The first time I heard about this thing called “the Singularity” was when I read Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near. Prior to this, I’d been the kind of person who spent most of their free time thinking about things like politics and social issues, because I was convinced that those were the most important and consequential things a person could spend their time thinking about. After reading Kurzweil’s book, though, it immediately became apparent to me – and has become increasingly apparent ever since – that although things like politics are definitely very important, they aren’t actually the most important thing in the world right now. The most important thing in the world right now – the thing that, if and when it happens, will be the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of our species – is the thing Kurzweil was talking about: the Singularity.
So what is the Singularity? There’s a pretty good chance at this point that you’re already familiar with the concept, but if not, the basic idea is that our technology – which has always developed at a pretty steady and predictable pace throughout history – is about to reach a critical turning point, after which our level of advancement will suddenly skyrocket and give us centuries’ worth of technological progress in a matter of a few short years or months – or, if it goes wrong, could completely wipe out all life on Earth. This is a pretty dramatic claim, to put it mildly. But if it’s right – and I think it is – it’s something that we not only should be taking seriously, but should be directing practically all our focus toward as a society – because it’s the thing that will make or break our entire species; and we’re approaching it very, very quickly.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here; let’s back up for a minute. Whenever there’s any kind of abstract talk about the future like this, people’s minds tend to automatically go in a certain direction. Most people, when they imagine “the future,” envision something like The Jetsons or Blade Runner or Wall-E, where technology has basically continued to evolve in the same kind of way that it has in the past (and at roughly the same rate), until eventually – over the course of the next century or two – we’ve developed things like hovercars and robot butlers and holograms and so on, and our society has transformed into one that’s largely still recognizable as the same kind of human society we have today, just with niftier gadgets. What most people don’t envision is a kind of future that we’d find totally unrecognizable today – like one in which, say, humans have become immortal demigods who can reshape matter at will, or one in which the entire human species has transformed itself into a multi-star-system-spanning swarm of microscopic nanomachines sharing a universal cloud consciousness that everyone has uploaded their minds into – nor do they imagine that such an outcome could be even remotely conceivable within any kind of time frame that could be described as “the near future.” Certainly they’d find the idea of it occurring within their own lifetimes to be absolutely absurd. But what the idea of the Singularity suggests is that, as crazy as it might sound, these assumptions might actually be wrong.
See, what the popular conception of the future assumes is that technological advancement generally follows a linear progression; that is to say, it takes for granted that the rate of progress in any given decade or century will be roughly the same as in the one that came before. As Tim Urban puts it:
When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. When we think about the extent to which the world will change in the 21st century, we just take the 20th century progress and add it to the year 2000.
But as Kurzweil points out, this isn’t actually how technological advancement works, and never has been. Technological progress isn’t additive – increasing by the same fixed amount every century – it’s multiplicative. Each century takes the advancements of the previous ones and uses those advancements to advance even more quickly still – with the result being that each successive century isn’t just more advanced than the previous one; it advances by an even greater amount every time. The kind of technology we have today is many times more advanced than what they had in 1950, which was many times more advanced than what they had in 1850, which was many times more advanced than in 1750, and so on – with the differences growing greater and greater in absolute terms with each passing century. Here’s Urban again:
This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced. 19th century humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so it’s no surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century—15th century humanity was no match for 19th century humanity.
This works on smaller scales too. The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movie’s Marty McFly was in 1955.
This is for the same reason we just discussed—the Law of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985—because the former was a more advanced world—so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.
In short, our technological capabilities aren’t just growing; the rate at which they’re growing is itself growing. Technological progress is accelerating, not in a linear progression, but in an exponential one. This is how it has always worked, and it’s how it continues to work today.
Probably the most famous example of this phenomenon in modern-day technologies is Moore’s Law, which observes that the capability level of computer chips (as measure by their transistor count) has roughly doubled every two years, and has been doing so for the last 50 years and counting:
Note that the y-axis in this chart is on a logarithmic scale (i.e. increasing by multiples) rather than a linear scale (i.e. increasing by fixed increments), just to make it easier to see how clear the trend line is. Converting this to a normal linear scale, though – to provide a more intuitive picture of how clearly progress is accelerating over time – it looks like this:
And it’s not just transistor counts where we see this trend, either; it shows up everywhere, from computational speed…
…to the efficiency and cost of memory and storage:
Even if we extend the time frame all the way back to before modern computers even existed, back when computations were still done with punch cards and vacuum tubes, the trend still holds true:
Nor is it only computer technology that follows this trend; the same pattern can be seen in all kinds of different areas of technological development. Here’s a chart showing how much the efficiency of genome sequencing has improved over time, for instance:
And here’s one for solar panels:
The list of examples goes on. Kurzweil provides dozens more such charts in his book, covering everything from phones to internet data to mechanical devices, and shows them all following the same pattern. In fact, he considers the Law of Accelerating Returns to be so ubiquitous that he even goes so far as to apply it to the entire history of our species:
And again, just to see how accelerative this whole process has been, here’s the same chart on a linear scale:
In all of these cases, we can see that progress follows a pattern of exponential growth, not linear growth. Things seem to be moving slowly and steadily for a while, but then at some point the pace suddenly starts to pick up, and before you can even fully realize what’s going on, the trajectory skyrockets. To borrow a line from John Green (who himself was paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway), it’s like falling asleep – it happens slowly at first, then all at once. And because this kind of accelerative exponential growth is naturally so unintuitive to our primate brains, which are so much more accustomed to everything in daily life following a more linear trend, it can completely catch us off guard when it does happen. As Kurzweil writes:
The pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory.
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Consider Gary Kasparov, who scorned the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later.
Or for another famous example, consider the New York Times editorial published in October of 1903, which predicted that it would take one to ten million years to develop a functioning flying machine. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable prediction at the time – after all, it was only a few years earlier that Lord Kelvin (among many others) had proclaimed that heavier-than-air flying machines would simply never be possible at all – but just two months after the prediction was made, Orville and Wilbur Wright succeeded in building the world’s first working airplane. And a mere 65 years after that – less than a single lifetime – humans were walking on the moon.
In the early years of the twentieth century, perhaps no nuclear physicist was more distinguished than Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of the proton and the “man who split the atom.” Like his colleagues, Rutherford had long been aware that atomic nuclei stored immense amounts of energy; yet the prevailing view was that tapping this source of energy was impossible.
On September 11, 1933, the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Leicester. Lord Rutherford addressed the evening session. As he had done several times before, he poured cold water on the prospects for atomic energy: “Anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms is talking moonshine.” Rutherford’s speech was reported in the Times of London the next morning.
Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had recently fled from Nazi Germany, was staying at the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square in London. He read the Times’ report at breakfast. Mulling over what he had read, he went for a walk and invented the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction. The problem of liberating nuclear energy went from impossible to essentially solved in less than twenty-four hours. Szilard filed a secret patent for a nuclear reactor the following year. The first patent for a nuclear weapon was issued in France in 1939.
There are all kinds of examples like this, where very reasonable people make very reasonable predictions that some new technology will perhaps emerge in a thousand or two thousand years if we’re lucky, based on past trends – only for it to be invented within their lifetime, or sometimes even within that same year. But their mistake, of course, is precisely to base their predictions on past trends, because the trend itself is the very thing that’s accelerating. As Urban puts it:
It’s most intuitive for us to think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially. If someone is being more clever about it, they might predict the advances of the next 30 years not by looking at the previous 30 years, but by taking the current rate of progress and judging based on that. They’d be more accurate, but still way off. In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now.
Just to drive this point home, here’s one more analogy, adapted from Shakuntala Devi. Imagine, she says, a big lake with a tiny patch of lily pads in one corner of it. Every day the patch of lily pads doubles in size, until after exactly one year it has grown so much that it now covers the entire lake. At what point would the lake have been half covered in lily pads? Our intuitive response, naturally, will be to say that if it took one year to cover the whole lake, then it must have taken half that time – six months – to cover half of it. But this answer is wrong. Since the patch of lily pads is doubling in size every day, that means that it would have been covering half the lake on day 364 – just one day before it was covering the whole lake – and the day before that, on day 363, it would have been covering one-fourth of the lake, and the day before that, on day 362, it would have been covering one-eighth of the lake, and so on. If you’d been watching from the very beginning, you wouldn’t have noticed the patch get large enough to cover even 1% of the lake until the very last week of the year; your first 11.8 months would have been completely uneventful, but then in that last week, the growth would have suddenly seemed to explode out of nowhere. It would have gone from <1% coverage to 100% coverage in just those last seven doublings. Again, though, that’s how it goes with exponential growth; it feels similar to linear growth at first, but then all of a sudden it doesn’t. Slowly, then all at once.
So what specifically does this mean for us and our immediate future? Looking back over all these charts, it’s hard not to notice that (depicted on a linear scale) they all seem to be approaching a point of maximal acceleration – a point at which that upward-curving exponential trend line will become nearly vertical. As Kurzweil writes:
In the 1950s John von Neumann, the legendary information theorist, was quoted as saying that “the ever-accelerating progress of technology … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” Von Neumann makes two important observations here: acceleration and singularity.
The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant).
The second is that exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all. As a result, observers’ expectation of an unchanged future was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.
Right now, by Kurzweil’s reckoning, we’re right at the knee of the curve. We’re leaving the “slowly at first” stage and are about to enter the “all at once” stage. So again, what does this mean? According to Kurzweil, it means that the 21st century won’t just achieve more technological progress than the 20th century – it’ll achieve thousands of times more.
But wait a minute – how can that even be possible? Sure, things like Moore’s Law might be fine for describing how technology has evolved up to this point, but just because a pattern has held true in the past doesn’t mean that we can just extrapolate it forward into the future indefinitely; at some point it will have to level off, just due to the laws of physics, right? And yes, of course that’s true, particularly when it comes to specific paradigms like Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is all about how many transistors can fit on an integrated circuit – but eventually there will come a point where those transistors will have gotten down to the smallest possible molecular scale and won’t be able to get any smaller; that’s just a hard physical limit. Having said that, though, Moore’s Law is just one paradigm describing the evolution of one piece of technology; the fact that it will eventually level off doesn’t mean that all technological progress will therefore stop. There are all kinds of other ways to improve computing performance besides just making transistors smaller – so once we’ve reached the limits of Moore’s Law, the natural next step will be to simply shift technical resources into other areas where there’s still plenty of room left for progress, like expanding chip architecture (e.g. making 3D chips that stack transistors vertically), optimizing chip-specific task specialization, improving memory bandwidth, designing better software, developing other forms of computation that don’t even involve transistors at all, like optical computing or memristors, etc. (See Sarah Constantin’s explanation of all this here.) This is just the natural course of technological development, as Kurzweil explains; once one particular technological paradigm matures and begins to level off, it creates an opportunity for the next paradigm to emerge and start ramping up. Each new technology follows a kind of S-curve as it emerges, grows into its full potential, plateaus, and then gives rise to new successor technologies – and the result at the fine-grained level of individual technologies is a kind of punctuated equilibrium, with relatively quiet periods interspersed with sudden bursts of progress. But the combined result of all these S-curves – the broader trend of technological advancement as a whole – is still a consistent exponential curve upward.
So while it’s true that there must eventually be some kind of absolute upper limit on how far technology can advance, the idea that we’re anywhere near that ceiling right now just seems woefully short-sighted. Indeed, it would be an awfully strange coincidence if, after millennia of consistent exponential progress, it was only right now that progress just completely stopped. The whole nature of progress is to build upon itself; the more advanced technology we create, the more it enables us to use that very technology to create even more advanced technology still, in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. And in fact, the way things are going, it’s looking like these next few paradigms we’re on the verge of cracking open – artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfacing, etc. – will have an even more dramatically multiplicative impact than anything that has come before – because for the first time, they’ll give us the ability to multiply our own intelligence itself, and by extension our ability to unlock even more extraordinary technological breakthroughs than ever, at a more breakneck pace than ever. As impressive as our progress has been up to this point, it’s these upcoming technologies that are primed to give us a whole new understanding of what explosive exponential progress can really mean – whether we’re ready for it or not.
N.W. Rains 