Brent Kearney

The Singularity Summit brings together futurist luminaries to discuss the rapidly approaching technological singularity: that point past which it becomes nearly impossible to estimate the course of human technological — and biological — development.

I highly recommend that you check out the videos from the summit. Especially the man with the crystal ball, the highlight of the conference, Ray Kurzweil. Despite his monotone, sleep-inducing style of speaking, Kurzweil’s talk is fascinating. He sums up what many of the other speakers said in their talks, comments on them, and gives an overview of the inexorable march of technological progress towards the singularity.

The debate between Ray Kurzweil and John Horgan was interesting. It was refreshing to hear an opposing view, even though his argument from complexity was rather weak in the face of exponentially growing knowledge and computational power, and Horgan had nothing to say about Kurzweil’s suggestion that the brain’s complexity is like a fractal — not as complex as it appears. In the end, it came down to a factual dispute: Horgan does not believe that biology/neurology is or is the same as information technology, and Kurzweil does.

It’s a valid objection. Many technophiles hold the view that genetics and/or brain-mind and/or nano-physics is similar or the same as binary, digital computer technology. What if this view is false? Could the information bits that are perceived in living cells turn out to be a misconception of what is going on inside the body? Is wetware an irreducible, fundamental component of brains, intelligence, consciousness? Of genetic goings-on in general?

Philosophers have long speculated that this could be so. It seems to me though, that the engineers have already won that debate. An example that nicely illustrates how fundamental biological processes are essentially a natural implementation of information technology is Paul Rothemund’s presentation, Casting spells with DNA, or the more recent version, DNA folding. Rothemund describes the beginnings of a high-level computer programming language for engineering DNA, resulting in the manipulation of biological mechanisms to precisely control the organization of matter at the molecular or atomic level. If the understanding of DNA as an information substrate was mistaken, this would not be possible.

Consciousness is another matter — as Horgan pointed out, we don’t even understand irony. First things first though. A lot will be discovered on the path to engineering a brain. Maybe the mystery of consciousness will be solved along the way. Maybe it will be an emergent property of a sufficiently complex neural system. We’ll find out when we get there!

See also: Singularity Hub’s first-hand review of the summit