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The Singularity is Nearer:
when we merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
After finishing this book in July of 2024, I wrote,
"Whether our futures within the next decade or so turn out to be amazingly good or supremely bad, I doubt they will fall in between. And, even if they do end up being supremely bad, it's likely to be great right up until that point. Kurzweil, whose track record I have followed for decades, is now predicting that, for the diligent, we will reach the Longevity Escape Velocity by 2030, just six years from now.
Are you on for the ride?!"
My clippings below collapse a 432-page book into sixteen pages, measured by using 12-point type in Microsoft Word.
See all my book recommendations.
Here are the selections I made:
Introduction
As a result , as I write this , one dollar buys about 11,200 times as much computing power , adjusting for inflation , as it did when The Singularity Is Near (2005) hit shelves .
Price - Performance of Computation , 1939 – 2023
During the 2030s , self - improving AI and maturing nanotechnology will unite humans and our machine creations as never before — heightening both the promise and the peril even further . If we can meet the scientific , ethical , social , and political challenges posed by these advances , by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better . Yet if we fail , our very survival is in question .
Chapter 2: Reinventing Intelligence
Between the publication of Perceptrons in 1969 and Minsky’s death in 2016 , computational price - performance ( adjusting for inflation ) increased by a factor of about 2.8 billion
It took AlphaGo Zero just twenty - one days to reach the level of AlphaGo Master , the version that defeated sixty top professionals online and the world champion Ke Jie in three out of three games in 2017 .
But that is not the most significant milestone for DeepMind . The next incarnation , AlphaZero , can transfer abilities learned from Go to other games like chess . [ 84 ] The program not only defeated all human challengers at chess but also defeated all other chess - playing machines , and did so after only four hours of training , using no prior knowledge except the rules .
Gmail Smart Reply felt awkward to some at first but quickly gained acceptance by users for its naturalness and convenience , and now it accounts for a significant minority of all Gmail traffic .
OpenAI’s 2019 model GPT - 2 had 1.5 billion parameters , [ 96 ] and despite flashes of promise , it did not work very well . But once transformers got over 100 billion parameters , they unlocked major breakthroughs in AI’s command of natural language — and could suddenly answer questions on their own with intelligence and subtlety .
About three decades ago , in 1993 , I had a debate with my own mentor Marvin Minsky . I argued that we needed about 1014 calculations per second to begin to emulate human intelligence . Minsky , for his part , maintained that the amount of computation was not important , and that we could program a Pentium ( the processor in a desktop computer from 1993 ) to be as intelligent as a human .
Although computation speeds for the same cost have been doubling roughly every 1.4 years on average since 2000 , the actual growth in the total computations ( “ compute ” ) used to train a state - of - the - art artificial intelligence model has been doubling every 5.7 months since 2010 .
We are going to accelerate the extension of our life spans starting in the 2020s , so if you are in good health and younger than eighty , this will likely happen during your lifetime .
Chapter 4: Life Is Getting Exponentially Better
In 1620 , the Mayflower took sixty - six days to make the crossing . [ 11 ] By the American Revolution , in 1775 , better shipbuilding and navigation had shaved the time to about forty days . [ 12 ] In 1838 , the paddle - wheel steamship Great Western completed the journey in fifteen days , [ 13 ] and by 1900 the four - funnel , propeller - driven liner Deutschland made the transit in five days and fifteen hours . [ 14 ] In 1937 , the turboelectric - powered liner Normandie cut it to three days and twenty - three hours .
In 1939 , the first service by Pan Am flying boats took just thirty - six hours , [ 16 ] and the first jet airline service , in 1958 , made the trip in less than ten and a half hours . [ 17 ] In 1976 , the supersonic Concorde slashed this to just three and a half hours !
During the Enlightenment , literacy gradually became more widespread , but by 1750 only the Netherlands and Great Britain , among major European powers , had more than a 50 percent literacy rate .
By 1900 , though , still fewer than one in four people could read . [ 49 ] During the twentieth century , public education expanded globally , and worldwide literacy exceeded one in four by 1910 .
By 1970 a majority of the world’s population had become literate .
Today the worldwide literacy rate is nearly 87 percent , and developed countries often boast figures above 99 percent .
In 1870 the population of the United States had on average around four years of formal education — while those of the United Kingdom , Japan , France , India , and China were all below one year .
By 2021 India averaged 6.7 years of education and China 7.6 years .
Availability of Flush Toilets , Electricity , Radio , Television , and Computers
By 1951 more than 95 percent of American homes had electricity , and by 1956 the national electrification effort was regarded as essentially complete .
By 1950 more than nine out of ten American households had a radio , but during that same decade television began to supplant radio’s dominance of the media landscape .
( In 2007 , the year the first iPhone was released , only 12 percent of Americans listened to online radio at least once a week ; by 2021 this had reached 62 percent . )
New stations sprang up nationwide , and by 1954 a majority of households had at least one TV .
Adoption increased rapidly , and by 1962 more than 90 percent of households had a set .
In January 1990 there were roughly 175,000 hosts across the internet’s entire Domain Name System . [ 96 ] By January 2000 this had soared to around 72,000,000 . [ 97 ] Likewise , the volume of worldwide internet traffic grew from about 12,000 gigabytes in 1990 to 306,000,000 gigabytes in 1999 .
Computers embedded in smartphones have rapidly expanded market penetration in the developing world , and as of 2022 around two - thirds of the world’s population has at least one .
So we have nearly tripled life expectancy in the past thousand years , and doubled it in the past two centuries .
For example , from 1880 to 1900 , life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from about thirty - nine to forty - nine , but from 1980 to 2000 — after the focus of medicine had shifted from infectious disease to chronic and degenerative disease — it only increased from seventy - four to seventy - six .
In 1820 , an estimated 84 percent of the world population was living in extreme poverty by modern global standards .
By 2019 extreme poverty ( presently defined as living on less than $ 2.15 a day in 2017 dollars ) was down to around 8.4 percent worldwide , having dropped by more than two - thirds between 1990 and 2013 .
From 1990 to 2013 there was an astonishing 95 percent drop in East Asia’s extreme poverty , in a total population that grew from 1.6 billion to 2 billion during that period .
2020 : $ 191.00 2015 : $ 169.88 2010 : $ 154.15 2000 : $ 147.18 1990 : $ 124.32 1980 : $ 102.41 1970 : $ 89.82 1960 : $ 65.27 1950 : $ 52.97 1940 : $ 35.47 1930 : $ 30.74 1910 : $ 26.45 1900 : $ 20.08 1880 : $ 15.08 1860 : $ 13.27 1840 : $ 8.37 1800 : $ 5.65 1774 : $ 7.06
Real personal income per hour in constant dollars has steadily increased in the United States , from around $ 5 per hour in 1880 to around $ 93 per hour in 2021 .
For example , in Oxford in the fourteenth century , there were an estimated 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year , whereas in London today there is less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year .
He estimates that these societies averaged a rate of death in warfare of 524 per 100,000 people per year . By comparison , the twentieth century saw two world wars — which included genocide , atomic bombings , and the largest - scale organized violence the world has ever seen — yet in Germany , Japan , and Russia , three of the countries hit hardest by this slaughter , the annual war death rates during that century were just 144 , 27 , and 135 per 100,000 , respectively . The United States , by comparison , made it through the twentieth century with just 3.7 annual warfare deaths per 100,000 , despite entering into conflicts all over the world .
In 1900 just 3 percent of the world’s population lived in what we would currently consider democracies , as even the United States still denied women the right to vote and enforced segregation against African Americans .
By 1922 , in the aftermath of World War I , that had climbed to 19 percent .
With the breakup of the Soviet Union , democracy again expanded rapidly , reaching almost 54 percent of the world’s population by 1999 .
When Konrad Zuse built the first working programmable computer , the Z2 , in 1939 , it could perform around 0.0000065 computations per second per 2023 dollar .
In 1965 , the PDP - 8 managed around 1.8 computations per second per dollar .
When my book The Age of Intelligent Machines was published in 1990 , the MT 486DX could achieve about 1,700 .
When The Age of Spiritual Machines appeared nine years later , Pentium III CPUs were up to 800,000 .
And when The Singularity Is Near debuted in 2005 , some Pentium 4s were at 12 million .
As this book goes to print in early 2024 , Google Cloud TPU v5e chips are likely around 130 billion operations per second per dollar !
When a teenager in Africa spends $ 50 on a smartphone , it counts as $ 50 of economic activity , despite the fact that this purchase is equivalent to over a billion dollars of computation and communication technology circa 1965 , and millions of dollars circa 1985 .
As a personal example , when I attended MIT in 1965 , the school was so advanced that it actually had computers . The most notable of them , an IBM 7094 , had 150,000 bytes of “ core ” storage and a quarter of a MIPS ( million instructions per second ) of computing speed . It cost $ 3.1 million ( in 1963 dollars , which is $ 30 million in 2023 dollars ) and was shared by thousands of students and professors .
By comparison , the iPhone 14 Pro , released while this book was being written , cost $ 999 and could achieve up to 17 trillion operations per second for AI - related applications . [ 206
At least roughly , the iPhone is 68 million times faster than the 7094 and less than one 30,000th the cost . In terms of price - performance ( speed per dollar ) , this is a staggering two - trillion - fold improvement .
As a teenager I saved up for years from the earnings of my paper route to buy a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for several thousand dollars , and that counted for thousands of dollars of GDP . By contrast , a teenager today with a smartphone has access to a vastly superior encyclopedia in Wikipedia — one that counts for nothing in economic activity because it’s free .
Solar made up about 3.6 percent of worldwide electricity in 2021 .
Most archaeologists estimate that the birth of human agriculture took place around 12,000 years ago , but there is some evidence that the earliest agriculture may date as far back as 23,000 years .
In 1866 , US corn farmers averaged an estimated 24.3 bushels per acre , and by 2021 this had reached 176.7 bushels per acre . [
Worldwide , land efficiency improvement has been roughly exponential , and today we need , on average , less than 30 percent of the land that we needed in 1961 to grow a given quantity of crops .
As a result , farmwork has gone from constituting 80 percent of all labor in the United States in 1810 to 40 percent in 1900 to less than 1.4 percent today . [
Just as I write this , this technology is spreading to the United States , where in 2021 a company called Alquist 3D completed the first owner - occupied 3D - printed home ,
Diligent People Will Achieve Longevity Escape Velocity by Around 2030
And so , by around 2030 , the most diligent and informed people will reach “ longevity escape velocity ” — a tipping point at which we can add more than a year to our remaining life expectancy for each calendar year that passes .
Chapter 5: The Future of Jobs: Good or Bad?
But when Google launched an ambitious AI - driven project in 2009 , progress began to rapidly accelerate
The project became an independent company called Waymo , which by 2020 was offering fully autonomous ride - hailing taxis to the public in the Phoenix area , followed by expansion to San Francisco .
University scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne ranked about seven hundred occupations on their likelihood of being disrupted by the early 2030s . [ 14 ] At a 99 percent likelihood of being able to be automated were such job categories as telemarketers , insurance underwriters , and tax preparers . [ 15 ] More than half of all occupations had a greater than 50 percent likelihood of being automatable .
In 1900 the total US workforce was around 29 million , comprising 38 percent of the population . [ 29 ] In early 2023 it was around 166 million , comprising over 49 percent of the population .
And despite the reduction in hours worked , workers ’ average annual earnings have multiplied more than fourfold in constant dollars since 1929 .
The year 1890 marked the first time a majority of Americans did not work on farms , and the trend was accelerating sharply by 1910 as tractors powered by steam or internal combustion engines replaced slow and inefficient work animals .
For example , in 1850 wheat yields in the United Kingdom were 0.44 ton per acre . [ 44 ] As of 2022 they had risen to 3.84 tons per acre .
As demand grew , factories had to hire new armies of workers , and peacetime manufacturing employment peaked around 1920 at an estimated 26.9 percent of the civilian labor force .
In fact , in the two decades from 1992 to 2012 , as computerization transformed factory production , the hourly output of the average manufacturing worker doubled ( adjusting for inflation ) . [ 56 ]
After staying steadily between 20 and 25 percent from 1920 to 1970 , manufacturing employment has steadily shrunk as a fraction of the labor force in the five decades since — to 17.5 percent in 1980 , 14.1 percent in 1990 , 12.1 percent in 2000 , and bottoming at 7.5 percent in 2010 .
Starting in 2022 , publicly available systems like DALL - E 2 , Midjourney , and Stable Diffusion used AI to create high - quality graphic art based on text - based prompts from humans .
So the problem is that GDP naturally counts today’s $ 900 chip as equivalent to one produced over two decades ago , even though the current one is more than 72,000 times more powerful for the same price . Thus , nominal wealth and income increases over the past few decades do not properly reflect the massive lifestyle advantages enabled by new technology . This distorts the interpretation of economic data and creates misleading perceptions , such as apparently slow or even stagnant wage growth . Even if your nominal wages stayed flat over the past two decades , you can now buy many thousands of times more computing power with them .
This dynamic is even stronger for digital goods , which can be produced almost for free . Once Amazon has formatted an e - book for sale , selling new copies of it doesn’t take any additional paper , ink , or labor — so it sells for a nearly infinite multiple of its marginal cost . As a result , the close relationship between marginal cost , price , and consumers ’ willingness to pay has been weakened . In the case of services whose marginal cost is low enough that they can be free to consumers altogether , that relationship breaks down completely . Once Google has designed its search algorithms and built its server farms , providing a user with one additional search costs almost nothing .
As Tim Worstall estimated in Forbes in 2015 , Facebook’s US - based revenue was about $ 8 billion , which would thus be its official contribution to GDP . [ 99 ] But if you value the amount of time people spend on Facebook even at minimum wage , the true benefit to consumers was around $ 230 billion .
Steven Pinker argued in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature : Why Violence Has Declined , this decline is the result of deep civilizational trends — factors like states based on the rule of law , growing literacy , and economic development .
Stanford research found that an estimated 39 percent of American heterosexual couples in 2017 had met online — many of those through mobile apps like Tinder and Hinge .
Chapter 6: The Next Thirty Years in Health and Well-Being
On January 11 , 2020 , Chinese authorities released the virus’s genetic sequence . [ 11 ] Moderna scientists got to work with powerful machine - learning tools that analyzed what vaccine would work best against it , and just two days later they had created the sequence for its mRNA vaccine . [ 12 ] On February 7 the first clinical batch was produced . After preliminary testing , it was sent to the National Institutes of Health on February 24 . And on March 16 — just sixty - three days after sequence selection — the first dose went into a trial participant’s arm .
A 2019 study showed that a neural net analyzing natural - language clinical metrics was able to diagnose pediatric diseases better than eight junior physicians exposed to the same data — and outperformed all twenty human doctors in some areas .
The first reference to nanotechnology was made by the physicist Richard Feynman ( 1918 – 1988 ) in his seminal 1959 lecture “ There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom , ” in which he described the inevitability of creating machines at the scale of individual atoms , as well as the profound implications of doing
Chapter 7: Peril
The global community has negotiated a number of international treaties [ 9 ] that have successfully reduced the total number of active warheads to fewer than 9,500 from a peak of 64,449 in 1986 , [ 10 ] halted environmentally harmful aboveground testing , [ 11 ] and kept outer space nuclear - free .
It took thirteen years after its discovery to sequence full - length genome of HIV in 1996 , and only thirty - one days to sequence the SARS virus in 2003 , and we can now sequence many biological viruses in a single day .
With biotechnology risks , we can still be subject to a pandemic such as COVID - 19 , which caused nearly seven million deaths in the world through 2023 ,
Appendix: Price-Performance of Computation, 1939–2023 Chart Sources
1939 Z2 Real price : $ 50,489.31 Computations per second : 0.33 Computations / second / dollar : 0.0000065
1941 Z3 Real price : $ 136,849.13 Computations per second : 1.25 Computations / second / dollar : 0.0000091
1943 Colossus Mark 1 Real price : $ 33,811,510.61 Computations per second : 5,000 Computations / second / dollar : 0.00015
1946 ENIAC Real price : $ 11,601,846.15 Computations per second : 5,000 Computations / second / dollar : 0.00043
1949 BINAC Real price : $ 3,523,451.43 Computations per second : 3,500 Computations / second / dollar : 0.00099
1953 UNIVAC 1103 Real price : $ 10,356,138.62 Computations per second : 50,000 Computations / second / dollar : 0.0048
1959 DEC PDP - 1 Real price : $ 1,239,649.32 Computations per second : 100,000 Computations / second / dollar : 0.081
1962 DEC PDP - 4 Real price : $ 647,099.67 Computations per second : 62,500 Computations / second / dollar : 0.097
1965 DEC PDP - 8 Real price : $ 172,370.29 Computations per second : 312,500 Computations / second / dollar : 1.81
1969 Data General Nova Real price : $ 65,754.33 Computations per second : 169,492 Computations / second / dollar : 2.58
1973 Intellec 8 Real price : $ 16,291.71 Computations per second : 80,000 Computations / second / dollar : 4.91
1975 Altair 8800 Real price : $ 3,481.85 Computations per second : 500,000 Computations / second / dollar : 144
1984 Apple Macintosh Real price : $ 7,243.62 Computations per second : 1,600,000 Computations / second / dollar : 221
1986 Compaq Deskpro 386 ( 16 MHz ) Real price : $ 17,886.96 Computations per second : 4,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 224
1987 PC’s Limited 386 ( 16 MHz ) Real price : $ 11,946.43 Computations per second : 4,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 335
1988 Compaq Deskpro 386 / 25 Real price : $ 20,396.30 Computations per second : 8,500,000 Computations / second / dollar : 417
1990 MT 486DX Real price : $ 11,537.40 Computations per second : 20,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 1,733
1992 Gateway 486DX2 / 66 Real price : $ 6,439.31 Computations per second : 54,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 8,386
1994 Pentium ( 75 MHz ) Real price : $ 4,477.91 Computations per second : 87,100,000 Computations / second / dollar : 19,451
1996 Pentium Pro ( 166 MHz ) Real price : $ 3,233.73 Computations per second : 242,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 74,836
1997 Mobile Pentium MMX ( 133 MHz ) Real price : $ 533.76 Computations per second : 184,092,000 Computations / second / dollar : 344,898
1998 Pentium II ( 450 MHz ) Real price : $ 1,238.05 Computations per second : 713,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 575,905
1999 Pentium III ( 450 MHz ) Real price : $ 898.06 Computations per second : 722,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 803,952
2000 Pentium III ( 1.0 GHz ) Real price : $ 1,734.21 Computations per second : 1,595,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 919,725
2001 Pentium 4 ( 1700 MHz ) Real price : $ 599.55 Computations per second : 1,843,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 3,073,978
2002 Xeon ( 2.4 GHz ) Real price : $ 392.36 Computations per second : 2,480,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 6,323,014
2004 Pentium 4 ( 3.0 GHz ) Real price : $ 348.12 Computations per second : 3,181,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 9,137,738
2005 Pentium 4 662 ( 3.6 GHz ) Real price : $ 619.36 Computations per second : 7,200,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 11,624,919
2006 Core 2 Duo E6300 Real price : $ 273.82 Computations per second : 14,880,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 54,342,788
2007 Pentium Dual - Core E2180 Real price : $ 122.23 Computations per second : 16,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 130,899,970
2008 GTX 285 Real price : $ 502.98 Computations per second : 708,500,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 1,408,604,222
2010 GTX 580 Real price : $ 690.15 Computations per second : 1,581,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 2,290,796,652
2012 GTX 680 Real price : $ 655.59 Computations per second : 3,250,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 4,957,403,270
2015 Titan X ( Maxwell 2.0 ) Real price : $ 1,271.50 Computations per second : 6,691,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 5,262,273,757
2016 Titan X ( Pascal ) Real price : $ 1,506.98 Computations per second : 10,974,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 7,282,098,756
2017 AMD Radeon RX 580 Real price : $ 281.83 Computations per second : 6,100,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 21,643,984,475
2021 Google Cloud TPU v4 - 4096 Real price : $ 22,796,129.30 Computations per second : 1,100,000,000,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 48,253,805,968
2023 Google Cloud TPU v5e Real price : $ 3,016.46 Computations per second : 393,000,000,000,000 Computations / second / dollar : 130,285,276,114
Notes
In 1888 , the Hollerith tabulating machine represented the first practically deployed device to perform large - scale computation . The exponential price - performance trend has remained remarkably steady right up through the present .
See chapter 6 for a much more detailed discussion of the factors that cause human life expectancy to currently max out at 120 . As I explain in that chapter , research over the past few decades has identified the specific biochemical processes that cause aging , and as of 2023 there is active research working toward addressing all of them . This doesn’t have to immediately totally cure aging to allow radical life extension — the tipping point will be when , every year , medicine adds at least one additional year to our life expectancy , allowing people to get ahead of the curve , so to speak , and achieve “ longevity escape velocity . ”
In England in 1325 , there were 21.4 homicides per 100,000 people per year . By 1575 it was 5.2 , by 1675 it was 3.5 , and by 1862 it was 1.6 , and it has stayed below that ever since . In Italy , it was 71.7 in 1375 , 7.0 by 1862 , and 0.9 by 2010 .
Technically , “ deep ” neural networks may have as few as three layers , but advances in computing power over the past decade have made much deeper networks practical . A key element of AlphaGo was a thirteen - layer neural network , which it used in 2015 – 16 to surpass the best human Go players . In order for this network to be useful , it needed massive amounts of data , so researchers trained it by simulating up to 1,000 games per second per computer processing unit . In 2017 , AlphaGo Zero simulated about 29 million games with a 79 - layer network , and beat the original AlphaGo 100 games to 0 .
An estimated 42,915 people died in traffic accidents on US roads in 2021 . While there is ongoing debate about how much of this should be attributed to human error , it is clear that the overwhelming majority of crashes have human error as a key component — likely somewhere between 90 and 99 percent . Autonomous vehicles controlled by capable enough AI could eliminate almost all of these .