I recently returned from an appearance at the Humanity Plus Summit at Harvard where visionaries spoke of a world–only 30 years from now– which will be vastly different than the one we live in today.

Well, according to a just-released Pew Research report examining the American public’s forecast for the next 40 years, Americans see great progress in our future,  but not at the rapid pace envisioned by Ray Kurzweil and other supporters of Singularity.

I pulled the following highlights but I encourage you to read the full report.

In the next 40 years….

81% of those surveyed expect that computers will be able to carry on conversations

71% believe there will be a cure for cancer

66% say that artificial arms and legs will outperform real limbs

53% envision ordinary people traveling in space

53% say there will be a major terrorist attack on the United States involving nuclear weapons

72% anticipate that the world will face a major energy crisis

41% expect Jesus Christ to return;  46% say this will definitely or probably not happen

Despite the imminent end of the space shuttle program, “Americans by and large remain optimistic that astronauts will land on Mars in the next 40 years:”
63%  say we will send a man to Mars in the next 40 years.

50% say that by 2050 there definitely or probably will be evidence that humans are not alone in the universe
“Roughly half of Americans foresee scientists bringing an animal species back from extinction through cloning (51%), while nearly as many (47%) say this will definitely or probably not take place by 2050.”

Read the full report.

Why so few posts from me lately? Truth is, I’ve been swamped. All great stuff, including a summer-long  immersion in an incubator program; some very cool upcoming Capitol Hill briefings for Discover Magazine and the National Science Foundation;  the launch of ECAST (Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology);  exciting speaking engagements; plotting of a national Emergency Response process so people with great ideas for solutions to a crisis will have an immediate and reliable place to turn where ideas will be delivered to decision-makers (more on that later); and…baseball season. I have four young kids and all of them play ball. Fun stuff!

To keep things fresh, I’ve enlisted the help of some enthusiastic writers so we can continue to deliver opportunities for you to get involved in science and science policy discussions; learn about people who are shattering stereotypes; and enjoy all science has to offer. From the simplest pleasures (like when I recently found a fly trapped in a spider’s web…I’m sure he deserved it) to mind-boggling speculations about our future (e.g. Singularity), it’s impossible to escape the influence and wonders of science.

I’d like to share with you a brief summary of SciCheer’s goals and outcomes. Feel free to use the data as you see fit. It’s becoming clearer to me that a SciCheer 2.0 might be in order. If you have thoughts on what the next generation of SciCheer should include, let me know. –Cheers!

On Sunday, the same day the New York Times featured YOUR future–aka Singularity, read on–on the cover of its business section, I was listening to the head cheerleader of all-things-Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, as he presented the future of humanity at the H+ Summit at Harvard. You might recall that we interviewed Ray on SciCheer sometime last year.

Ray and I, along with several others, were speakers at the H+ Summit, the theme of which was The Rise of the Citizen Scientist. I spoke about “citizen scientists” as I know them. (A copy of my powerpoint presentation can be found, below. I’ll post a link to the video when I have it.) As it turns out, my definition of citizen science isn’t quite the same as the who follow the Transhumanist/Singularity philosophy. While they are very interested and enthusiastic about what “our” citizen scientists are doing–and quite a visionary and friendly group of people, I might add–they are more interested in how humans can, ultimately, harness the deepest powers of technology to  “seize control of the evolutionary process” and create immortality.

I’ll do my best to explain what this means by pulling excerpts from my past interview with Ray Kurzweil:

Ray’s “short version” definition of  Singularity:  “The Singularity is a future time when the pace of technological change will be so fast and transformative that you will not be able to follow it unless you merge with the intelligent technology we are creating.”

How this work will and when: “Accessing the web from inside our brains is one good example of what we will see in about twenty years. The machine extensions to our brains will grow exponentially both in hardware and software capability. By the late 2030s, it will be the nonbiological portion of our intelligence that predominates.”

No thanks, I like things just the way they are. “First of all, it is human to change who we are. We didn’t stay on the ground, we didn’t stay on the planet, and we have not stayed with the limitations of our biology. Human life expectancy was 23 a thousand years ago. We are the only species that changes who we are and extends our reach, both physical and mental, through our tools. So it is human to change who we are. There will always be early and late adopters, but people are not going to completely dismiss these changes. How many people today complete reject medical and health technologies? When there is a therapy based on blood cells devices that overcome a particular disease, very few if any people will reject it. People put computers in their brains today if they have Parkinson’s Disease. People do not reject this FDA approved therapy due to philosophical issues.”

The buzz kill: real concerns that microscopic robots will pose a threat to the world: “Yes, that is called the grey goo scenario, and the narrative thread in the movie illustrates this danger. I do think we can manage that through a combination of ethical standards to build in safeguards into nanotechnology, as well as a rapid response system that detects threats and immediately deals with them, just like our biological immune system is designed to do. But this is not something we should be sanguine about. We need to be very diligent about it.”

So, there’s your future. Want to have a say? First step, head over to the beta website of ECAST (Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology) and sign up so we can keep you apprised of so-called “participatory” opportunities. We (see below) set up ECAST precisely so the public and scientists can inform each other on emerging technologies so smart, representative policies are initiated. And, as stated before: government policymakers, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and citizens need such analysis to capably navigate the technology-intensive world in which we now live.

“We”=Science Cheerleader, Arizona State University, Boston Museum of Science, the Loka Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

Now, more than ever, we need to get in front of emerging technologies to help shape our future.

As promised, here’s a copy of my presentation.

Thanks, Mike Treder, for sharing this. Mike’s the managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. I’m a big fan of Mike’s writings, although some may think we are not of the same species. Almost everything about us can be described as polar opposite. He’s even a damn Yankees fan! But we do share our zest for opening doors to public participation, particularly in matters of technology policy.

Mike will be speaking at an upcoming seminar titled Biopolitics of Popular Culture, as will David Brin (author of The Postman) who wrote this piece for SciCheer last year.

If you register TODAY, you can cash in on the early bird discount.

Here’s the program description I copied from IEET’s website:

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? [Note from SciCheer: See interview with Ray Kurzweil for nonfiction example of someone who wants to live a much longer than normal life.]  What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.

Kurzweil answered plenty-o-questions from Science Cheerleader subscribers, here, last month.  This video series is very engaging.

(Transcendent Man, a documentary on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, will premiere on April 25 in NYC. Learn when and where tickets are available, here.)

I first met Ray when I was about 24 yrs old, working at Discover Magazine (then owned by Disney). He patiently talked me through the tech behind his outrageously cool Kurzweil Keyboard and we set forth to put it on display at Disney’s Epcot.  Here we are today, five years later (give or take 10 yrs). I asked Ray to field questions from Science Cheerleader subscribers, and Bart’s readers, regarding his wildly controversial Singularity predictions. And now for the answers to the questions you posed to Ray right here. (Thanks, Ray!).

Darlene,

Here are my responses. Please confirm receipt and indicate if this meets your needs. These were good questions which I enjoyed answering.

Best, Ray

1. What is your “short version” definition of what the Singularity is? –Bart

RAY: The Singularity is a future time when the pace of technological change will be so fast and transformative that you will not be able to follow it unless you merge with the intelligent technology we are creating.

2. Singularity University is clearly aimed at helping to shape the Singularity and hasten its arrival. Do exponential trends really need help and, if so, can we really expect to shape them? –Jon

RAY: The exponential growth of information technologies will continue inexorably as it has for over a century. However, technology has always been a double-edged sword ever since we developed fire and stone tools. How we apply these technologies and whether constructive applications that overcome human suffering and extend our creativity predominate over destructive applications is not preordained. That is where we can help shape the Singularity.

3. How would we recognize the Singularity happening? Would the change be gradual, or would it be similar to the singularity around a black hole–so enormous, rapid, and widespread that we wouldn’t even realize what had happened until long after we’ve crossed the point of no return? –Marianne

RAY: The pace of information technology is continual yet exponential. Exponential trajectories have no discontinuities but are nonetheless disruptive. You describe the changes well as “enormous, rapid, widespread,” and constituting a “point of no return.”

4. Given the slow and erratic progress in AI over the past 40 years, what makes you so confident that machines will become intelligent (in the commonly understood sense) in the next 40? –Corey

RAY: I disagree with your characterization of AI. It reminds me of people who go into the rain forest and ask, “where all the species that are supposed to be here” when there are 25 species of ants within fifty feet of them. The species in the rain forest are not seen because they are hidden in the ecostructure. Similar, AI is all around us yet hidden in our modern economic infrastructure. Every time you send an email or connect a cell phone call intelligent algorithms route the information. Pick up a product, it’s been designed at least in part by intelligent computer assisted design software, inventory levels controlled by intelligent just-in-time inventory systems, assembled in robotic factories. AI software flies and lands airplanes, guides intelligent weapons system, automatically detects credit card fraud, helps you find information on the web, diagnoses electrocardiograms and blood cell images comparable to trained physicians, and much else. If all the AI programs were to stop tomorrow, our modern infrastructure would grind to a halt. That was not the case just fifteen years ago. These were all research projects then. On the research front, AI programs can now play master levels of go, drive cars with no human drivers through complex terrains, recognize songs and images, and so on. Now that we can see inside the brain with very high resolution we are building models and simulations of brain regions. That will accelerate AI in the years ahead.

5. Why do you think it’s a good idea for us to create machines that are smarter or more powerful than human beings? Can we expect singularity to shape itself or will we still hold charge of our technological creations? –Bart/Jasmin

RAY: The machines are not an alien invasion from Mars. It is part of our civilization which is already a human-machine civilization. Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, our tools have been extensions of ourselves. We are the only species that changes who we are based on tools we create.

6. Suppose that things continue in much the way they are now, with increasingly powerful and miniaturized wireless devices making information available wherever we want it. Does that count as a “Singularity?” It is easy for me to imagine, for instance, a brain implant that allows me to conduct Google searches purely by the power of thought—but that merging of biological and digital intelligence seems distinctly different from what you mean by a Singularity. –Corey

RAY: Accessing the web from inside our brains is one good example of what we will see in about twenty years. The machine extensions to our brains will grow exponentially both in hardware and software capability. By the late 2030s, it will be the nonbiological portion of our intelligence that predominates.

7. How do you see the economics of the future working/changing if everything is free? –Bart

RAY: Who said everything will be free? We will continue to have open source and proprietary sources of information. When we have nano desktop factories that can produce physical products from information files and very inexpensive input materials, we will be able to live very well on just open source information. But there will still be an edge and demand for proprietary information. Information technologies have had an 18 percent growth rate as measured in constant dollars for the past fifty years despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it for the same cost every year. This in fact has been the source of true economic growth.

8. How close are we to getting a Star Trek-like “holodeck?” –Jonathan

RAY: In twenty years we will be able to produce physical products from information files using nano desktop factories. This is still short of the holodeck but it will turn virtually the entire economy into an information economy.

9. How far away are we from reaching the Singularity? Is 2045 still a reasonable estimate? –Jason

RAY: According to my models, we will multiply our biological intelligence a billion fold through its integration with nonbiological intelligence by 2045. I consider that the Singularity.

10. How do you respond to people who claim that this is just “the geek Rapture?” –Bart

RAY: This “criticism” is based on the notion that the “rapture” came first and that we just worked backwards to justify this religious notion. But that is not where the ideas come from. They come from a scientific analysis of technology trends. Religion emerged in pre scientific times and we do need to update our philosophies based on science.

11. What is to become of people who don’t want to join your Singularity and just want to remain human as they are? –Bart

RAY: First of all, it is human to change who we are. We didn’t stay on the ground, we didn’t stay on the planet, and we have not stayed with the limitations of our biology. Human life expectancy was 23 a thousand years ago. We are the only species that changes who we are and extends our reach, both physical and mental, through our tools. So it is human to change who we are. There will always be early and late adopters, but people are not going to completely dismiss these changes. How many people today complete reject medical and health technologies? When there is a therapy based on blood cells devices that overcome a particular disease, very few if any people will reject it. People put computers in their brains today if they have Parkinson’s Disease. People do not reject this FDA approved therapy due to philosophical issues.

12. Are you pleased or disappointed with the progress made so far? What technologies are “ahead of the curve,” as you see it, which ones are behind? –Jason

RAY: My team and I just updated the graphs that were in my 2005 book The Singularity is Near from 2002 through 2007. The exponential curves have remained precisely on track. It is pretty remarkable when you consider that what we are measuring is the innovation of millions of people.

13. Your book takes a very optimistic view of science and human nature, but neglects the problem of human evil. Given what we’ve done with previous “great inventions,” don’t you worry that individuals or nations could do great harm with all this—accidentally or maliciously? What safeguards would be put in place to prevent this? –Bart/Ned

RAY: I don’t know why people say I ignore the downsides when I was the one who initiated the debate about promise versus peril. Bill Joy’s WIRED cover story “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” was based on my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, as he acknowledges at the beginning of the article. My recent book, The Singularity is Near, has an extensive discussion of the downsides and what to do about them in chapter 8 (“The Deeply Intertwined Promise versus Peril of GNR”). The safeguards we need are twofold. We need ethical standards for responsible practitioners such as the Asilomar guidelines in biotechnology. And we need a rapid response system, basically a technological immune system, to deal with intentional abuse. We have such a system for software viruses. I am working with the U.S. Army on putting a rapid response system in place for bioengineered biological viruses.

14. What is/will be the relationship between ethics and The Singularity? The rapid growth of science/knowledge leads to many advancements via engineering, but how can/will ethics be applied when mankind can no longer keep pace? –Paul

RAY: See my response to the previous question.

15. What are your foundational core values…specifically your belief about God and how that guides the limits of what you do? –Rosalind

RAY: I believe that evolution is a spiritual process in that it leads to greater intelligence, creativity, beauty, and love, all of the attributes that God has been called without limit. I believe we have a responsibility to apply our ideas to overcome human suffering. We have made good progress on this. Just read Thomas Hobbes on what human life was like a few hundred years ago. He described it as short, brutish, disaster prone, disease and poverty filled. Human life expectancy was 37 just 200 years ago.

16. Space exploration is one technology you downplay in The Singularity is Near. Does your new venture with Peter Diamandis and NASA—the Singularity University—change this perspective? –Bart

RAY: Space travel will be of key importance once we saturate the matter and energy in our midst at the physical limits of computation. We will then need to spread out to the rest of the galaxy and universe. But we will not sending missions of squishy creatures, but rather missions of nanobots swarms.

17. What is the purpose of “Singularity U?” –Bart

RAY: The purpose of Singularity University is to bring together the most creative students and professors to study exponentially growing information technologies and to apply these ideas to meeting the grand challenges of humanity.

18. What should people do about scientific literacy so that everyone can understand, at least a basic level, the rapidly advancing technology? –Paul

RAY: Indeed, scientific literacy needs to be a core goal of our educational system. Other countries are taking that more seriously than we are. About twenty years ago, the U.S. graduated about 60,000 engineers per year and China graduated about 10,000. Now, we graduate about the same level and China graduates about 300,000 per year.

19. What should we be *doing* about all this? –Dan

RAY: Celebrate science and engineering as the cool subjects that they are. It is only the exponentially growing information technologies that have the scale to address the major problems of humanity.

20. In 1999, you created a hedge fund called “FatKat” (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies) which began trading in 2006 to recognize patterns in “currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends” and eventually beat the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions. Did FatKat predict the market collapse? –Darlene

RAY: The FatKat algorithms are designed to only predict a few hours or days ahead and to do that with an accuracy that is somewhat better than chance.

21. Between the Reading Machine and the newest pocket-sized device designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud, you’ve demonstrated a remarkable desire to help the blind. I’m curious: what sparked your interest in helping the blind? –Darlene

RAY: In the mid 1970s I had developed a method that could recognize print in any typestyle. It was a solution in search of a problem. I happened to sit next to a blind guy on an airplane who said that his only real handicap was the inability to read ordinary print. That sparked my desire to apply this technology to build a print-to-speech reading machine.

22. You are making a movie due for release this year called The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future, part fiction, part non-fiction, in which you interview 20 big thinkers like our friend Marvin Minsky. I assume Marvin shares your vision on what Singularity is and will be. Do most “futurists” share your vision? Why or why not? –Darlene

RAY: There is increasing awareness of my exponential view, but linear thinking is actually hard wired in the brain. So even otherwise sophisticated scientists often project current trends linearly into the future. They just have not studied technology trends. There is a profound difference between the intuitive linear perspective and the historically accurate exponential view. If I take thirty steps linearly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …) I get to 30. If I take thirty steps exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …) I get to a billion. The latter sequence describes what has already happened. When I was a student at MIT we all shared one computer. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper than the one we all shared when I was a student, and is a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion fold increase in price performance since I was a student and we will do it again in the next 25 years. This applies not just to computation but to any technology where we can measure the underlying information properties such as bits moved around on the Internet, genetic sequencing, brain sequencing, and much else.

23. The “part non-fiction” subplot in your movie includes a computer that saves the world from self-replicating, tiny robots. Are you concerned that such microscopic robots will pose a threat to the world?–Darlene

RAY: Yes, that is called the grey goo scenario, and the narrative thread in the movie illustrates this danger. I do think we can manage that through a combination of ethical standards to build in safeguards into nanotechnology, as well as a rapid response system that detects threats and immediately deals with them, just like our biological immune system is designed to do. But this is not something we should be sanguine about. We need to be very diligent about it.

24. I understand it had been documented that one of your goals is to bring back your late father using AI. How can that happen? –Darlene

RAY: Future AI’s will be intelligent to gather all of the information about a deceased person (his DNA from his gravesite, memories of people who knew him, archived records) and create a person (say a virtual person in a realistic virtual reality environment) very similar to that person, basically someone indistinguishable from that person to the people who knew him or her. For this reason I have kept about fifty boxes of my father’s archives, all of his music, letters, photographs, movies, etc. Would this person be the same person as my father, or a new person that just happens to be very similar? You can argue that if my father lived, he would be very different anyway. We change our particles every six months or less, but there is a continuity of pattern. I discuss this philosophical issue in chapter 7 of The Singularity is Near.

25. Lastly, you were clearly influenced by your parents’ and uncle’s careers. Are your children working in science/engineering fields? –Darlene

RAY My son Ethan, age 29, works as a venture capitalist for Bessemer Ventures in Silicon valley in the area of high tech business. I often talk to him about my business strategies. He is not an inventor but he is fostering technology innovation. My daughter is a writer and artist and is writing a graphic novel as her senior project at Stanford. Interestingly, I majored in both computer science and creative writing at MIT.

A couple of days ago, I invited readers to submit questions they’d like Ray Kurzweil to answer. The Science Cheerleader and Bartacus will be interviewing Ray Kurzweil (Artificial Intelligence expert; king of the Singularity effort)  in the coming weeks. Details are here.  As a reminder, the deadline to submit questions is midnight, Monday 2/16. 

Here are some terrific questions from Science Cheerleader readers:

Jon: Singularity University is clearly aimed at helping to shape the Singularity and hasten its arrival. Do exponential trends really need help and, if so, can we really expect to shape them?

Paul: 1) What is/will be the relationship between ethics and The Singularity? The rapid growth of science/knowledge leads to many advancements via engineering, but how can/will ethics be applied when mankind can no longer keep pace. Or will this be a problem?    2) What to do about scientific literacy so that everyone can understand, to at least a basic level, the rapidly advancing technology?

Corey:
Given the slow and erratic progress in AI over the past 40 years, what makes Kurzweil so confident that machines will become intelligent (in the commonly understood sense) in the next 40?    Or perhaps I should ask the flip side of the question: Suppose that things continue in much the way they are now, with increasingly powerful and miniaturized wireless devices making information available wherever we want it. Does that count as a “singularity”? It is easy for me to imagine, for instance, a brain implant that allows me to conduct Google searches purely by the power of thought–but that merging of biological and digital intelligence seems distinctly different from what Kurzweil means by singularity.

What Would You Ask Ray Kurzweil

For those of you who already know who Kurzweil is and what this is about, Bart of Rhetoric and Rockets and I have the opportunity to do an email interview with him and write an article right here on ScienceCheerleader.com.

If you have a question you’re dying to ask about The Singularity, send it in and we will include it in the list for consideration. We’ll keep his open until Monday 2/16 midnight ET.

For those of you who have no idea who Ray Kurzweil is or what this is about, kindly continue reading below. RK’s most famous book, “The Singularity is Near,” talks about a fundamental transformation that is occurring in the world’s technology–not just computers, but also nanotechnology (manufacturing things at the atomic level) and biotechnology (changing the human genome to overcome illness, disease, or defects).

RK proceeds from the idea that computers have been making massive improvements in processing speed and capability every couple years. The basic theory governing this advance is Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit has been increasing by an order of magnitude once every two years. This is how you get computers with ten times the speed for the same amount of money. RK says that this ability to compute is allowing us to also better understand everything faster, from the human genome to climate modeling to the human bloodstream. Eventually, around 2045 or so, the world’s computers will achieve a point where they become not only superfast, but superintelligent–faster than us and smarter. This condition, called the Singularity, will enable us to do anything from extending life more or less indefinitely, accurately predict the weather a year out, or “upload” the contents of our minds into the internet–allowing our souls to more or less become “ghosts in the machine.”

Kurzweil has even partnered with NASA and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation to create a “Singularity University” to help technical, business, and political leaders understand and cope with the changes the Singularity will bring. There are more links below. I’m sure all sorts of questions can come to mind. We’ve got ours, what are yours?

http://sciencecheerleader.com/2008/11/the_next_big_future/

http://singularity.com/
http://singularityu.org/
http://bartacus.blogspot.com/2007/11/review-of-singularity-is-near-review-is.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Imagine a world with no shortage of water, food, medical care and energy.

The Next Big Future reports this can happen when Singularity is achieved as early as the year 2029!

Singularity refers to a point in time when artificial intelligence (computers) catch up to be as intelligent as humans, then quickly outpace us, drastically altering the course of mankind.

Last week, the Singularity Summit 2008 (“the premier dialog on the Singularity”) took place in San Jose, California. Futurists got together to share data as well as concerns. And there are plenty of concerns. From the event website:

While some regard the Singularity as a positive event and work to hasten its arrival, others view the Singularity as dangerous, undesirable, or unlikely. The most practical means for initiating the Singularity are debated, as are how, or whether, it can be influenced or avoided if dangerous.

“As scientists we should also be saying ‘What are we working on? A force for good or bad?’ And responsibly consider societal impacts,” said Peter Norvig, Google Director of Research and a Summit participant.

Summit presenter, James Miller, associate professor of economics at Smith College said the mere belief that Singularity will be achieved soon, may lead to more cryonics (freezing the body so it might me resuscitated in the future).  “As more people think that future could be a vastly different placed shaped by technological advances, they are more likely to spend what it takes to be a part of it.”

Yikes!

Find out what’s already in the works to make this mind-blowing vision a reality and weigh in on the HUGE societal impacts, like Science Cheerleader subscriber Bart did on his blog.