The New York Times (5/24/09, J. Markoff) highlights the fun idea that developments in artificial intelligence may someday produce a Skynet-like system (as in Terminator Salvation); i.e., “a military R&D project that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant…”

Technologist Ray Kurzweil believes The Singularity is near. Click .

This idea dates back to the ebullient Apollo Maslow Window in a 1961 short story by Arthur C. Clarke. First called “The Singularity” in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, it referred to a future time when humans would be overwhelmed by the acceleration of technological progress. Extrapolating from Moore’s Law, AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that technological progress would accelerate to the point when machines had “not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences.”

And he said it would occur in 2045.

This is one reason I don’t forecast beyond 2030! But all kidding aside, it’s relevant to the favorite question of many of my friends: Besides WW III or a planet-sterilizing comet impact, what would it take to throw off the long wave of the last 200+ years and invalidate the 2015 Maslow Window concept?

My usual response is that it would apparently require something worse than the Civil War, WW I, WW II, the Cold War, the Great Victorian Depression of 1873, The Great Depression of the 1930s, and numerous financial panics and major recessions (including the current one) of the last 200 years. Because amazingly, the long wave didn’t blink during any of those. However, having computers take over the process of technological invention — and probably eventually everything else — would certainly be something new!

Kurzweil, currently 61, envisions uploading the contents of a human’s brain into a computing environment — providing a type of immortality — within his lifetime. At the 2006 World Future Society meeting in Toronto where I happened to catch him, Kurzweil also suggested creating a Manhattan-style project to develop this capability. He had an enormous crowd and we all caught the symbolism when his computer malfunctioned during the presentation and nobody could fix it. Nevertheless, Kurzweil’s a genuine celebrity in the technology and futures communities.

But not everyone is buying the show. For example, William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, believes bad news is more likely than a Kurzweilian utopia with ultra-computers attending to our every need, “I wasn’t saying we would be supplanted by something, I think a catastrophe is more likely.”

And expanding on the fact that Moore’s Law is not a law of physics, merely an industrial pattern, physicist and management consultant Theodore Modis asserts that Kurzweil’s approach is not really scientific. “Kurzweil and the singularitarians are indulging in some sort of para-science, which differs from real science in matters of methodology and rigor. They tend to overlook rigorous scientific practices such as focusing on natural laws, giving precise definitions, verifying the data meticulously, and estimating the uncertainties.”

Modis questions Kurzweil’s key forecasts, including whether The Singularity will ever occur, because Kurzweil’s exponentials are actually “S” curves. For example, regarding supercomputing power, “assuming that the exponential trend will continue until 2045 (which I personally doubt) we find that computer power will reach 6×10**23 Flops (floating-point operations per second) at ‘singularity time’. But … until computer power reaches a final ceiling, there must be further growth of less than two orders of magnitude. This translates to an ultimate computer power of less than 10**25 Flops, which is in flagrant contradiction with Kurzweil’s forecast of 10**50 and beyond!”

Modis is passionate about his anti-Singularity beliefs. Although I first read about the 56 year energy cycle in his 1992 book and have been in contact with him since my 1996 Space Policy article, he more recently gently complained about Figure 1 in Cordell (2006), because it could be misinterpreted to support The Singularity.

Neither Modis nor I actually finished Kurzweil’s book. Modis admits that “Around Page 150 I got fed up and stopped … as science fiction goes, even realistic one like Kurzweil’s, I prefer more literary prose with plot, romance, and less of this science.”

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