Technology and Human Enhancement
Machines are increasingly exceeding us in the performance of more and more tasks, from guiding objects like
missiles or satellites to assembling other machines. They are merging with us ever more intimately and are learning how to reconfigure our biology in new and significantly
faster technological domains.
Originally published in The
Futurist March-April 2006. Reprinted on KurzweilAI.net February
3, 2006.
This article is a response to Ray Kurzweil's feature in The
Futurist, Reinventing
Humanity. You can also read other responses to Kurzweil's article
by Terry
Grossman, J.
Storrs Hall, Damien
Broderick, and Richard
Eckersley. Ray Kurzweil's response to Eckersley's comments can
be found here.
Click here
to read a PDF of the full feature.
I have a few differences of opinion with Kurzweil about the coming
Singularity.
I think he is being overly optimistic about biotechnology’s
ability to create substantially better biological human beings.
While we'll certainly learn to push human capacities to their natural
limits in coming decades, I see nothing on the horizon that would
allow us to exceed those limits. Biology seems far too frail, slow,
complex, and well defended (both at the molecular level and with
regard to social custom) for that to be plausible within any reasonable
time frame. Furthermore, by the time we are able to substantially
improve our biology, we probably won’t want to, as there will
be far more interesting and powerful technological environments
available to us instead. This points to the importance of understanding
the relative accelerations of various technologies (in this case,
biological vs. technological).
Kurzweil makes a major contribution to the literature on acceleration
studies by clearly explaining technological acceleration curves.
These acceleration curves show that the longer we use a technology,
the more we get out of it: We use less energy, space, and time,
and we get more capacity for less cost. Technological acceleration
curves are a little-understood area, but thanks to pioneers like
Kurzweil, interest and research in the field are advancing.
The notion that the “future can't be predicted" is demonstrably
false with regard to a wide number of accelerating physical-computational
trends, even though we do not yet know specifically how those technologies
will be implemented. We can no longer ignore the profound technological
changes occurring all around us.
It's also time we acknowledged the slowness of human biology compared
to our technological progeny. Our machines are increasingly exceeding
us in the performance of more and more tasks, from guiding objects
like missiles or satellites to assembling other machines. They are
merging with us ever more intimately, andare learning how to reconfigure
our biology in new and significantly faster technological domains.
Something very interesting is happening, and human beings are selective
catalysts, not absolute controllers, of this process. Let us face
this openly, and investigate it actively, so that we may guide these
developments as wisely as possible.
© 2006 John Smart. Reprinted with permission.
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