals (Kurzweil’s physics and chemistry age) to plants (epoch 2), animals (epoch 3), humans (epoch 4) and... Well, that’s where things diverge, of course. Instead of angels and god we have, respectively, human-computer hybrids and the Singularity. The parallels are so obvious that I can’t understand why it took me forty years to see them (it didn’t really, it all came to me in a rapid flash of awakening).

Where does Kurzweil get his hard data for the various diagrams purportedly showing this cosmic progression through his new scala naturae? Fortunately for later scholars, he tells us: the Encyclopedia Britannica, the American Museum of Natural History (presumably one of those posters about the history of the universe they sell in their gift shop), and Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar (which Sagan used as a metaphor to convey a sense of the passing of cosmic time in his popular book, The Dragons of Eden). I bow to the depth of Kurzweil’s scholarship.

And finally, we get to stage 6, when the universe “wakes up.” How is this going to happen? Easy: “[the universe] will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation to spread out from its origin on Earth.” Besides the obvious objection that there is no scientific substance at all to phrases like the universe reorganizing matter and energy (I mean, the universe is matter and energy), what on earth could one possibly mean by “optimal level of computation”? Optimal for whom? To what end? Oh, and for this to happen, Kurzweil at least realizes, “information” would have to somehow overcome the limit imposed by the General Theory of Relativity on how fast anything can travel, i.e. the speed of light. Kurzweil here allows himself a bit of restraint: “Circumventing this limit has to be regarded as highly speculative.” No, dude, it aint’ just speculative, it would amount to a major violation of a law of nature. You know, the sort of thing David Hume labeled “miracles.” (channel Sagan’s version of Hume’s dictum: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)

Would you like (another) taste of just how “speculative” Kurzweil can get? I’m glad you asked: “When scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today’s terms) ... Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.” Oh? The universe has a destiny? And, pray, who laid that out?

At this point I think the reader who has been patient enough with me will have gotten a better idea of why I think Kurzweil is a crank (that and the fact that his latest book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever is co-authored with Terry Grossman, who is a proponent of homeopathic cures — nobody told Ray that homeopathy is quackery?).

Allow me, however, to conclude with what may well turn out to be a knock down argument against the Singularity. As we have seen, the whole idea is that human beings will merge with machines during the ongoing process of ever accelerating evolution, an event that will eventually lead to the universe awakening to itself, or something like that. Now here is the crucial question: how come this has not happened already?

To appreciate the power of this argument you may want to refresh your memory about the Fermi Paradox, a serious (though in that case, not a knockdown) argument against the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life. The story goes that physicist Enrico Fermi (the inventor of the first nuclear reactor) was having lunch with some colleagues, back in 1950. His companions were waxing poetic about the possibility, indeed the high likelihood, that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life forms. To which Fermi asked something along the lines of: “Well, where are they, then?”

The idea is that even under very pessimistic (i.e., very un-Kurzweil like) expectations about how quickly an intelligent civilization would spread across the galaxy (without even violating the speed of light limit!), and given the mind boggling length of time the galaxy has already existed, it becomes difficult (though, again, not impossible) to explain why we haven’t seen the darn aliens yet.

Now, translate that to Kurzweil’s much more optimistic predictions about the Singularity (which allegedly will occur around 2045, conveniently just a bit after Kurzweil’s expected demise, given that he is 63 at the time of this writing). Considering that there is no particular reason to think that planet earth, or the human species, has to be the one destined to trigger the big event, why is it that the universe hasn’t already “awakened” as a result of a Singularity occurring somewhere else at some other time? Call that the, oh, I don’t know, “Pigliucci paradox.” It has a nice ring to it.