What Is the Nature of Man?

Near the beginning of his new book, “The Singularity Is Near” (Viking, 601 pages, $29.95), Ray Kurzweil quotes a remark the computer scientist Mark Miller made in 1986: “You know,” Mr. Miller said, “things are going to be really different! … No, no, I mean really different!” Just how really different things are going to be is the subject of this exhilarating and terrifyingly deep look at where we are headed as a species.What Mr. Kurzweil terms “The Singularity” is the point in the future “during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” “Within several decades,” he predicts, “information based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.” As our machines become exponentially faster and more capable, they will be increasingly integrated into the human matrix itself. The end result of this incredible process will be the union of humans with their machines.Thus, when “The Singularity” arrives, Mr. Kurzweil believes there will cease to be a meaningful distinction between humans and their technology. Our essential nature will change as our technology becomes an outgrowth and continuation of our biology and, thus combined, a new species will control its own evolution at a rate accelerating to infinity. “The transformation underlying the Singularity,” he writes, “is not just another in a long line of steps in biological evolution. We are upending biological evolution altogether.”Is this off-the-wall science fiction? Mr. Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist and futurist, and he makes a compelling and, indeed, a very moving case for his view of the future. His previous books, “The Age of Intelligent Machines,” and “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” laid the groundwork for this analysis of what happens when humans transcend biology. He sees the reversal of human aging and the end of pollution. He anticipates the end of world hunger and the defeat of death itself. He sees limitless benefits to mankind when our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful.Even conceding that this may be a wildly optimistic embrace of our technofuture, it is very difficult to fault the detailed and rational analysis that has produced it. Still, there are many who find fault with the optimism of the Singularity theory. One of the most articulate and persistent critics is Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and the author of the much-cited essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”Alarmed by the implications of Mr. Kurzweil’s futuristic predictions, Mr. Joy concludes that “the only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” Of course, it is not clear how “relinquishment” could be accomplished without a police state, as Mr. Kurzweil points out in his rebuttal. Also, he adds, “If It Can Be Done, It Will Be Done” – if not here, then elsewhere, possibly by some very unfriendly people.Another severe critic is the environmentalist Bill McKibben, who wrings his hands in despair over this vision of the future. “Environmentalists must now grapple squarely with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more.” In other words, let’s just throw in the towel, call it quits, and shut everything down. (As Ogden Nash once put it: “Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.”)Mr. Kurzweil will have none of this new Ludditism. There is no rational way to reject the future, he says, regardless of the threats of what might happen. Most Cold War commentators were convinced that the world was about to erupt in a nuclear holocaust, yet it did not do so. All Mr. Kurzweil can be accused of is excessive exuberance; he has not only stated his positive case but also answered his critics in detail.This is without question a very difficult book. Mr. Kurzweil is asking us to make a leap of imagination to grasp the sense in which we are becoming one with both the material world, the technological world, the cosmos, and ultimately, with God. “Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent – transcendent – matter and energy. So, in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit.” Then he adds, “So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal.”These are brave sentiments, uttered without any protection of irony. At the end of our mind-altering tour through this incredible world of nanobots, virtual reality, human bodies less than corporeal, and other unimaginable consequences of the forces now unfolding, we are left with one last and overwhelming question: What is the nature of man?This is the true divide between those who find themselves agreeing with Ray Kurzweil and those who bitterly oppose him and everything he stands for. Is the post-Singularity man human? Has modification and enhancement, genetic or physical, so altered him that he is now an alien creature? Or is it more correct to insist that man’s essential, and deepest, nature is to strive and expand his consciousness without limit? Are we creating a new “species,” or has man finally taken control of his own evolution and transcended biology, as he was always meant to do?Among the many marvelous quotes in this book is one from E.O. Wilson: “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us … Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.”Mr. Pettus last wrote for these pages on the risks of mixing politics and science.

What Is the Nature of Man?

What Is the Nature of Man?

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