The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“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.”

“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.”

“A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud, which will directly extend our thinking. In this way, rather than AI being a competitor, it will become an extension of ourselves. By the time this happens, the nonbiological portions”

“When a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?[1]”

“Then, in March of 2023, GPT-4 was rolled out for public testing via ChatGPT. This model achieved outstanding performance on a wide range of academic tests such as the SAT, the LSAT, AP tests, and the bar exam.[119] But its most important advance was its ability to reason organically about hypothetical situations by understanding the relationships between objects and actions—a capability known as world modeling.”

“Today, AI’s remaining deficiencies fall into several main categories, most notably: contextual memory, common sense, and social interaction.”

“Suppose you are in front of a firing squad, and they all miss. You could say, ‘Well, if they hadn’t all missed, I wouldn’t be here to worry about it.”

“Moravec’s paradox.84 In short, mental tasks that seem hard to humans—like square-rooting large numbers and remembering large amounts of information—are comparatively easy for computers. Conversely, mental tasks that are effortless to humans—like recognizing a face or keeping one’s balance while walking—are much more difficult for”

“This leads us to a third case, which is actually not a hypothetical. Every day our own cells undergo a very rapid replacement process. While neurons generally persist, about half of their mitochondria turn over in a month;[46] a neurotubule has a half-life of several days;[47] the proteins that add energy to the synapses are replenished every two to five days;[48] the NMDA receptors in synapses are replaced in a matter of hours;[49] and the actin filaments in the dendrites last for about forty seconds.[50] Our brains are thus almost completely replaced within a few months,”

“Recall my estimate that the computation inside the human brain (at the level of neurons) is on the order of 1014 per second. As of 2023, $1,000 of computing power could perform up to 130 trillion computations per second.[130] Based on the 2000–2023 trend, by 2053 about $1,000 of computing power (in 2023 dollars) will be enough to perform around 7 million times as many computations per second as the unenhanced human brain.[131]”

“The Snapdragon 810, a common chip on smartphones in the $50 range, averages about three billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS) across a range of performance benchmarks.[203] This corresponds to around 60 million computations per second per dollar. The best available computers in 1965 achieved about 1.8 computations per second per dollar, and in 1985 they were up to about 220.[204] At those efficiencies, it would have taken almost $1.7 billion (in 2023 dollars) to match the Snapdragon in 1965 and $13.6 million in 1980.”

“Can machines think?”

“The question of how identity relates to replacing an object’s parts gradually over time dates back to a thought experiment first posed about 2,500 years ago, called the Ship of Theseus.”

“For example, an American man at age 97 has about a 30 percent chance of dying before 98, and if he makes it that far he will have a 32 percent chance of dying before 99. But from age 110 onward, the risk of death rises by about 3.5 percentage points a year.”

“because in many areas AI can actually do a better job than the humans it is replacing. Self-driving cars will be much safer than those operated by human drivers, and the AI will never get drunk, drowsy, or distracted.”

“In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) published an article in Mind titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”[1] In it, Turing asked one of the most profound questions in the history of science: “Can machines think?” While the idea of thinking machines dates back at least as far as the bronze automaton Talos in Greek myth,[2] Turing’s breakthrough was boiling the concept down to something empirically testable. He proposed using the “imitation game”—which we now know as the Turing test—to determine whether a machine’s computation was able to perform the same cognitive tasks that our brains can. In this test, human judges interview both the AI and human foils using instant messaging without seeing whom they are talking to. The judges then pose questions about any subject matter or situation they wish. If after a certain period of time the judges are unable to tell which was the AI responder and which were the humans, then the AI is said to have passed the test.”

“This is longevity escape velocity.[100] This is why there is sound logic behind Aubrey de Grey’s sensational declaration that the first person to live to 1,000 years has likely already been born.”

“As I have argued in this chapter, contrary to many popular assumptions, life is getting better in profound and fundamental ways for the great majority of people on earth.”

“Humanity currently has roughly 12,700 nuclear warheads, around 9,440 of which are active and could be used in a nuclear war.[3] The United States and Russia each maintain around 1,000 large warheads that could be launched with less than a half hour’s notice.[”

“The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to greatly transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.[94]”

“The US regulatory process involves three main phases of clinical trials, and according to a recent MIT study, only 13.8 percent of candidate drugs make it all the way through to FDA approval.[5] The ultimate result is a process that typically takes a decade to bring a new drug to market, at an average cost estimated between $1.3 billion and $2.6 billion.[”

“learning is currently re-creating the powers of the neocortex, we can assess what AI still needs to achieve to reach human levels, and how we will know when it has. Finally, we’ll turn to how, aided by superhuman AI, we will engineer brain–computer interfaces that vastly expand our neocortices with layers of virtual neurons. This will unlock entirely new modes of thought and ultimately expand our intelligence millions-fold: this is the Singularity.”

“But by far the most important application of AI to medicine in 2020 was the key role it played in designing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. 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.”

“Likewise, such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s involve subtle, complex processes that cause misfolded proteins to build up in the brain and inflict harm.[22] Because it’s impossible to study these effects thoroughly in a living brain, research has been extremely slow and difficult. With AI simulations we’ll be able to understand their root causes and treat patients effectively long before they become debilitated.”

“Before the pandemic, vaccines typically took five to ten years to develop.”

“As of 2023, there are five nations known to have a full “triad” of nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles, air-delivery bombs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles): the United States (5,244 warheads), Russia (5,889), China (410), Pakistan (170), and India (164).[8] Three other nations are known to have a more limited form of delivery system: France (290), the United Kingdom (225), and North Korea (around 30).”

“In 2020 a team at MIT used AI to develop a powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in existence. Rather than evaluate just a few types of antibiotics, it analyzed 107 million of them in a matter of hours and returned twenty-three potential candidates, highlighting two that appear to be the most effective.[”

“accessible, we are integrating these capabilities ever more closely with our natural biological intelligence. Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelligence and consciousness so profoundly that it’s difficult to comprehend. This event is what I mean by the Singularity.”

“So the neocortex was essentially waiting for a calamity in order to take over the world. That crisis, which we now call the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, 135 million years after the neocortex came into existence. Due to an asteroid impact and possibly also volcanic activity, the environment all across the earth changed suddenly, resulting in about 75 percent of all animal and plant species, including the dinosaurs, going extinct. (While the creatures we commonly know as dinosaurs went extinct during this event, some scientists consider birds to be a surviving branch of dinosaurs.)[50]”

“Waymo’s self-driving vehicles have traveled well over 20 million fully autonomous miles at the time of this writing”