Musings 23 Nov 2009 01:01 am
Kurzweil’s Sixth Epoch: Waking Up the Universe
The inventor, futurist, and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil is a genius of the first rate, and one of his most intriguing ideas, expressed in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, is that the past and future history of the universe can be divided into six epochs. To futurists the first five epochs are unsurprising – a standard breakdown of the paradigm shifts in the dominant form of replicator from physical/chemical to biological (DNA) to memetic (ideas in the human brain) to technological and presently to the merging of human intelligence with technology.
It is the Sixth Epoch, “The Universe Wakes Up,” that is a truly fascinating idea. Essentially, after the singularity occurs (the exponential intelligence and technology explosion after Seed AI is created and replaces organic intelligence as the dominant form of intelligence), Kurzweil predicts, the new super-intelligent civilization (machine or machine/human hybrid) will expand throughout the galaxy and eventually the universe, turning matter into computational substrates, until the entire universe is one giant computer. Quoting Wikipedia, by 2199, “with the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of “life”) would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe. Kurzweil suggests that this will open up all sorts of new possibilities such as doing the infinitely impossible and beyond.”
It is clear why some consider this brand of futurism akin to a religion. Nonetheless, the staggering implications of this possibility are worth considering. For instance, if consciousness is just an artifact of sufficiently complex systems, when the universe “wakes up” will it be a conscious being? A woken up universe would surely bring a new meaning to the word pantheism.
But why has this not already happened? Just as Fermi asked why, if intelligent life is (as we suspect) abundantly common in the universe, we have not encountered it, it seems puzzling that we are not enveloped in Kurzweil’s sixth epoch now. This fact leads to the conclusion that at least one of the following must be true:
- We are the most advanced intelligent life in the universe. If we are not the only intelligent life, then this is statistically highly unlikely, because if there are any other civilizations in the universe, even if they are vanishingly rare, we are only one of countless such civilizations.
- Faster-than-lightspeed travel is impossible. Perhaps the most likely, but unless the above was true, we might expect to see astronomical evidence of civilizations that have already reached their singularities waking up their home galaxies.
- Technological civilizations which approach or reach the singularity never last long enough to start waking up the universe.
on 13 Jan 2010 at 8:54 pm 1.Jack said …
The implications of self-improving AI were explored by Isaac Asimov in the fifties and probably by others even earlier. It doesn’t originate with Kurzweil. Seriously, I can’t understand what people see in this guy.
on 15 Apr 2010 at 5:33 pm 2.Yorick said …
One other possibility:
o The Singularity cannot be reached
We do not understand how consciousness works. It’d be rash to state that we will understand it by such-and-such a date, or that we will positively be able to create it through technology, or that such technologically created people (conscious entities, whatever you wish to call them) will outstrip human intelligence exponentially.
There are just too many unknowns. Maybe machines really cannot become conscious. Maybe if they can become conscious, it turns out that being able to find prime numbers really fast and being able to increase one’s intelligence are two very, very different things. Maybe machines that become conscious just want to watch (virtual) reality TV, and that’s why the Singularity never occurs.
Maybe we’ll find out eventually. That’d be fun. In the meantime, keep making those robots!