Books
Ray Kurzweil. The Singularity is Nearer (when we merge with AI).
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MPH, MSc
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Raymond Kurzweil (1948-) is a graduate in computer science, having received more than 20 honorary doctorates from various universities in recognition of his contributions in technology and artificial intelligence. He published in 2024 his work "The Singularity Is Nearer", a sequel to his work "The Singularity Is Nearer published in 2005". Ray Kurzweil proposes a techno-futuristic vision where artificial intelligence, biotechnology and computing will merge mind and machine, progressively replacing the human being. He predicts that in the next decade of 2030, AI simulation will occur directly in the sensory cortexes, producing a fully immersive environment, and the existence of realistic human replicas through nanotechnology to which we can export our minds.
Marvin Minsky proposed two ways in which solutions to problems could be computed. The first is a symbolic approach, based on the formulation of explicit rules as if-then structures combined together. Many traditional computer programs have operated with this type of logic, but it is necessary to identify in advance which are the optimal rules for each situation, so they have limitations. The connectionist approach, on the other hand, uses networks of interconnected nodes that generate intelligence from their structure, rather than from predefined content. Instead of applying explicit rules, these networks detect patterns, learning by training with large volumes of data. This architecture is inspired by the way the human nervous system operates, where successful synaptic connections are reinforced through processes of synaptic potentiation and inhibition, replicating the logic of reinforcement learning. For Minsky, a 1990 computer already had enough power to emulate a human intelligence; the problem was that the right program or algorithm did not exist. Kurzweil defended the opposite position. For him, intelligence is proportional to processing power. Neither could prove his thesis at the time, Minsky did not have the algorithm, and Kurzweil did not have computers with the necessary power. However, Kurweil thinks that recent developments in technology reinforce his position. There are supercomputers that have surpassed the exaFLOP barrier, reaching computational levels that would be on the order of 10,000 times the processing speed of the human brain. For Kurzweil, the non-biological part of our brain will have a much greater computational capacity than the biological part.
Our biological body is suboptimal, as it is the product of random processes, determined by environmental circumstances and chance during the evolution of organisms. The same structural limitation is found in the nervous system, which impedes further information processing. In the same way that the evolution of species has been adding layers of processing, from subcortical structures to the layers of the neocortex, layers of information processing can be added by hardware. This implies the expansion of the nervous system to prosthetic units, first external (we already rely on them), but eventually internal. Nanotechnology will culminate directly in the expansion of our brain, with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. At this point we will merge completely with AI, expanding our intelligence and consciousness in a way so profound, it is actually difficult to comprehend. Just as an animal can hardly comprehend symbolic and metacognitive information that it is not processing, neither can a human being comprehend all those degrees of possibility that it is not processing. Therefore, for Kurzweil we must question what human beings are and leave behind a biology that limits us, opening the door to a directed evolution through bioengineering and artificial intelligence. This implies that it is possible to explore the range of unselected genetic possibilities through bioengineering processes, or even through simple computation of consciousness, transcending the very biological structure of bodies.
It was mathematics professor John McCarthy who proposed the term artificial intelligence in 1956. Kurzweil predicts that in the 2030s AI will not be something external that we interact with through a screen, but that we will connect directly to it, integrating with our brains through an immersive experience. This implies that AI will progressively become part of our brain activity, our cognition and our sensory experience. In doing so, it will be an extension of our mind and consciousness, and thus of our identity. John von Neumann anticipated the idea of a "technological singularity" around 1960. The singularity is the moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, self-improving at exponential speed, radically transforming civilization, and bringing an end to the human era.
The first problem of identity is that we run into the paradox of Theseus' ship, which the Greeks exposed 2000 years ago. If we replace a part of a boat, the boat has changed, although it also remains the same boat. In the same way, a river has completely different water at each moment, but we consider that it is still the same river. Similarly, we people are not molecularly the same for one tenth of a second of our lives. This sense of permanence was for this reason seen by Buddhists as a delusion of the mind. In the same way, we could change all the parts of a ship, and it would still be the same ship. The same is true of our brain. Neurons persist, although their cellular machinery is renewed every moment, with mitochondria, receptors, synaptic proteins, etc. being replaced. Our brain can be completely new every few months. And yet, the sense of consciousness remains even though all the machinery that produces it is different.
There would be two different aspects to understand about consciousness. The first is as a fundamental quality, something you either have or don't have. In general we assume that inert matter does not have consciousness, while living beings do. Since a living being has consciousness, different degrees of that consciousness would be experienced according to the organism. Many people think that an insect must have some kind of consciousness of first-person experience of its environment, however rudimentary it may be. Some minimal sentience. Some authors consider that this extends even to microscopic levels, or even to plants. Moreover, a growing number of philosophers think that all matter around us can actually have some degree of consciousness, and that the only difference is the complexity of what that aggregation of matter processes. From this point of view, even an atom would have a minimum of awareness of its existence, even if it were residual.
Some people believe in a completely materialistic view, under which consciousness is caused by physical processes, by matter, with its different levels of complexity. At the opposite extreme, idealistic views presuppose that only consciousness exists. The perception of the material world is something that, we could say, we hallucinate (this would be the argument of the famous Matrix saga). Dualistic views understand that consciousness is something completely separate from dead matter, and can fit with a view of soul, as well as other vitalistic ideas. The main problem with dualism is that we have no theory to explain how the supranatural soul affects matter. Physicalism on the other hand does not allow us to explain the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., the existence of consciousness in the first place. Other visions, we could say intermediate, place consciousness on a different plane from matter. Some authors, such as Roger Penrose, place consciousness at the quantum level. Others believe that consciousness is something else, completely separate from physical processes, something that does not emerge from lower processes of matter, but precedes it, being created by God. Pantheistic views see in all material forms the expression of a God who expresses himself in everything, forming integral parts of an absolute consciousness that is part of everything. For David Chalmers, consciousness would not be a biological phenomenon but rather something like a fundamental force of the universe that biological matter processes. Under this idea, panprotopsychism, consciousness is something that exists outside of organisms, and outside of material physics. Living organisms simply "connect" or interact with it from a physical plane. The complexity of matter would process that field of consciousness in different ways. Kurzweil is receptive to Chalmers' framework. This assumes that the type of matter really doesn't matter, be it carbon from biology or silicon from hardware, consciousness would be produced equally.
Returning to Theseus' ship, our brain is made up of nuclei and neural networks, and these of neurons functionally active at the individual level. Neurons are ultimately amino acids, atoms, protons, electrons, and so on. Therefore, nothing that cannot be created and reproduced physically. The unitary perception of consciousness as a person is also somewhat intriguing. It seems that the brain is composed of subunits of consciousness, and we know that they can fragment. Therefore, the unified consciousness in a single stream is part of an aggregate of parts of consciousness. In studies using surgery, it is known that people can show separate consciousnesses with different interests, and that each brain lobe can be accessed separately, showing different tastes and opinions. Gazzaniga's studies are well known in this regard. Thus consciousness seems to function not only emergently in a unitary sense, but through subprocesses with autonomous consciousness at each level that aggregate to form higher levels of complexity.
Contrary to the deterministic inertia of most scientists, Kurzweil thinks that basic brain processes give rise to processes that do not function in a linearly reducible way. This implies that we can live in a physical world from fundamental laws, while free will exists. Wolfram proposed that extremely simple systems can generate incredibly complex and unpredictable behaviors with examples of cellular automata, challenging reductionist versions of determinism. For Wolfram, complexity arises from deterministic programs, but they produce complex patterns, so the result is something beyond the program. Replicating brain function does not equate to the ability to pre-compute its future states. Therefore, a world deterministic in its processes, with mechanistic causation, can have free will. Brain processes do not control us, we do. From basic processes they emerge into the consciousness with which we express ourselves in the world through actions. However, causal openness produces a certain indeterminism, which does not necessarily imply free will in the sense of autonomous agency derived from self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. The fact that something is unpredictable does not imply that it is free nor does it demonstrate intentionality in the sense of subjective experience, therefore, it would not solve the hard problem.
By the 2040s, Kurzweil thinks there will be nanobots that will penetrate the brain via blood capillaries with the capacity to make a copy of all data. Then there will be a complete replica of each person's mind. This is a first type of immortality. It remains to be resolved whether it is a replica of the person or the self-consciousness itself with the capacity to be exported. Not only will this expand our brain capacity exponentially, but it is the first type of immortality. For Kurtzweil this is freeing us from our skull. It wouldn't just affect us. We could make an animal expand its consciousness. In this assumption, we would theoretically be able to talk to our pet, because its cognitive capacity would be expanded in the cloud and its neural activity transformed into language by software. It also assumes that we could fully control behavior by activating neural patterns, something we already know from experiments on neural activation with optogenetics in animals.
Copying our mind in backup devices will be a protection against any accident or disease. We could have a replica of a person, progressively indistinguishable from that person. However, we are facing the problem called philosophical zombie, the creation of a replica without consciousness in the first person. Only the replica could know if it has a consciousness by experiencing it in the first person. The problem arises because there is no scientific way to objectify and demonstrate externally whether that replica has a consciousness or not. We cannot demonstrate if that being is not conscious, neither can we demonstrate it of an insect for example, although we can manipulate its neurons and change its behavior. But we do not know what it is experiencing subjectively.
For Kurzweil, this is a reason to treat artificial intelligence as a conscious being, even though we cannot prove it. It would be the right way to act morally. The Turing test would not only serve to establish human-level cognitive abilities, but would also be a test of subjective consciousness and thus of moral rights. This may imply legal rights for AI. Kurtzweil does not address a question that is self-evident to me: what if the computational model itself says that it is not conscious: should we act a priori as if it were conscious, or should we take what it tells us?
Brain simulations could be summarized in five categories: functional, connectomic, molecular cellular, and quantum. Functional emulations would process information trying to simulate the mind. The connectomic models would replicate the hierarchical connections between groups of neurons, emulating mental activity at the level of structure. The cellular model would replicate information processing at the cellular level. The bio-molecular model would replicate information processing at the level of its internal cellular machinery. The most advanced phase would possibly be quantum emulation that would replicate processing at the subatomic level, however, according to Kurzweil, it would require a power that would not be achieved even in this century. There are authors who believe that consciousness begins precisely at a quantum level. Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is independent of the machinery that produces it, and that the quantum level is not actually necessary.
A classic of medical and scientistic propaganda is to confuse public health (or just health) with medicine. It is in fact one of the great foundational myths of our Western societies, a central element of the false schemes of the population, and of the rationalizing violence of the system. Kurzweil implies that the improvement in the life expectancy of the population is essentially due to medical and pharmacological advances. This is completely false, and ignorant. Despite occupying a majority place in the collective imagination, medicine has only contributed to a tiny percentage of life expectancy.
https://www.annfammed.org/content/17/3/267
Life expectancy has increased primarily because of the separation of drinking and waste water, garbage collection, sewerage and general cleanliness of cities, better nutrition, etc. Moreover, most of the gain in life expectancy is pre-1950, while the pharmacology that is often alluded to is post-1950. The epidemiologist Archie Cochrane himself, one of the fathers of evidence-based medicine, showed in the late 1960s that the expected positive correlation between a country's supply of medical treatment and life expectancy did not occur.
https://jech.bmj.com/content/32/3/200
On the other hand, life expectancy is not the years that adults live, but is determined mainly by infant mortality. Childhood infectious disease determines most of a society's life expectancy statistics. However, the causes of infant mortality are not only biological, and neonaticide and infanticide have been common in the face of disease, impairment, or difficult life circumstances. In our societies we shift this to hundreds of thousands of abortions, thereby increasing life expectancy statistics. Reproductive issues, whatever we want to classify as "early death" or "abortion", and other decisions regarding the birth of people with severe problems, are an important part of life expectancy statistics. There is even evidence that some systems manage reproductive decisions themselves with the explicit goal of improving the statistical appearance of mortality and life expectancy.
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051
In addition, a significant percentage of the reduction in child mortality is due to the reduction of environmental risks (e.g. child labor), and the reduction of deaths resulting from violence, not the medical treatment of disease. Life expectancy is also influenced by extending people's biological life span, without necessarily extending their functional life span or even their conscious life span. In fact, beyond childhood, adults in many societies without medicine have life expectancies close to that of many developed countries.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12785
On the other hand, most of what we do in medicine and health systems today has no evidence, and some of the most cited articles in epidemiology and scientific methodology question the existing evidence from medical research itself.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S089543562200...
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.p...
Medicine has had a role in decreasing infant mortality, but most of society grossly overvalues the role of medicine in population health to an irrational and mythological extreme. Sometimes mass panic. Most life expectancy is not due to medical factors, but mostly environmental and cultural, and to reduce life expectancy to medicine as Kurzweil does is wrong and ignorant.
The same logic Pinker and Kurzweil follow with violence and crime statistics, confusing falling crime statistics with falling crime. For example, cybercrime continues to rise exponentially, but only a decimal part of the crimes are prosecuted, so they do not compute in any "crime" statistics. Crime moves from the street to the Internet, where the opportunity increases with less exposure. If in some contexts physical aggression decreases, psychological aggression, blackmail and extortion also increase, and in fact, evidence shows that the psychological consequences are more traumatic than the physical ones. This is completely ignored by Kurzweil.
At one point in the book the author mentions, very surprisingly, that perhaps COVID came out of a laboratory. Possibly 20 or 30 million people have died if we compute the excess mortality, which also do not enter in the statistics of "crimes", simply because there is no investigation of those responsible and those who in a coordinated manner have tried to cover it up. However, we call it "COVID" and not "crime", and that's it. Out of the statistics. Obviously the West is not going to do a Nuremberg to investigate itself. Especially since there are a lot of powerful people involved who are obviously not going to investigate themselves. While Pinker or Kurzweil are celebrating statistics designed to take crimes out of the crime statistics. Many of the most dangerous people in the world do not compute in any crime statistics, yet they are part of our most elite institutions and corporations.
The same fallacy applies to our geostrategic interests and "military operations", which of course are not 'crimes', nor do we compute them in our "crime" statistics. Indirect deaths from famine, displacement, disease, or more sophisticated war strategies such as economic asphyxiation are of course also not "crimes" to put on a a la Pinker-Kurzweil chart. In short, there are all kinds of violent actions that produce damage but that we do not compute as "crimes", because the power structures and bureaucracies that make these classifications play conceptual and statistical juggling games that authors such as Kurzweil and Pinker reproduce with an embarrassing sociological amateurism.
Additionally, the epistemic problem that Kurzweil faces with his numerical positivism is that it leads us to the fact that North Korea is a great model of a peaceful society, given that it is one of the countries with the least crime in the world if we look at the statistics of robberies, assaults, homicides, etc. The fact that certain numbers go down does not imply that there is greater welfare or less suffering, or even that it is not the sign of a subdued society that cannot even react to the abuses it suffers. Kurweil and Pinker's model of "peace" confuses moral virtue and social control. Under the facade of numerical progress, Pinker and Kurzweil legitimize Bentham's techno-panoptic dystopia. The decline of violence in the West is paralleled by an increase in institutional violence, something Kurzweil is also unwilling to mention. Millions of people are deprived of their liberty in prisons on a daily basis, mostly for non-violent crimes, something that has been normalized by society, without anyone asking questions about its raison d'être, and with no evidence of its effect on crime at the individual or societal level. Contrary to what Pinker and Kurzweil want to claim, violence does not go away; it is institutionalized, normalized, and pushed out of sight. This is not an improvement in society, but a change in the strategy of social control. It is sociologist Max Weber's purest definition of the monopoly of violence. Even so, physical violence continues to exist, inside the walls. And it is again left out of Pinker and Kurzweil's statistics. Additionally, a high percentage of the inmate population has some diagnosed severe mental disorder. Some professor of forensic psychiatry has bravely wondered if prisons are not in fact the new psychiatrists. The destruction of law to produce a progressive authoritarian legal positivism completely escapes the consciousness of the authors.
Kurweil's concept of poverty is equally numerical, economistic, biased and ethnocentric. He forgets to mention that the concept of poverty is first and foremost relative to the socio-cultural adjustment of the individual to the group and to the ecological framework. Nor does he dare to mention that there is actually more slavery in absolute terms today than 500 years ago, something spectacularly decried everywhere. Not surprisingly, Kurzweil claims that the blame for hunger in Africa is due to not planting genetically modified organisms. The fallacy of this argument is that Africa just needs normal agriculture like we have in the rest of the world, or simply that we stop dumping food on them economically. Taking the opportunity to shoehorn genetically modified organisms is an attempt to take advantage of a situation of political vulnerability of a continent, to transform a political problem into a problem of genetically modified organisms like a Trojan horse. This would also make them dependent on Western corporate and technocratic oligarchies, which would increase their control over the continent at the political, economic and technological levels. I find it difficult to think that Kurzweil's reasoning is naive. Additionally, it would mean subjecting a continent to a massive experiment involving systemic risks and unpredictable consequences on the biosphere.
Clearly, technology is progressing, but this same technological progress means that, for the first time in human history, a single person can destroy the entire world with a not very expensive laboratory. Autonomous cars drive themselves, and that's certainly fascinating. But good old Ray doesn't explain the obvious threat of all this. The automation of vehicles brings with it the control of all of them by the state. Now it is the central system that decides who can use your car and who can't, perhaps because you don't have your biomedical injections up to date, you don't have your points on your license as a dutiful citizen, or because there is a bad flu that winter and they lock everyone up for "public health", 'science', and the "common good". We are normalizing the end of freedom, and the authoritarian use of laws. In his celebration of democracy, Kurzweil omits the question of whether all this is even compatible with any concept of democracy. Pinker himself has in recent years signed a manifesto against existing censorship in universities, and the persecution and "cancellation". To his credit, he has openly criticized the silencing and persecution of public health professors opposed to COVID policies. Yet he contradictorily defends the very system that is producing these dynamics.
Kurzweil is excited about the increase in literacy. He neglects to mention the apparent fall in IQ in the West (reverse Flynn effect), the fall in reading habits, etc. However, we must ask ourselves what is the point of being able to read if we live in a totalitarian system that controls all information in the purest 1984 style. Incredibly, Kurzweil speaks of "disinformation" during COVID. But he does not seem to refer to those who have imposed with censorship and violence a false story about the COVID, but to those who correctly suspected that what was being told was opaque, manipulated or false, and knew that most of the measures that were being taken had no scientific evidence whatsoever. 1984: the lie becomes the truth, and then the truth becomes the lie. I myself cannot publish things for which I have hundreds of scientific studies to prove it, and I can only do so in private. Others can lie openly and are never censored.
Another argument used by Kurzweil is the increase in GDP in the West. He forgets to mention that much of that production is of superfluous things, contrary to the paradigm of efficiency and ecology that he then tries to defend in a frontally contradictory way. He should also explain why, if people's economic capacity is progressively greater, people used to be able to live on their own savings, while now they have to live through debt. It should explain why those people of the past with lower GDP per capita had the capacity to pay for a house in a few years with their salary, and why people today, who enjoy higher GDP per capita, increasingly live at home with their parents because they cannot afford a house. The nominal economy of Kurzweil's graphs is not the real economy of the people. GDP per capita does not show who benefits from that economy. On the contrary, those graphs hide the increasing redistribution and concentration of capital to state and corporate oligarchies that have constructed financial, fiscal and legal schemes that facilitate the extraction of rental value and people's dependence on the system. Although people have tried to convince themselves otherwise.
It is easily objectifiable that technologies tend to decrease in price, since the market tends to decrease them by improving the efficiency of production processes. Kurzweil again exhibits his naivety by talking about cheap prefabricated houses. That has been around for a long time, the housing price problem is not in production, but in politics. The problem of housing is far from being the price of bricks or the price of the building materials you want to use. The price of housing is fundamentally the price of land, the system of rent extraction through a scheme of inflationary engineering, supporting the balance sheets of banks and the issuance of credit through fractional reserve, and the cost of public revenue collection opportunity on all this perfectly calculated framework. It is not the cost of production of materials but the system that prevents cheap housing, because it would destroy the scheme of constant indebtedness with which the constant payment of the citizens is guaranteed. To increase its power over society, the system must maximize its income by extracting rents from it. The State will not allow the cheapening of housing, because it would lose its own financing. Contrary to Kurzweil's vision (I do not know whether he is naive or the opposite), there is not a problem with housing production, but with the political system with which the state and financial oligarchies systematically extract money from society using land as an instrument. The State is not going to release its collection mechanisms because it would lose its economic capacity, and with it it would lose control over society. This is obvious. The rise in the price of land is, in fact, the pillar on which our financial system has been built. It does not occur to me whether the complete automation of production processes can mean the end of this economy. The classic market of people exchanging goods and services will progressively disappear, so that the real economy is heading towards being a mere centralized abstraction of social credit allocation. However, the state will look for a symbolic mortgage that chains people in order to continue to control them. The state will not favor people's autonomy, but their dependence. Kurzweil's cheap prefabricated house will come with a social credit mortgage, the presentation of an up-to-date biomedical product card, etc.
Automation necessarily ends up in a basic income, something Kurzweil does mention. I myself often give this example: think of a small community on an island. Each member has the job of catching 3 or 4 fish every day, to satisfy our only need in this environment, which is to have food to eat. One day, someone invents some fixed nets that catch the fish without anyone having to keep an eye on them. From that moment on, the work scheme of our small community is abruptly interrupted. What is the problem of being left without a job? No problem. There simply has to be an agreement to share the fish. We are facing the same situation, but on a larger scale. The automation of the work is not a problem. The question is how to share out what the automated processes produce. However, given that automation will affect jobs in a differentiated and progressive manner, the question is how to implement the right to this basic income according to the labor sector and the particular circumstances of individuals. Perhaps some people will receive this basic income, and there may be those who receive a basic income and also work for an extra salary. Whether we like it or not, we are going to a socialized system. That is why the system has suddenly changed its discourse towards strongly statist and interventionist ideas in order to get people used to an authoritarian system. The anti-globalization ideas of some of the most important left-wing politicians of the last half century, such as Julio Anguita, have become "ultra-right".
The automation of productive processes should not be confused with the State giving free money to the people, which is what they will try to sell. Automation has been made possible by those who have spent their lives working, and by companies and technologies. However, there is a serious threat. It means increasing people's dependence on the state. It implies absolute centralization, in which "social credit" is the tool of political legitimization. It is the perfect situation of control to which every ruler aspires, the purchase of votes through the blackmail of receiving an income. It means making of the whole society a clientelistic network that receives a socialized rent, exchanging sovereignty and freedom for a quota of money. The State strategically interposes itself between what is produced and the people, creating the illusion of beneficence and a secular divine providence. The fruit of social effort is appropriated and transformed into the illusion of a political favor that the ruler produces and grants to the ruled. This idea is false, and produces an extremely dangerous situation, and actually spells the end of any degree of "democracy" that might exist. It is over.
Pinker and Kurzweil dispatch with mere data issues that are much more complex. Numbers are not neutral as so many people assume. Truth is doomed in the face of persuasion, as Socrates already realized. Presenting simple ideas is more convincing than having to give all kinds of explanations. This is why we live in societies that are inevitably corrupt. Numbers are persuasive because of their appearance of mathematical rationality, but often, numbers are used to hide realities that take away the reason for those numbers. Kurzweil complains about the "cognitive biases" of those of us who don't buy the numbers in the nearly 100 pages devoted to this section. Good old Ray doesn't see his own pile of biases (I tell you about them): inductive fallacy, classification bias, presentism, reductionism, economism, positivism, confusion of the nominal and the real, ethnocentrism, self-confirmation, historicism, technological solutionism... and in short, an amateurism in public health, political and social science in general that is hardly concealable. Of course, these are complex and debatable ideas, but that is precisely what is lacking in the work, and hence the deserved criticism. We would forgive Ray if he had not devoted an entire third of his book to make us go through such an exercise in amateurism and superficiality, especially coming from someone who is supposed to be an intellectual talent who apparently charges between 50,000 and 100,000 euros per lecture.
Kurzweil acknowledges that psychotropic drugs work poorly, or not at all, as well as generating many problems. However, he thinks that mental health problems can be repaired from the ground up. Kurzweil only thinks of bottom-up processes, not quite understanding that many "disorders" are top-down problems. In other words, no neurotransmitter or physiological process can make a person feel that his or her life is full of purpose and significance simply by increasing hedonic tone or some other simple process. The rest is to think of affective engineering, which would only involve the creation of a narcotized phantom, no longer a human consciousness living a life, but a computerized entity at the experiential level. It is problematic to think that the meaning of life should be to go in a direction of efficiency. Then I can put a lever with electrodes directly to my mesolimbic pathway and activate it for self-gratification without having to perform any life experience. Olds and Milner's studies showed that this efficiency pathway activating neurons led experimental animals to a reduction of their lifespan, to death.
Since many of the pathogens that pose a threat come from animals that we began to domesticate only a few thousand years ago, our immune system has not evolved to fight them sufficiently. Kurzweil predicts nanobots that will destroy all the necessary pathogens and repair cells one by one. Before that, though, it is certain that we are moving towards a biomedical system that makes the need for what many doctors currently do questionable. There are already studies comparing AI with physicians in the assessment of imaging tests, etc. There is also theorizing about a major translation of clinical trials to in silico simulations with massive populations.
Nor does Kurzweil tell us what will happen to sexuality, when having a child, if it can be called that, will be a matter of growing a dermal cell in the laboratory. It no longer takes 2 people. It is a bioengineered production. This is already practically a reality. The cult of technology is the very disappearance of the human being as the machine grows. Science fiction has always saved man by separating him from the machine, but this is naive. We don't know if there will be anything human left after all this. Moreover, this transhuman and posthuman project is being done behind the backs of the population, who have no idea where it is all going, nor have they been invited to participate in it. It will be what Pinker and Ray call "democracy". That people can barely come to understand it, fine. I myself have had students who have almost burst into tears in utter confusion.
He doesn't talk much about systemic risks Ray Kurzweil, something that has been more clearly developed by authors such as Martin Rees. Nevertheless, Kurzweil has always recognized the existence of risks that are potentially catastrophic for the existence of humanity. Whether it is biotechnology, nanotechnology or artificial intelligence, they can lead to our extinction. Be it a devastating pandemic of a synthetic virus, or a chain reaction of self-replicating nanobots. There are many scenarios in which our survival is in question. Ray does not realize that this is not an entrepreneurial race to sell apps with filters to entertain people. The development of these technologies is part of the most terrible escalation of military technology in human history. The race is the social control of humanity. To try to be the first to break all telecommunications encryptions, the first to build the most sophisticated robot army, and the first to monopolize control of all communications. With this, to achieve the control of the consciousness of all humanity, not in the classical symbolic sense, but in the code, processual and programmatic sense.
The biological brain is for Kurzweil simply an evolutionary accident. "I cannot reprogram it to free me from my fears, traumas and doubts that I know are preventing me from achieving all that I would like to achieve." Moravec's paradox states that what is difficult for humans, such as doing complex mathematical calculations, is easy for machines, and conversely, what is easy for humans, what we do automatically and unconsciously such as any coordinated movement, is difficult for a machine. This happens because the processing of the actions we have automated is fundamentally connectionist, being programmed by Darwinian selection over millions of years of our evolution. Science fiction has always saved the human being by separating the human from the machine, but this is naïve. Rather, we should ask ourselves whether there will be anything human left after the progressive implantation in the organism, or the direct replication of our mind exported to hardware. In both cases, it implies the disappearance of the organic from the organism.
The very existence of the universe as we know it seems to depend on a series of incredibly precise and therefore improbable conditions. Only small variations in fundamental physical constants such as the mass of the quarks, the charge of the electron, or gravity, would have prevented the formation of stable atoms, of carbon, of complex molecules, and, therefore, of the groupings with different levels of complexity that make up life. The same is true of the strong nuclear force, "whoever designed the rules of the universe created this additional force, or else the evolution of atoms would have been impossible." Astronomer Hugh Ross compares the probability of a universe like ours to that of a tornado passing through a landfill leaving a Boeing 747 assembled and ready to fly. Life is possible, but on the basis of surprisingly precise rules of the cosmic game. This leads to the anthropic principle: we can only observe a universe that is in the first place compatible with our existence as observers. However, if we assume that reality exists independently of our perception, we have no satisfactory explanation for it. For Kurzweil the final stage is when all matter in the universe will be transformed into "Computronium", matter organized for the exclusive purpose of computation, expanding throughout the galaxy. Everything will be mind. Kurzweil's finalistic moment is a kind of techno-spinozist pantheism. The development of the space race using nanobots spread throughout the galaxy was picked up in his 2005 work, and is not mentioned in his most recent writing. However, many of his specific predictions for these two decades did not come true.
For Kurtzweil, the biological brain is programmed to destroy all the information patterns that are people. An extension of life 1.0 is already possible through an emulation of the contents of consciousness. I can upload the half hundred or so critical commentaries on philosophical works that I have on the web, along with the thousands of pages of my psychology and neuroscience chapters, public health, other privately written stuff, etc. From this content, an AI could already analyze my lines of thought, and carry on a conversation as if it were me. It could clone my voice and physical appearance and reproduce me on a screen. This is already a reality. Possibly in the next few years there will be a progressively customizable humanoid, until its appearance can be edited with a programmable cell-by-cell tissue. A complete replica of me could continue to exist autonomously, even if I cease to exist. The question of self-consciousness remains to be resolved. I am not only the contents of my mind, but above all a first-person perception of myself. The hard problem refers to this question of internal experience of the self. Kurzweil believes that only computation is necessary, independent of any structure. But another possibility is that some basic unit in the neuroanatomical sense as protoself would be necessary to expand prosthetically, or at least a structural replication of some levels of my connectome by biotechnology so that the sense of self as a living being called Alfonso could emerge from them. This would be an extension of self-conscious life 2.0.
The old relationship between consciousness and matter remains unsatisfactorily unexplained. The categories of space, time, color, object, causality, need a perceptual construction, they are not simply "things given in themselves" as a naive realism exposed by our naked sensory organs make us feel and believe. The brain does not grasp reality, it produces it. It remains to be seen to what degree and on what basis. In any case, it seems clear that our senses have evolved to make us see a fragment of reality possibilities, which implies that classical materialist realism is a false view of existence. Matter does not "is" in a sense of ontological primacy over being. Our nervous system has drawn a perceptual adaptation, a metaphorical construct, but we do not have ontological access to external reality, such as it is, through our mind. We do not see the external world, we see what our brain produces. This is clear. There remains the old Kantian question of whether there is a "thing-in-itself" outside the perception of the nervous system, or whether we are dealing with an immaterial experience more along the lines of Berkeley's idealism. In modern words, a simulation, and not a material world. That we experience some degree of simulation is clear, the question is the material or algorithmic basis of it. The Aristotelian prime mover, the Christian God, or the primary mechanism. However, indeed, the philosophical moment has come to question the anthropomorphic character that forms the basis of our consciousness and our existence. We are facing the end of the human being. We are moving towards a hyperreal, formless human being. Consciousness on a support.
We do not know what life is or what the locus of life is. We know that the perception from our senses, the naive realism that our eyes see, is only a layer of reality (or perhaps better said, of conscious experience). The religions that thought of our bodies as a kind of temporary creation or avatar had sophisticated thinking, even if one would like to say otherwise. Conversely, some see the foundation of life as a material process, and organisms are simply protein machinery whose mission is to carry genes. Under physicalist models, we would be the consequence of an atomic evolution at the level of primitive particles. Others want to challenge thermodynamics head-on, to subtract the algorithm of pure information. Other positions see life directly as a delusion of consciousness. Regardless of the origin of things, many see clearly that we are heading towards a process of digitalization of consciousness. A Matrix, a fully programmed interoceptive and exteroceptive experience. A code life lived under avatar personas in virtual designer worlds. Will we soon resurrect animals, or replicas of them, a la Jurassic Park?
"My biological brain evolved for a very different kind of prehistoric life and predisposes me to habits I wouldn't have." Ray Kurzweil.
THINKING MACHINES AND SINGULARITY
The idea of thinking machines is in Greek mythology, for example in the bronze automaton of Thales, however, it was in 1950 when the British mathematician Alan Turing published an article in Mind entitled "computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which he wondered if machines could think, proposing a way to test it. In his work "The Year of Spiritual Machines" in 1999, Kurzweil launched the prediction that machines could pass the Turing test in the year 2029, implying the ability to give answers indistinguishable to those that a human being would give. At this point, we would not be able to tell when we are talking to a machine or a person. In fact, the AI must pretend to perform calculations more slowly than it does. For Turing, the successful imitation of a machine was evidence enough of its ability to think. However, an advanced chatbot could pass the test by answering using probabilistic response patterns, without assuming a symbolic understanding of what it answers, so the problem of the real intelligence of these devices, let alone that of consciousness, remains unresolved. The Turing test measures imitation, not understanding, let alone subjective experience. Therefore, the fact that a machine passes it does not imply that the machine is performing an elaboration of the reasoning process of the answers. There is only an imitation of human response patterns. A machine can tell a joke, but this does not imply that it is capable of understanding the process that produces humor, nor why the joke is funny even if it responds "hahaha". Similarly, it can give complex answers without understanding them through a cognitive process. They do not understand a correct answer, they simply recognize and select it.Marvin Minsky proposed two ways in which solutions to problems could be computed. The first is a symbolic approach, based on the formulation of explicit rules as if-then structures combined together. Many traditional computer programs have operated with this type of logic, but it is necessary to identify in advance which are the optimal rules for each situation, so they have limitations. The connectionist approach, on the other hand, uses networks of interconnected nodes that generate intelligence from their structure, rather than from predefined content. Instead of applying explicit rules, these networks detect patterns, learning by training with large volumes of data. This architecture is inspired by the way the human nervous system operates, where successful synaptic connections are reinforced through processes of synaptic potentiation and inhibition, replicating the logic of reinforcement learning. For Minsky, a 1990 computer already had enough power to emulate a human intelligence; the problem was that the right program or algorithm did not exist. Kurzweil defended the opposite position. For him, intelligence is proportional to processing power. Neither could prove his thesis at the time, Minsky did not have the algorithm, and Kurzweil did not have computers with the necessary power. However, Kurweil thinks that recent developments in technology reinforce his position. There are supercomputers that have surpassed the exaFLOP barrier, reaching computational levels that would be on the order of 10,000 times the processing speed of the human brain. For Kurzweil, the non-biological part of our brain will have a much greater computational capacity than the biological part.
Our biological body is suboptimal, as it is the product of random processes, determined by environmental circumstances and chance during the evolution of organisms. The same structural limitation is found in the nervous system, which impedes further information processing. In the same way that the evolution of species has been adding layers of processing, from subcortical structures to the layers of the neocortex, layers of information processing can be added by hardware. This implies the expansion of the nervous system to prosthetic units, first external (we already rely on them), but eventually internal. Nanotechnology will culminate directly in the expansion of our brain, with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. At this point we will merge completely with AI, expanding our intelligence and consciousness in a way so profound, it is actually difficult to comprehend. Just as an animal can hardly comprehend symbolic and metacognitive information that it is not processing, neither can a human being comprehend all those degrees of possibility that it is not processing. Therefore, for Kurzweil we must question what human beings are and leave behind a biology that limits us, opening the door to a directed evolution through bioengineering and artificial intelligence. This implies that it is possible to explore the range of unselected genetic possibilities through bioengineering processes, or even through simple computation of consciousness, transcending the very biological structure of bodies.
It was mathematics professor John McCarthy who proposed the term artificial intelligence in 1956. Kurzweil predicts that in the 2030s AI will not be something external that we interact with through a screen, but that we will connect directly to it, integrating with our brains through an immersive experience. This implies that AI will progressively become part of our brain activity, our cognition and our sensory experience. In doing so, it will be an extension of our mind and consciousness, and thus of our identity. John von Neumann anticipated the idea of a "technological singularity" around 1960. The singularity is the moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, self-improving at exponential speed, radically transforming civilization, and bringing an end to the human era.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND IDENTITY
Kurzweil radically rethinks the meaning of being human. It is not anthropoid biological structure, something accidental, but basically consciousness and identity. We are human beings fundamentally by the perception of a particular autobiographical experience, to be human means above all to be the center of our experience. With Descartes' res cogitans as a fixed point, the res extensa can be constructed in the most efficient way with such degrees of freedom as the laws of physics allow. Philosophers of consciousness call qualias the contents of conscious experience that we experience. Here there is a problem, for many unsolvable, and that is that consciousness can only be experienced in the first person, so it cannot be studied scientifically in the third person, i.e., from the empirical perspective of external observation. This is what David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness is not verifiable, except by the one who experiences it, in the first person.The first problem of identity is that we run into the paradox of Theseus' ship, which the Greeks exposed 2000 years ago. If we replace a part of a boat, the boat has changed, although it also remains the same boat. In the same way, a river has completely different water at each moment, but we consider that it is still the same river. Similarly, we people are not molecularly the same for one tenth of a second of our lives. This sense of permanence was for this reason seen by Buddhists as a delusion of the mind. In the same way, we could change all the parts of a ship, and it would still be the same ship. The same is true of our brain. Neurons persist, although their cellular machinery is renewed every moment, with mitochondria, receptors, synaptic proteins, etc. being replaced. Our brain can be completely new every few months. And yet, the sense of consciousness remains even though all the machinery that produces it is different.
There would be two different aspects to understand about consciousness. The first is as a fundamental quality, something you either have or don't have. In general we assume that inert matter does not have consciousness, while living beings do. Since a living being has consciousness, different degrees of that consciousness would be experienced according to the organism. Many people think that an insect must have some kind of consciousness of first-person experience of its environment, however rudimentary it may be. Some minimal sentience. Some authors consider that this extends even to microscopic levels, or even to plants. Moreover, a growing number of philosophers think that all matter around us can actually have some degree of consciousness, and that the only difference is the complexity of what that aggregation of matter processes. From this point of view, even an atom would have a minimum of awareness of its existence, even if it were residual.
Some people believe in a completely materialistic view, under which consciousness is caused by physical processes, by matter, with its different levels of complexity. At the opposite extreme, idealistic views presuppose that only consciousness exists. The perception of the material world is something that, we could say, we hallucinate (this would be the argument of the famous Matrix saga). Dualistic views understand that consciousness is something completely separate from dead matter, and can fit with a view of soul, as well as other vitalistic ideas. The main problem with dualism is that we have no theory to explain how the supranatural soul affects matter. Physicalism on the other hand does not allow us to explain the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., the existence of consciousness in the first place. Other visions, we could say intermediate, place consciousness on a different plane from matter. Some authors, such as Roger Penrose, place consciousness at the quantum level. Others believe that consciousness is something else, completely separate from physical processes, something that does not emerge from lower processes of matter, but precedes it, being created by God. Pantheistic views see in all material forms the expression of a God who expresses himself in everything, forming integral parts of an absolute consciousness that is part of everything. For David Chalmers, consciousness would not be a biological phenomenon but rather something like a fundamental force of the universe that biological matter processes. Under this idea, panprotopsychism, consciousness is something that exists outside of organisms, and outside of material physics. Living organisms simply "connect" or interact with it from a physical plane. The complexity of matter would process that field of consciousness in different ways. Kurzweil is receptive to Chalmers' framework. This assumes that the type of matter really doesn't matter, be it carbon from biology or silicon from hardware, consciousness would be produced equally.
Returning to Theseus' ship, our brain is made up of nuclei and neural networks, and these of neurons functionally active at the individual level. Neurons are ultimately amino acids, atoms, protons, electrons, and so on. Therefore, nothing that cannot be created and reproduced physically. The unitary perception of consciousness as a person is also somewhat intriguing. It seems that the brain is composed of subunits of consciousness, and we know that they can fragment. Therefore, the unified consciousness in a single stream is part of an aggregate of parts of consciousness. In studies using surgery, it is known that people can show separate consciousnesses with different interests, and that each brain lobe can be accessed separately, showing different tastes and opinions. Gazzaniga's studies are well known in this regard. Thus consciousness seems to function not only emergently in a unitary sense, but through subprocesses with autonomous consciousness at each level that aggregate to form higher levels of complexity.
Contrary to the deterministic inertia of most scientists, Kurzweil thinks that basic brain processes give rise to processes that do not function in a linearly reducible way. This implies that we can live in a physical world from fundamental laws, while free will exists. Wolfram proposed that extremely simple systems can generate incredibly complex and unpredictable behaviors with examples of cellular automata, challenging reductionist versions of determinism. For Wolfram, complexity arises from deterministic programs, but they produce complex patterns, so the result is something beyond the program. Replicating brain function does not equate to the ability to pre-compute its future states. Therefore, a world deterministic in its processes, with mechanistic causation, can have free will. Brain processes do not control us, we do. From basic processes they emerge into the consciousness with which we express ourselves in the world through actions. However, causal openness produces a certain indeterminism, which does not necessarily imply free will in the sense of autonomous agency derived from self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. The fact that something is unpredictable does not imply that it is free nor does it demonstrate intentionality in the sense of subjective experience, therefore, it would not solve the hard problem.
BRAIN IA BRAIN INTERFACE
Brain recordings are currently very limited, both in terms of the spatial resolution of electroencephalography and the temporal resolution limitations of functional neuroimaging. We can record neurons, even at the individual level, however, these are invasive techniques that require surgery, and are not exempt from producing damage. Nevertheless, there are several technologies under development. Studies have been done with dictionaries of a few hundred words, and it has been shown that you can determine the word a person thinks of from cortical electrical activity. However, this is a simple model with a limited set of words, which does not capture the complex syntax of ordinary language. Nevertheless, it shows that it is possible to decode patterns of brain activity in a predictive way. Elon Musk's neuralink is one of the most ambitious projects in this regard. The neuralink has been implanted in a monkey, who was able to play Pong on a screen with its thinking after decoding its neural patterns from the movement of a joystick. Following FDA approval, the first device has been implanted in humans with 1024 recording electrodes. Efforts are underway to produce devices that record the activity of 1 million neurons. The process is bidirectional, also involving activating hundreds of thousands of neurons. The aim would be to create a cortical layer that would interface with an intranet, via sensors. The entire brain may not need to be mapped, given the large number of lower-level processes that are not of interest for cognitive processing, and the redundant neural systems that can be created more directly than evolution has created the brain.By the 2040s, Kurzweil thinks there will be nanobots that will penetrate the brain via blood capillaries with the capacity to make a copy of all data. Then there will be a complete replica of each person's mind. This is a first type of immortality. It remains to be resolved whether it is a replica of the person or the self-consciousness itself with the capacity to be exported. Not only will this expand our brain capacity exponentially, but it is the first type of immortality. For Kurtzweil this is freeing us from our skull. It wouldn't just affect us. We could make an animal expand its consciousness. In this assumption, we would theoretically be able to talk to our pet, because its cognitive capacity would be expanded in the cloud and its neural activity transformed into language by software. It also assumes that we could fully control behavior by activating neural patterns, something we already know from experiments on neural activation with optogenetics in animals.
Copying our mind in backup devices will be a protection against any accident or disease. We could have a replica of a person, progressively indistinguishable from that person. However, we are facing the problem called philosophical zombie, the creation of a replica without consciousness in the first person. Only the replica could know if it has a consciousness by experiencing it in the first person. The problem arises because there is no scientific way to objectify and demonstrate externally whether that replica has a consciousness or not. We cannot demonstrate if that being is not conscious, neither can we demonstrate it of an insect for example, although we can manipulate its neurons and change its behavior. But we do not know what it is experiencing subjectively.
For Kurzweil, this is a reason to treat artificial intelligence as a conscious being, even though we cannot prove it. It would be the right way to act morally. The Turing test would not only serve to establish human-level cognitive abilities, but would also be a test of subjective consciousness and thus of moral rights. This may imply legal rights for AI. Kurtzweil does not address a question that is self-evident to me: what if the computational model itself says that it is not conscious: should we act a priori as if it were conscious, or should we take what it tells us?
Brain simulations could be summarized in five categories: functional, connectomic, molecular cellular, and quantum. Functional emulations would process information trying to simulate the mind. The connectomic models would replicate the hierarchical connections between groups of neurons, emulating mental activity at the level of structure. The cellular model would replicate information processing at the cellular level. The bio-molecular model would replicate information processing at the level of its internal cellular machinery. The most advanced phase would possibly be quantum emulation that would replicate processing at the subatomic level, however, according to Kurzweil, it would require a power that would not be achieved even in this century. There are authors who believe that consciousness begins precisely at a quantum level. Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is independent of the machinery that produces it, and that the quantum level is not actually necessary.
"LIFE BECOMES EXPONENTIALLY BETTER"
Kurzweil spends a third of the book expounding his idea of progress and well-being, much of it being a rehash of Pinker. The arguments oscillate between reductionism, ignorance and frivolity, so this section is a critique of his central points.A classic of medical and scientistic propaganda is to confuse public health (or just health) with medicine. It is in fact one of the great foundational myths of our Western societies, a central element of the false schemes of the population, and of the rationalizing violence of the system. Kurzweil implies that the improvement in the life expectancy of the population is essentially due to medical and pharmacological advances. This is completely false, and ignorant. Despite occupying a majority place in the collective imagination, medicine has only contributed to a tiny percentage of life expectancy.
https://www.annfammed.org/content/17/3/267
Life expectancy has increased primarily because of the separation of drinking and waste water, garbage collection, sewerage and general cleanliness of cities, better nutrition, etc. Moreover, most of the gain in life expectancy is pre-1950, while the pharmacology that is often alluded to is post-1950. The epidemiologist Archie Cochrane himself, one of the fathers of evidence-based medicine, showed in the late 1960s that the expected positive correlation between a country's supply of medical treatment and life expectancy did not occur.
https://jech.bmj.com/content/32/3/200
On the other hand, life expectancy is not the years that adults live, but is determined mainly by infant mortality. Childhood infectious disease determines most of a society's life expectancy statistics. However, the causes of infant mortality are not only biological, and neonaticide and infanticide have been common in the face of disease, impairment, or difficult life circumstances. In our societies we shift this to hundreds of thousands of abortions, thereby increasing life expectancy statistics. Reproductive issues, whatever we want to classify as "early death" or "abortion", and other decisions regarding the birth of people with severe problems, are an important part of life expectancy statistics. There is even evidence that some systems manage reproductive decisions themselves with the explicit goal of improving the statistical appearance of mortality and life expectancy.
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051
In addition, a significant percentage of the reduction in child mortality is due to the reduction of environmental risks (e.g. child labor), and the reduction of deaths resulting from violence, not the medical treatment of disease. Life expectancy is also influenced by extending people's biological life span, without necessarily extending their functional life span or even their conscious life span. In fact, beyond childhood, adults in many societies without medicine have life expectancies close to that of many developed countries.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12785
On the other hand, most of what we do in medicine and health systems today has no evidence, and some of the most cited articles in epidemiology and scientific methodology question the existing evidence from medical research itself.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S089543562200...
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.p...
Medicine has had a role in decreasing infant mortality, but most of society grossly overvalues the role of medicine in population health to an irrational and mythological extreme. Sometimes mass panic. Most life expectancy is not due to medical factors, but mostly environmental and cultural, and to reduce life expectancy to medicine as Kurzweil does is wrong and ignorant.
The same logic Pinker and Kurzweil follow with violence and crime statistics, confusing falling crime statistics with falling crime. For example, cybercrime continues to rise exponentially, but only a decimal part of the crimes are prosecuted, so they do not compute in any "crime" statistics. Crime moves from the street to the Internet, where the opportunity increases with less exposure. If in some contexts physical aggression decreases, psychological aggression, blackmail and extortion also increase, and in fact, evidence shows that the psychological consequences are more traumatic than the physical ones. This is completely ignored by Kurzweil.
At one point in the book the author mentions, very surprisingly, that perhaps COVID came out of a laboratory. Possibly 20 or 30 million people have died if we compute the excess mortality, which also do not enter in the statistics of "crimes", simply because there is no investigation of those responsible and those who in a coordinated manner have tried to cover it up. However, we call it "COVID" and not "crime", and that's it. Out of the statistics. Obviously the West is not going to do a Nuremberg to investigate itself. Especially since there are a lot of powerful people involved who are obviously not going to investigate themselves. While Pinker or Kurzweil are celebrating statistics designed to take crimes out of the crime statistics. Many of the most dangerous people in the world do not compute in any crime statistics, yet they are part of our most elite institutions and corporations.
The same fallacy applies to our geostrategic interests and "military operations", which of course are not 'crimes', nor do we compute them in our "crime" statistics. Indirect deaths from famine, displacement, disease, or more sophisticated war strategies such as economic asphyxiation are of course also not "crimes" to put on a a la Pinker-Kurzweil chart. In short, there are all kinds of violent actions that produce damage but that we do not compute as "crimes", because the power structures and bureaucracies that make these classifications play conceptual and statistical juggling games that authors such as Kurzweil and Pinker reproduce with an embarrassing sociological amateurism.
Additionally, the epistemic problem that Kurzweil faces with his numerical positivism is that it leads us to the fact that North Korea is a great model of a peaceful society, given that it is one of the countries with the least crime in the world if we look at the statistics of robberies, assaults, homicides, etc. The fact that certain numbers go down does not imply that there is greater welfare or less suffering, or even that it is not the sign of a subdued society that cannot even react to the abuses it suffers. Kurweil and Pinker's model of "peace" confuses moral virtue and social control. Under the facade of numerical progress, Pinker and Kurzweil legitimize Bentham's techno-panoptic dystopia. The decline of violence in the West is paralleled by an increase in institutional violence, something Kurzweil is also unwilling to mention. Millions of people are deprived of their liberty in prisons on a daily basis, mostly for non-violent crimes, something that has been normalized by society, without anyone asking questions about its raison d'être, and with no evidence of its effect on crime at the individual or societal level. Contrary to what Pinker and Kurzweil want to claim, violence does not go away; it is institutionalized, normalized, and pushed out of sight. This is not an improvement in society, but a change in the strategy of social control. It is sociologist Max Weber's purest definition of the monopoly of violence. Even so, physical violence continues to exist, inside the walls. And it is again left out of Pinker and Kurzweil's statistics. Additionally, a high percentage of the inmate population has some diagnosed severe mental disorder. Some professor of forensic psychiatry has bravely wondered if prisons are not in fact the new psychiatrists. The destruction of law to produce a progressive authoritarian legal positivism completely escapes the consciousness of the authors.
Kurweil's concept of poverty is equally numerical, economistic, biased and ethnocentric. He forgets to mention that the concept of poverty is first and foremost relative to the socio-cultural adjustment of the individual to the group and to the ecological framework. Nor does he dare to mention that there is actually more slavery in absolute terms today than 500 years ago, something spectacularly decried everywhere. Not surprisingly, Kurzweil claims that the blame for hunger in Africa is due to not planting genetically modified organisms. The fallacy of this argument is that Africa just needs normal agriculture like we have in the rest of the world, or simply that we stop dumping food on them economically. Taking the opportunity to shoehorn genetically modified organisms is an attempt to take advantage of a situation of political vulnerability of a continent, to transform a political problem into a problem of genetically modified organisms like a Trojan horse. This would also make them dependent on Western corporate and technocratic oligarchies, which would increase their control over the continent at the political, economic and technological levels. I find it difficult to think that Kurzweil's reasoning is naive. Additionally, it would mean subjecting a continent to a massive experiment involving systemic risks and unpredictable consequences on the biosphere.
Clearly, technology is progressing, but this same technological progress means that, for the first time in human history, a single person can destroy the entire world with a not very expensive laboratory. Autonomous cars drive themselves, and that's certainly fascinating. But good old Ray doesn't explain the obvious threat of all this. The automation of vehicles brings with it the control of all of them by the state. Now it is the central system that decides who can use your car and who can't, perhaps because you don't have your biomedical injections up to date, you don't have your points on your license as a dutiful citizen, or because there is a bad flu that winter and they lock everyone up for "public health", 'science', and the "common good". We are normalizing the end of freedom, and the authoritarian use of laws. In his celebration of democracy, Kurzweil omits the question of whether all this is even compatible with any concept of democracy. Pinker himself has in recent years signed a manifesto against existing censorship in universities, and the persecution and "cancellation". To his credit, he has openly criticized the silencing and persecution of public health professors opposed to COVID policies. Yet he contradictorily defends the very system that is producing these dynamics.
Kurzweil is excited about the increase in literacy. He neglects to mention the apparent fall in IQ in the West (reverse Flynn effect), the fall in reading habits, etc. However, we must ask ourselves what is the point of being able to read if we live in a totalitarian system that controls all information in the purest 1984 style. Incredibly, Kurzweil speaks of "disinformation" during COVID. But he does not seem to refer to those who have imposed with censorship and violence a false story about the COVID, but to those who correctly suspected that what was being told was opaque, manipulated or false, and knew that most of the measures that were being taken had no scientific evidence whatsoever. 1984: the lie becomes the truth, and then the truth becomes the lie. I myself cannot publish things for which I have hundreds of scientific studies to prove it, and I can only do so in private. Others can lie openly and are never censored.
Another argument used by Kurzweil is the increase in GDP in the West. He forgets to mention that much of that production is of superfluous things, contrary to the paradigm of efficiency and ecology that he then tries to defend in a frontally contradictory way. He should also explain why, if people's economic capacity is progressively greater, people used to be able to live on their own savings, while now they have to live through debt. It should explain why those people of the past with lower GDP per capita had the capacity to pay for a house in a few years with their salary, and why people today, who enjoy higher GDP per capita, increasingly live at home with their parents because they cannot afford a house. The nominal economy of Kurzweil's graphs is not the real economy of the people. GDP per capita does not show who benefits from that economy. On the contrary, those graphs hide the increasing redistribution and concentration of capital to state and corporate oligarchies that have constructed financial, fiscal and legal schemes that facilitate the extraction of rental value and people's dependence on the system. Although people have tried to convince themselves otherwise.
It is easily objectifiable that technologies tend to decrease in price, since the market tends to decrease them by improving the efficiency of production processes. Kurzweil again exhibits his naivety by talking about cheap prefabricated houses. That has been around for a long time, the housing price problem is not in production, but in politics. The problem of housing is far from being the price of bricks or the price of the building materials you want to use. The price of housing is fundamentally the price of land, the system of rent extraction through a scheme of inflationary engineering, supporting the balance sheets of banks and the issuance of credit through fractional reserve, and the cost of public revenue collection opportunity on all this perfectly calculated framework. It is not the cost of production of materials but the system that prevents cheap housing, because it would destroy the scheme of constant indebtedness with which the constant payment of the citizens is guaranteed. To increase its power over society, the system must maximize its income by extracting rents from it. The State will not allow the cheapening of housing, because it would lose its own financing. Contrary to Kurzweil's vision (I do not know whether he is naive or the opposite), there is not a problem with housing production, but with the political system with which the state and financial oligarchies systematically extract money from society using land as an instrument. The State is not going to release its collection mechanisms because it would lose its economic capacity, and with it it would lose control over society. This is obvious. The rise in the price of land is, in fact, the pillar on which our financial system has been built. It does not occur to me whether the complete automation of production processes can mean the end of this economy. The classic market of people exchanging goods and services will progressively disappear, so that the real economy is heading towards being a mere centralized abstraction of social credit allocation. However, the state will look for a symbolic mortgage that chains people in order to continue to control them. The state will not favor people's autonomy, but their dependence. Kurzweil's cheap prefabricated house will come with a social credit mortgage, the presentation of an up-to-date biomedical product card, etc.
Automation necessarily ends up in a basic income, something Kurzweil does mention. I myself often give this example: think of a small community on an island. Each member has the job of catching 3 or 4 fish every day, to satisfy our only need in this environment, which is to have food to eat. One day, someone invents some fixed nets that catch the fish without anyone having to keep an eye on them. From that moment on, the work scheme of our small community is abruptly interrupted. What is the problem of being left without a job? No problem. There simply has to be an agreement to share the fish. We are facing the same situation, but on a larger scale. The automation of the work is not a problem. The question is how to share out what the automated processes produce. However, given that automation will affect jobs in a differentiated and progressive manner, the question is how to implement the right to this basic income according to the labor sector and the particular circumstances of individuals. Perhaps some people will receive this basic income, and there may be those who receive a basic income and also work for an extra salary. Whether we like it or not, we are going to a socialized system. That is why the system has suddenly changed its discourse towards strongly statist and interventionist ideas in order to get people used to an authoritarian system. The anti-globalization ideas of some of the most important left-wing politicians of the last half century, such as Julio Anguita, have become "ultra-right".
The automation of productive processes should not be confused with the State giving free money to the people, which is what they will try to sell. Automation has been made possible by those who have spent their lives working, and by companies and technologies. However, there is a serious threat. It means increasing people's dependence on the state. It implies absolute centralization, in which "social credit" is the tool of political legitimization. It is the perfect situation of control to which every ruler aspires, the purchase of votes through the blackmail of receiving an income. It means making of the whole society a clientelistic network that receives a socialized rent, exchanging sovereignty and freedom for a quota of money. The State strategically interposes itself between what is produced and the people, creating the illusion of beneficence and a secular divine providence. The fruit of social effort is appropriated and transformed into the illusion of a political favor that the ruler produces and grants to the ruled. This idea is false, and produces an extremely dangerous situation, and actually spells the end of any degree of "democracy" that might exist. It is over.
Pinker and Kurzweil dispatch with mere data issues that are much more complex. Numbers are not neutral as so many people assume. Truth is doomed in the face of persuasion, as Socrates already realized. Presenting simple ideas is more convincing than having to give all kinds of explanations. This is why we live in societies that are inevitably corrupt. Numbers are persuasive because of their appearance of mathematical rationality, but often, numbers are used to hide realities that take away the reason for those numbers. Kurzweil complains about the "cognitive biases" of those of us who don't buy the numbers in the nearly 100 pages devoted to this section. Good old Ray doesn't see his own pile of biases (I tell you about them): inductive fallacy, classification bias, presentism, reductionism, economism, positivism, confusion of the nominal and the real, ethnocentrism, self-confirmation, historicism, technological solutionism... and in short, an amateurism in public health, political and social science in general that is hardly concealable. Of course, these are complex and debatable ideas, but that is precisely what is lacking in the work, and hence the deserved criticism. We would forgive Ray if he had not devoted an entire third of his book to make us go through such an exercise in amateurism and superficiality, especially coming from someone who is supposed to be an intellectual talent who apparently charges between 50,000 and 100,000 euros per lecture.
MEDICINE AND POSTHUMANISM
The futuristic lines of Kurzweil's health were best exposed in his 2005 work "The Singularity is Near". Humans don't need a heart that breaks down and consumes calories to oxygenate tissues. Ray thinks that tissues can be oxygenated directly, so the future is to dispense with the heart. The same would happen with the rest of the organs. This would make us energetically efficient, since the food we eat is basically destined to the inefficient activity of all the organs of our body. This however does not appear in this work. However, it is clear that Ray wants to turn us into a replicant, a ghost without organs. Surely Kurzweil would answer me that one can create an interoceptive simulation of those aspects related to the parietal and insular cortex, and the interoceptive aspects of body perception. But I think of the tin man who longed for a heart so he could feel alive in The Wizard of Oz.Kurzweil acknowledges that psychotropic drugs work poorly, or not at all, as well as generating many problems. However, he thinks that mental health problems can be repaired from the ground up. Kurzweil only thinks of bottom-up processes, not quite understanding that many "disorders" are top-down problems. In other words, no neurotransmitter or physiological process can make a person feel that his or her life is full of purpose and significance simply by increasing hedonic tone or some other simple process. The rest is to think of affective engineering, which would only involve the creation of a narcotized phantom, no longer a human consciousness living a life, but a computerized entity at the experiential level. It is problematic to think that the meaning of life should be to go in a direction of efficiency. Then I can put a lever with electrodes directly to my mesolimbic pathway and activate it for self-gratification without having to perform any life experience. Olds and Milner's studies showed that this efficiency pathway activating neurons led experimental animals to a reduction of their lifespan, to death.
Since many of the pathogens that pose a threat come from animals that we began to domesticate only a few thousand years ago, our immune system has not evolved to fight them sufficiently. Kurzweil predicts nanobots that will destroy all the necessary pathogens and repair cells one by one. Before that, though, it is certain that we are moving towards a biomedical system that makes the need for what many doctors currently do questionable. There are already studies comparing AI with physicians in the assessment of imaging tests, etc. There is also theorizing about a major translation of clinical trials to in silico simulations with massive populations.
Nor does Kurzweil tell us what will happen to sexuality, when having a child, if it can be called that, will be a matter of growing a dermal cell in the laboratory. It no longer takes 2 people. It is a bioengineered production. This is already practically a reality. The cult of technology is the very disappearance of the human being as the machine grows. Science fiction has always saved man by separating him from the machine, but this is naive. We don't know if there will be anything human left after all this. Moreover, this transhuman and posthuman project is being done behind the backs of the population, who have no idea where it is all going, nor have they been invited to participate in it. It will be what Pinker and Ray call "democracy". That people can barely come to understand it, fine. I myself have had students who have almost burst into tears in utter confusion.
FINAL REMARKS
Kurzweil's technoracionalist gospel sees technical evolution the engine of knowledge and the destiny of life as an inevitability, not as a political choice that has been willed into being. It is clear that for Kurzweil technology is more important than freedom or autonomy, or than human life itself in the natural sense. For Kurzweil, society must be guided by technology. This is something that is actually already happening. We are going on the Titanic, boasting with the hybris of the scientific-technocratic ideology. We shall see if it is not those Indians of whom Pierre Clastres spoke who have the last laugh.He doesn't talk much about systemic risks Ray Kurzweil, something that has been more clearly developed by authors such as Martin Rees. Nevertheless, Kurzweil has always recognized the existence of risks that are potentially catastrophic for the existence of humanity. Whether it is biotechnology, nanotechnology or artificial intelligence, they can lead to our extinction. Be it a devastating pandemic of a synthetic virus, or a chain reaction of self-replicating nanobots. There are many scenarios in which our survival is in question. Ray does not realize that this is not an entrepreneurial race to sell apps with filters to entertain people. The development of these technologies is part of the most terrible escalation of military technology in human history. The race is the social control of humanity. To try to be the first to break all telecommunications encryptions, the first to build the most sophisticated robot army, and the first to monopolize control of all communications. With this, to achieve the control of the consciousness of all humanity, not in the classical symbolic sense, but in the code, processual and programmatic sense.
The biological brain is for Kurzweil simply an evolutionary accident. "I cannot reprogram it to free me from my fears, traumas and doubts that I know are preventing me from achieving all that I would like to achieve." Moravec's paradox states that what is difficult for humans, such as doing complex mathematical calculations, is easy for machines, and conversely, what is easy for humans, what we do automatically and unconsciously such as any coordinated movement, is difficult for a machine. This happens because the processing of the actions we have automated is fundamentally connectionist, being programmed by Darwinian selection over millions of years of our evolution. Science fiction has always saved the human being by separating the human from the machine, but this is naïve. Rather, we should ask ourselves whether there will be anything human left after the progressive implantation in the organism, or the direct replication of our mind exported to hardware. In both cases, it implies the disappearance of the organic from the organism.
The very existence of the universe as we know it seems to depend on a series of incredibly precise and therefore improbable conditions. Only small variations in fundamental physical constants such as the mass of the quarks, the charge of the electron, or gravity, would have prevented the formation of stable atoms, of carbon, of complex molecules, and, therefore, of the groupings with different levels of complexity that make up life. The same is true of the strong nuclear force, "whoever designed the rules of the universe created this additional force, or else the evolution of atoms would have been impossible." Astronomer Hugh Ross compares the probability of a universe like ours to that of a tornado passing through a landfill leaving a Boeing 747 assembled and ready to fly. Life is possible, but on the basis of surprisingly precise rules of the cosmic game. This leads to the anthropic principle: we can only observe a universe that is in the first place compatible with our existence as observers. However, if we assume that reality exists independently of our perception, we have no satisfactory explanation for it. For Kurzweil the final stage is when all matter in the universe will be transformed into "Computronium", matter organized for the exclusive purpose of computation, expanding throughout the galaxy. Everything will be mind. Kurzweil's finalistic moment is a kind of techno-spinozist pantheism. The development of the space race using nanobots spread throughout the galaxy was picked up in his 2005 work, and is not mentioned in his most recent writing. However, many of his specific predictions for these two decades did not come true.
For Kurtzweil, the biological brain is programmed to destroy all the information patterns that are people. An extension of life 1.0 is already possible through an emulation of the contents of consciousness. I can upload the half hundred or so critical commentaries on philosophical works that I have on the web, along with the thousands of pages of my psychology and neuroscience chapters, public health, other privately written stuff, etc. From this content, an AI could already analyze my lines of thought, and carry on a conversation as if it were me. It could clone my voice and physical appearance and reproduce me on a screen. This is already a reality. Possibly in the next few years there will be a progressively customizable humanoid, until its appearance can be edited with a programmable cell-by-cell tissue. A complete replica of me could continue to exist autonomously, even if I cease to exist. The question of self-consciousness remains to be resolved. I am not only the contents of my mind, but above all a first-person perception of myself. The hard problem refers to this question of internal experience of the self. Kurzweil believes that only computation is necessary, independent of any structure. But another possibility is that some basic unit in the neuroanatomical sense as protoself would be necessary to expand prosthetically, or at least a structural replication of some levels of my connectome by biotechnology so that the sense of self as a living being called Alfonso could emerge from them. This would be an extension of self-conscious life 2.0.
The old relationship between consciousness and matter remains unsatisfactorily unexplained. The categories of space, time, color, object, causality, need a perceptual construction, they are not simply "things given in themselves" as a naive realism exposed by our naked sensory organs make us feel and believe. The brain does not grasp reality, it produces it. It remains to be seen to what degree and on what basis. In any case, it seems clear that our senses have evolved to make us see a fragment of reality possibilities, which implies that classical materialist realism is a false view of existence. Matter does not "is" in a sense of ontological primacy over being. Our nervous system has drawn a perceptual adaptation, a metaphorical construct, but we do not have ontological access to external reality, such as it is, through our mind. We do not see the external world, we see what our brain produces. This is clear. There remains the old Kantian question of whether there is a "thing-in-itself" outside the perception of the nervous system, or whether we are dealing with an immaterial experience more along the lines of Berkeley's idealism. In modern words, a simulation, and not a material world. That we experience some degree of simulation is clear, the question is the material or algorithmic basis of it. The Aristotelian prime mover, the Christian God, or the primary mechanism. However, indeed, the philosophical moment has come to question the anthropomorphic character that forms the basis of our consciousness and our existence. We are facing the end of the human being. We are moving towards a hyperreal, formless human being. Consciousness on a support.
We do not know what life is or what the locus of life is. We know that the perception from our senses, the naive realism that our eyes see, is only a layer of reality (or perhaps better said, of conscious experience). The religions that thought of our bodies as a kind of temporary creation or avatar had sophisticated thinking, even if one would like to say otherwise. Conversely, some see the foundation of life as a material process, and organisms are simply protein machinery whose mission is to carry genes. Under physicalist models, we would be the consequence of an atomic evolution at the level of primitive particles. Others want to challenge thermodynamics head-on, to subtract the algorithm of pure information. Other positions see life directly as a delusion of consciousness. Regardless of the origin of things, many see clearly that we are heading towards a process of digitalization of consciousness. A Matrix, a fully programmed interoceptive and exteroceptive experience. A code life lived under avatar personas in virtual designer worlds. Will we soon resurrect animals, or replicas of them, a la Jurassic Park?
"My biological brain evolved for a very different kind of prehistoric life and predisposes me to habits I wouldn't have." Ray Kurzweil.
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