computers has exploded. By installing a software module enabling us to
communicate through sophisticated spoken languages, we ensured that the
most useful information stored in one person’s brain could get copied to
other brains, potentially surviving even after the original brain died.”^11
At this nascent stage of the implant revolution, it could be argued that
we could be categorized as Life 2.1, with artificial joints and pacemakers,
but without the dramatic cognitive hardware upgrade that is soon to come.
“Many AI researchers think that Life 3.0 may arrive during the coming
century, perhaps even during our lifetime, spawned by progress in AI.”^12
The key characteristic of Life 3.0 is both a software and hardware upgrade,
where cybernetic implants will enable humans to capture, process,
communicate, and remember infinitely better than we can today.
The cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) of the near future will usher in the
age of Homo electrus; the Singularity is near.
Ray Kurzweil, MIT graduate, famed inventor, and futurist, believes that
we are only a few decades away from a time when there will be no
distinction between human and machine, or between physical and virtual
reality.^13 Borrowing a concept from physics and mathematics, Singularity
is the idea that computer superintelligence will continue its exponential
growth unabated, resulting in a future where machine brainpower becomes
so powerful and alluring that mankind will have no choice but to partner
with computers.
Kurzweil is no amateur futurist with his head in the clouds. This is the
man who was the principle inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the
first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first commercially marketed
large-vocabulary speech recognition software, among many other
inventions. Using scores of mathematical models and technology
assessments, Kurzweil comes to a startling conclusion: by 2045,
Singularity will be achieved. “The essence of being human is not our
limitations—although we do have many—it’s our ability to reach beyond
our limitations. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t even stay of the
planet. And we are already not settling for the limitations of our
biology.”^14
The three components of the revolution will be “GNR,” or Genetics,
Nanotechnology, and Robotics. To me, Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The
Singularity is Near, sounds fantastical when he predicts the coming
changes in genetic manipulation. Hardly a decade later, with CRISPR