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January 2001

Kurzweil vs. Dertouzos

Two of technology's deepest thinkers in a dialogue on the future of humanity.

By Ray Kurzweil and Michael Dertouzos

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In our September issue, Michael Dertouzos wrote a column, "Not by Reason Alone," that took Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems to task for a piece Joy had written in Wired. In his Wired article, Joy argued that humanity should renounce certain lines of research, including nanotechnology, because of the dangers they pose. Dertouzos argued that Joy's view was flawed because his predictions were based on reason which, taken alone, is an inadequate guide to the future. Dertouzos' column drew an impassioned response from Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines. We print Kurzweil's letter and Dertouzos' rejoinder.

Ray Kurzweil

Although i agree with michael dertouzos' conclusion in rejecting Bill Joy's prescription to relinquish "our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge," I come to this view through a very different route. Although I am often paired with Bill Joy as the technology optimist versus Bill's pessimism, I do share his concerns about the dangers of self-replicating technologies. Michael is being shortsighted in his skepticism.

Michael writes that "just because chips...are getting faster doesn't mean they'll get smarter, let alone lead to self-replication." First of all, machines are already "getting smarter." As just one of many contemporary examples, I've recently held conversations with a person who speaks only German by translating my English speech in real time into human-sounding German speech (by combining speech recognition, language translation and speech synthesis) and similarly converting their spoken German replies into English speech. Although not perfect, this capability was not feasible at all just a few years ago. The intelligence of our technology does not need to be at human levels to be dangerous. Second, the implication that self-replication is harder than intelligence is not accurate. Software viruses, although not very intelligent, are self-replicating as well as being potentially destructive. Bioengineered biological viruses are not far behind. As for nanotechnology-based self-replication, that's further out, but the consensus in that community is this will be feasible in the 2020s, if not sooner.

Many long-range forecasts of technical feasibility in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future technology because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of technological progress rather than the "historical exponential" view. When people think of a future period, they intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for the period being considered. However, careful consideration of the pace of technology shows that the rate of progress is not constant, but it is human nature to adapt to the changing pace, so the intuitive view is that the pace will continue at the current rate. It is typical, therefore, that even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, extrapolate the current pace of change over the next 10 years or 100 years to determine their expectations. This is why I call this way of looking at the future the "intuitive linear" view.

But any serious consideration of the history of technology shows that technological change is at least exponential, not linear. There are a great many examples of this, including exponential trends in computation, communication, brain scanning, miniaturization and multiple aspects of biotechnology. One can examine this data in many different ways, on many different time scales and for a wide variety of different phenomena, and we find (at least) double exponential growth, a phenomenon I call the "law of accelerating returns." The law of accelerating returns does not rely on an assumption of the continuation of Moore's law, but is based on a rich model of diverse technological processes. What it clearly shows is that technology, particularly the pace of technological change, advances (at least) exponentially, not linearly, and has been doing so since the advent of technology. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details) but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored).

This observation also applies to paradigm shift rates, which are currently doubling (approximately) every decade. So the technological progress in the 21st century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 20,000 years.

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January/February 2001

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Comments

  • technology leverage
    KjenkinsJC on 03/21/2007 at 11:22 AM
    Posts:
    2
    I agree with much of what Michael Dertouzos says. However, all things human do not continue the same. There have always been good and evil people and this will continue but the capacity for destruction is rapidly changing. In a world without technology, good can win over evil if it maintains a majority.  However, technologies give leverage to even the smallest minority. Even if 99% of the people in the world have good intentions, the 1% will have the capacity to do great harm to millions. Genghis Khan reach only as far as his hourses could take him and it took time. Today's technology (let alone tommorrows) allows those will ill intentions to qickly reach any place as we have witnessed.  To put it another way, without technology terrorism would not be a significant problem. Can we keep technology only in the hands to those who use it wisely? This has already been answered.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • Is techno-science controllable per se ?
    Konstantinos on 02/29/2008 at 5:09 AM
    Posts:
    1
    The issue of discrepancy between speed of technology and human inertia (Dertouzos' argument) is brilliantly analysed in the "Promethean Shame" syndrome by Günther Anders (The Outdatedness of Human Being, written in 1956).

    The proposals of both Kurzweil and Dertouzos regarding controllability of science and technology (via ethical guidelines, regulatory overviews, computer-assisted surveillance, etc.) seriously underestimate the real dimension of the challenge. Heidegger, in an interview with Augstein in 1966, insists pessimistically towards his upset and stunning interlocutor: "The Technique is in its substance something that man on his own cannot get under control". Homo Faber, the doer and controller, mutating to an object, subordinated to its own creature? 

    Sloterdijk, taking up an older argument by Plato, optimistically proposes in his famous speech "Rules for the human zoo" (1999) that it may still be time to try to setup some rules and limitations, that we restrict ourselves, that we  - voluntarily - resist to the temptation to do everything that appears doable. This again reflects an older tradition; as with many other deadly temptations (fame, immortality, unlimited power, etc.), there was a device in the ancient Greek cities to train their citizens to resist also against this ultimate temptation. In the center of the pólis, adjacent to the agorà, they kept a plot of land idle, it was forbidden to "valorize" or use it for any purpose. It was protected by Hermès and called boulimiaíon. Since it was the most precious plot of land in the middle of the city, almost everybody wanted to own it (hence the bulimia). Are the tropical forests or our DNA the modern equivalents to the boulimiaíon? (see also my article to be published soon in the Biotechnology Journal 2008-3: "Managing Science: is the Cudos still in place?" DOI 10.102/biot.200800029).

    Bill Joy's proposal to renounce certain lines of research - by an explicit and voluntary political act- is within this boulimiaíon tradition. So, the battle is old and between (explicit, democratic) politics, as the basic and generic emancipation project, and its own daughter, the techno-science, which claims full independence (accepting no limit beyond technical feasibility).

    Relatively new (since the middle of past century) is the fact that now we can really make it a world that most probably will never have existed. This, according to Günther Anders, ultimate nihilistic singularity, is a huge threat for the mental stability of our and future generations and could explain some of the violence that takes place seemingly "without reason", in particular in western societies (Columbine, etc.).

    Konstantinos Karachalios, Munich
    Rate this comment: 12345
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