When human and artificial intelligence merge

Only a few mouse clicks separate us from paradise. By the end of the decade, artificial intelligence (AI) will make it possible to use robots, 3D printers and vertical farms to produce and consume all goods and services at a fraction of today’s costs.

Abundance will make wars and conflicts unnecessary. Wolves and lambs will rest together. And even eternal life is getting closer step by step.

Because AI multiplies the possibilities for medical diagnostics and therapy. Then injected nanorobots in our bodies eliminate the biological deficits in our organism.

After all, we create perfect digital copies of our personalities with which we can control and act indefinitely. And we can resurrect the dead as replicants.

Daring but calculated predictions

Ray Kurzweil, 76, AI pioneer, inventor, chief engineer of the transhumanists and techno-optimists, thought leader for Google and bestseller guarantee, promises us all this and much more. For 40 years he has been making extremely daring but empirically based and calculated predictions, so concrete that he can be measured against them. This is what sets him apart from science fiction authors.

By 2030, Kurzweil says, AI applications will surpass the skills of top experts in almost every field, including medicine, business, politics, science, technology, law, sports and the arts. This could solve all world problems such as poverty, ignorance, disease, energy shortages, insecurity, species extinction and climate change.

AI can do this because it constantly optimizes itself and learns from successes and failures. Today’s AI applications are based on neural networks – modeled on human brains. The potential of AI suddenly became publicly known through conversational language models such as ChatGPT. This, says Kurzweil, is just a glimpse of what is now rapidly changing the situation. AI will even have to restrain itself in “Turing tests”, i.e. in anonymous performance comparisons with humans, in order not to be immediately recognized as a machine. So she will fake pauses for thought or make mistakes.

AI should permeate everything

From 2030, he assumes, human and technical intelligence will begin to merge into a superintelligence that is not yet understandable: nano-sized devices will permanently connect a person’s neurons in the brain with their duplicate neurons in a cloud.

This means that this hybrid can think a million times faster and therefore further and deeper. According to Kurzweil, around 2045 the brain and computer will become one, i.e. they will mutate into a singular. Then the “singularity” would be reached – the fixed point of his thinking for a long time.

According to Kurzweil, the “law of increasing returns” in information technology is behind this revolution. This forms a self-reinforcing control loop: every advance in computer performance enables ever higher, wider and faster computer performance via feedback. Innovation stimulates innovation, AI drives AI, mainframe computers create supercomputers, training with large data sets allows patterns to be recognized in even larger data sets – without limit, without ceiling, without end.

Since AI penetrates all areas of research, medical, energy and agricultural technologies would also become information technologies and would therefore be subject to their laws. We are currently at the foot of the steep rise in the exponential curve that shows the increase in earnings. But we still misperceive the current changes as a linear increase, but soon the exponential growth will no longer be overlooked.

Anyone who thinks all of this is absurd should remember how quickly we have become accustomed to using computer services for a few cents every time we reach for our smartphone, which is immense compared to previous decades.

Risks are minimized

In view of these enormous opportunities, Kurzweil dwarfs the risks such as job loss, arms race, uncontrolled self-replication or criminal abuse. Consequently, all risks could be minimized through smart information technologies. Only AI can save from the dangers posed by AI.

However, Kurzweil shows emphatically: The fusion of humans and machines exacerbates age-old, complicated philosophical problems, such as how identity and consciousness are to be understood or how the relationship between body, mind and soul must be redefined in the face of “avatars”, “replicants” and so on “Androids.”

And while reading it, one is sometimes overwhelmed by the countless legal and ethical problems that arise, such as how a right to complete death can be guaranteed.

Kurzweil’s worldview is thoroughly technological. There is little room for actors. Companies, states and researchers are just extras in the big drama. They make technological progress, but they don’t make decisions. Strangely, in a book that refers to “evolution” in the German title, the basic evolutionary mechanism of reproduction, variation and selection is not given any importance.

Bordering on naivety, especially politically

Kurzweil does not think in the thought pattern of the theory of evolution. In his case, development follows a superhuman plan that must be enforced against all opponents. For him, history is determined by the law of information technology and takes place without intersections, forks, dead ends or detours.

This borders on naivety, especially in political terms. Because as the last decade of social media has clearly shown: every abundance creates new scarcity. There are arguments over scarce resources, and arguments take time.

Nevertheless: Especially in security-oriented Germany, such a view, which only sees opportunities, is a necessary corrective. Fears and concerns are driving regulation in this country in which AI is in danger of being lost in the small details of the General Data Protection Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Act.

Kurzweil doesn’t weigh things up, he marks the extreme pole on the plus side. But without it you don’t know where the middle is and you can’t find balance.