The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist’s View
A professor of Neuroscience, David Linden, breaks down some of Kurzweil’s more specific predictions. Some members of the singularity community are criticizing him for critiquing Kurzweil without offering predictions of his own.
I’m with Linden however: you can’t predict the future with any degree of accuracy, the only thing you can do is predict and prepare for future large scale trends. Trying to predict specifically how we evolving and sometimes crazy humans will apply any particular technology, or how we will mix and match any two or three of them always becomes a very dicey thing.
Kurzweil predicts that by the late 2030s, we will be able to routinely scan an individual’s brain with such molecular precision and with such a complete understanding of the rules underlying neuronal function and plasticity that we will be able to “upload” our mental life into a vastly powerful and capacious future computer. As Kurzweil describes it his book The Singularity is Near , “This process would capture a person’s entire personality, memory, skills and history.”
At that point, boundaries between brain, mind, and machine would fall away. Once our individual mental selves are instantiated in machine form, manipulations of mental function, perception, and action just become software modules. Want to improve your mood? Want to preserve all your experiences in memories with perfect fidelity? Want to have the mother of all orgasms? There’s an app for that.
As much as I respect Ray Kurzweil and appreciate his willingness to make predictions about and argue for specific future events, I take issue with his timetables for both the introduction of brain-nanobots and the ability to upload the contents and meaning of a brain.
neuro2.jpg Image: Harris KM, Fiala JC, Ostroff L. Structural changes at dendritic spine synapses during long-term potentiation.. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 358, 745-748 (2003).
I am a neurobiologist and I have spent the past 28 years engaged in studies of the cellular and molecular basis of memory and cognition. I am an optimist and a technophile, but I believe that I speak for the vast majority of brain researchers when I express serious doubts about Kurweil’s timetable.
The central premise underlying his predictions is that enabling technologies like computer processors, computer memory, microscopes, brain scanners, and DNA sequencing machines have been on an exponential rather than a linear trajectory in terms of their capacity, speed, resolution, and real-world cost, and that it is reasonable to imagine that this exponential trend will continue. Kurzweil also assumes that the human mind resides entirely in the brain (or at least in the nervous system): There is no immortal soul, collective energy, or other nonbiological component that encodes our individual mental selves. At this point in his argument I’m still on board.
However, Kurzweil then argues that our understanding of biology—and of neurobiology in particular—is also on an exponential trajectory, driven by enabling technologies. The unstated but crucial foundation of Kurzweil’s scenario requires that at some point in the 2020s, a miracle will occur: If we keep accumulating data about the brain at an exponential rate (its connection maps, its activity patterns, etc.), then the long-standing mysteries of development, consciousness, perception, decision, and action will necessarily be revealed. Our understanding of brain function and our ability to measure the relevant parameters of individual brains (aided by technologies like brain nanobots) will consequently increase in an exponential manner to allow for brain-uploading to computers in the year 2039.
That’s where I get off the bus.