The Age of Spiritual Machines, or the faith of modernity (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #09)
Happy leap day, readers!
I’m back and at it again this week, and I’m chomping at the bit to say a piece about Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I started reading this week as part of Winning Slowly Season 8 (spoilers!… except that we mentioned we might read this one on air multiple times already).
Before I dive in, the usual asides: in case a friend emailed this to you or you just don’t remember what you signed up for, I’m Chris Krycho this is Across the Sundering Seas, my mostly-weekly (I take one week a month off) newsletter about the things I’m reading and studying. Topics so far this year have included theological anthropology (or what it means to be a human made in the image of God), climate change, epistemology (and especially the meaning of mystery), building reliable software (and why Facebook’s and Microsoft’s and Boeing’s problems are not the same), and the nature of learning itself. If you’d like to unsubscribe, you can always do that right here.
Now, into the week’s critique!
Ray Kurzweil has a pretty famous name in tech nerd circles at this point, because he has been hyping up the idea of a technological singularity for the last couple decades. A “technological singularity,” in the version of his framing that has made it to semi-public consciousness, is a moment when the rate of technological change crosses a tipping point and accelerates so radically that it transforms everything ever after, because the machines become intelligent and we get to upload our consciousnesses to them and escape these meatbags called our bodies.
I’m only 67 pages into The Age of Spiritual Machines so far, but I already suspect for a variety of reasons that the version I just outlined is not doing Kurzweil an injustice. This book is—as its title might suggest—theological through and through. Specifically, it’s teleological through and through: it ascribes to the Universe (nearly or always in capital letters) and to Technology (never capitalized in practice but always treated as if it were) a directionality and a purposiveness that sound rather odd coming from a committed atheist (“there is nothing outside the Universe,” Kurzweil proclaims on p. 31). From the outset, it is clear that the title of Kurzweil’s book is not an accident. The Universe, and Technology, clearly hold for him the place that God holds for theists.
That theological bent comes with a kind of prophetic zeal, even in these early pages. Kurzweil discusses the way computing technology has advanced over the last century, and he admits that Moore’s Law—summarized as computing being twice as fast and half as costly every 18–24 months—likely will break down right around now, in the early 2020s. Not to worry, though:
The spiral we are most interested in—the Law of Accelerating Returns—gives us ever greater order in technology, which inevitably leads to the emergence of computation. Computation is the essence of order. It provides the ability for a technology to respond in a variable and appropriate manner to its environment to carry out its mission. Thus computational technology is also an evolutionary process, and also builds on its own progress. The time to accomplish a fixed objective gets exponentially shorter over time (for example, ninety years for the first MIP per thousand dollars versus one day for an additional MIP today). That the power of computing grows exponentially over time is just another way to say the same thing.
So Where Does That Leave Moore’s Law?
Well, it still leaves it dead by the year 2020. Moore's Law came along in 1958 just when it was needed and will have done its sixty years of service by 2018, a rather long period of time for a paradigm nowadays. Unlike Moore’s Law, however, the Law of Accelerating Returns is not a temporary methodology. It is a basic attribute of the nature of time and chaos—a sublaw of the Law of Time and Chaos—and describes a wide range of apparently divergent phenomena and trends. In accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns, another computational technology will pick up where Moore’ Law will have left off, without missing a beat.
—p. 33, emphasis mine
How and why? Well, Kurzweil hand-waves a few possibilities, but at the end of the day he has this confidence because he has faith in computing, in Technology-with-a-capital-‘T’, in the direction toward which the Universe is bent: not justice, as MLK might have had it, but progress. This is the faith of modernity, displayed as clearly and succinctly as I have ever seen.
And “faith” is certainly the right word. Kurzweil continually expresses his enthusiasm for this narrative of progress in the language of spirituality. Sometimes these are merely parenthetical admissions of a fondness for certain kinds of mysticism. At other times, the language is that of a pastor exhorting his flock:
Let us first praise evolution. It has createda plethora of designs of indescribable beauty, complexity, and elegance; not to mention effectiveness. Indeed, some theories of aesthetics define beauty as the degree of success in emulating'the natural beauty that evolution has created: It created human beings with their intelligent human brains; beings smart enough to cteate their own intelligent technology.
—p. 44, emphasis mine
He goes on to show some of the limitations of evolution—especially as regards its speed—but the framing is there nonetheless. Let us praise evolution… and let us marvel at its acceleration, and let us consider how we shall now make what supercedes us as that acceleration continues without bound! It is worshipful: worshipful of the Universe, worshipful of intelligence as the heights of what the Universe has accomplished so far, worshipful therefore of greater intelligence as better and more ultimate.
One wonders, reading this, just exactly what Kurzweil’s religion would make of the unintelligent, the mentally handicapped. If progress means greater intelligence (as it certainly does in his construal), then more intelligent beings are better and more valuable than less intelligent beings—and this is the key part—by dint of their intelligence. Humans will be of less worth than the machines we create; but even now, people with higher IQs are better than people with lower IQs. I have no idea whether Kurzweil would admit to this inference from his theology—but it’s there, and it’s shameful.
I’m glad to be tackling this book head-on. It has been enormously influential in certain parts of the Silicon Valley circles, and the consequences of Silicon Valley’s philosphies are inescapable for all of us. Kurzweil’s theology—his unbounded faith in progress and especially in computing-as-salvation—is the explicit form of what much of Silicon Valley believes, even if most are unwilling to come right out and say. It’s not a good book. But it deserves to be read and argued with, just because its philosophy has been so influential. Perhaps by arguing with it—by showing just how foolish and false, and ultimately how wicked are its conclusions; but also by showing why Kurzweil hopes and dreams what he does, and what the true and better version of those hopes and dreams are really looks like—we can get somewhere.