Not everyone who is predicting an impending singularity in human development is suggesting that it will be a spiritual Renaissance. Futurists and technologists are predicting that we may be heading toward a technological singularity. This idea was first proposed by the mathematician Vernor Vinge, based on Moore's Law, the observation that the rate of increase in computing power has been consistently exponential for the last fifty years.

Computing power now doubles approximately every eighteen months. If this trend were to continue, Vinge and others argue, computers within a decade of our current era will be more powerful than the human brain. Once this happens, they suggest it is likely that computers themselves will take over the designing of future computers. This could then lead to a runaway train kind of scenario where machines rapidly become much smarter than the humans who initially created them.

In this version of convergence, the technosphere would be the goal, not just the means. The technological singularity would be a convergence of all technologies, until humans became totally embedded and submerged into a virtual world. This singularity is a state in which humans will be components of a cybernetic social network of such complexity that no one person will be able to understand more than a tiny fraction of the whole.

Ray Kurzweil

One of the chief proponents of this idea is the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who describes this near-imminent technological omega point in his book The Singularity Is Near. His vision of the future is not just a matter of his opinion; it is a template that is being acted upon and implemented by the multinational corporate world.

Kurzweil predicts that not only will computers become more intelligent than humans, but also that computers will become so powerful that it will be possible to download the entire contents of the human brain into one. The result of this would be a sort of digital immortality. Kurzweil does not see a problem with consciousness being transferred along with the information from a brain.

Kurzweil believes that his only responsibility is to stay alive until this technology is in place so that he can live forever. Consequently, he is taking a large number of health supplements and is planning his life to avoid taking any unnecessary risks. Kurzweil's current estimate is that computers will surpass the power of the human brain sometime in the next decade and that the singularity will occur sometime around 2045.

Critique of the Technological Singularity

Kurzweil's estimates of the computing power required to model the structure of the human brain have taken a major blow from the quantum theory of mind proposed by Dr. Stuart Hammeroff, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, and Professor Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind. Their idea is that the human brain doesn't function by electrical impulses being transferred from synapse to synapse. Instead, they propose the brain is a quantum computer that uses coherence states in tiny structures called microtubules to record and store information.

Kurzweil has been forced to admit that if their theory is proven correct, the human brain is many millions of times more powerful than previously estimated. If this is indeed the case, the technological singularity is not quite so close, certainly not anywhere near 2012 and could, in fact, be very distant indeed.