We are making exponential progress in every type of information technology.
Moreover, virtually all technologies are becoming information technologies.
We can reliably predict that in the not too distant future we will reach
what is known as “The Singularity”.

This is a time when the pace of technological change will be so rapid and
its impact so deep that human life will be irreversibly transformed. We will
be able to reprogram our biology, and ultimately transcend it. The result
will be an intimate merger between ourselves and the technology we create.

The evidence for this ubiquitous exponential growth is abundant. In my new
book, The Singularity is Near, I have graphs from a variety of fields,
including communications, the internet, brain scanning and biological
technologies, that reveal exponential progress. Broadly, my models show that
we are doubling the rate of technical innovation every decade. Throughout
the 20th century, the rate of progress gradually picked up speed. By the end
of the century, the rate was such that the sum total of the century’s
achievements was equivalent to about 20 years of progress at the 2000 rate.

Growth in information technology is particularly rapid: we’re doubling its
power, as measured by price-performance, bandwidth, capacity and many other
measures, every year or so. That’s a factor of 1000 in 10 years, a million
in 20 years, and a billion in 30 years, although a slow, second level of
exponential growth means that a billion-fold improvement takes only about a
quarter of a century. The exponential growth of computing goes back over a
century and covers five main paradigms:

. Electromechanical computing as used in the 1890 US census.

. Relay-based computing as used to crack Nazi cryptography in the early
1940s.

. Vacuum-tube-based computing as used by CBS to predict the election of
Dwight Eisenhower as US president in 1952.

. Discrete-transistor-based computing as used in the first space launches in
the 1960s.

. Computing based on integrated circuits, invented in 1958 and applied to
mainstream computing from the late 1960s.

Each time it became apparent that one paradigm was about to run out of
steam, the realisation resulted in research pressure to create the next
paradigm. Today we have more than a decade left in the paradigm of shrinking
transistors on an integrated circuit, but there has already been enormous
progress in creating the sixth main computing paradigm of three-dimensional
molecular computing, using carbon nanotubes for example. As another example,
it took us 14 years to sequence the genome of HIV; SARS took only 31 days.

The result is that we can reliably predict such measures as
price-performance and capacity of a broad variety of information
technologies. There are many things we cannot dependably anticipate. Our
inability to make reliable predictions applies to any specific project. But
the overall capabilities of information technology in each field can be
projected. I have been making predictions of this type for more than 20
years.

We see examples in other areas of science of very smooth and reliable
outcomes resulting from the interaction of a great many unpredictable
events. Consider that predicting the path of a single molecule in a gas is
essentially impossible, but predicting the properties of the entire gas -
comprised of a great many chaotically interacting molecules – can be done
very reliably through the laws of thermodynamics. Analogously, it is not
possible to reliably predict the results of a specific project or company,
but the overall capabilities of information technology, comprised of many
chaotic activities, can nonetheless be dependably anticipated through what I
call the law of accelerating returns.

Between 2000 and 2014 we’ll make 20 years of progress at 2000 rates,
equivalent to the entire 20th century. And then we’ll do the same again in
only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience 100 years
of technological advance in the 21st century; we will witness in the order
of 20,000 years of progress when measured by the rate of progress in 2000,
or about 1000 times that in the 20th century.

Ultimately, we will merge with our technology. As we get to the 2030s, the
non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate. By the 2040s it
will be billions of times more capable than the biological part.

Above all, information technologies will grow at an explosive rate. And
information technology is the technology that we need to consider.
Ultimately, everything of value will become an information technology: our
biology, our thoughts and thinking processes, manufacturing and many other
fields. As one example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing will enable us to
apply computerised techniques to automatically assemble complex products at
the molecular level.

This will mean that by the mid 2020s we will be able to meet our energy
needs using very inexpensive nanotechnology-based solar panels that will
capture the energy in 0.03 per cent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth,
which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030.

A common objection is that there must be limits to exponential growth, as in
the example of rabbits in Australia. The answer is that there are, but
they’re not very limiting. By 2020, $1000 will purchase 1016 calculations
per second (cps) of computing (compared with about 109 cps today), which is
the level I estimate is required to functionally simulate the human brain.
Another few decades on, and we will be able to build more optimal computing
systems. For example, one cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be about
100 million times more powerful than the human brain. The ultimate
1-kilogram computer – about the weight of a laptop today – which I envision
late in this century, could provide 1042 cps, about 10 quadrillion (1016)
times more powerful than all human brains put together today.

And that’s if we restrict the computer to functioning at a cold temperature.
If we find a way to let it get hot, we could improve that by a factor of
another 100 million. And we’ll devote more than 1 kilogram of matter to
computing. We’ll use a significant portion of the matter and energy in our
vicinity as a computing substrate.

Our growing mastery of information processes means the 21st century will be
characterised by three great technology revolutions. We are now in the early
stages of the “G” revolution (genetics, or biotechnology). Biotechnology is
providing the means to change your genes: not just designer babies but
designer baby boomers. But perfecting our biology will only get us so far.

Biology will never be able to match what we will be capable of engineering,
now that we are gaining a deep understanding of biology’s principles of
operation. That will bring us to the “N” or nanotechnology revolution, which
will achieve maturity in the 2020s. There are already early impressive
experiments. A biped nanorobot created by Nadrian Seeman and William
Sherman, of New York University, can walk on legs only 10 nanometres long,
demonstrating the ability of nanoscale machines to execute precise
manoeuvres.

Microchips of Bedford, Massachusetts, has developed a computerised device
that, when implanted under the skin, delivers precise mixtures of medicines
from hundreds of nanoscale wells inside it. There are many other examples.

By the 2020s, nanotechnology will enable us to create almost any physical
product we want from inexpensive materials, using information processes. We
will be able to go beyond the limits of biology, and replace your current
“human body version 1.0″ with a dramatically upgraded version 2.0, providing
radical life extension. The “killer app” of nanotechnology is “nanobots”,
blood-cell-sized robots that can travel in the bloodstream destroying
pathogens, removing debris, correcting errors in DNA and reversing ageing
processes.

We’re already in the early stages of augmenting and replacing each of our
organs, even portions of our brains with neural implants, the most recent
versions of which allow patients to download new software to their implants.

The most profound transformation will be “R” for the robotics revolution,
which really refers to “strong” AI, or artificial intelligence at the human
level. Hundreds of applications of “narrow AI” – machine intelligence that
equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks – already permeate
our infrastructure. Every time you send an email or make a mobile phone
call, intelligent algorithms route the information. AI programs diagnose
electrocardiograms with an accuracy rivalling that of doctors, evaluate
medical images, fly and land aircraft, guide intelligent autonomous weapons,
make automated investment decisions for over $1 trillion of funds, and guide
industrial processes. A couple of decades ago these were all research
projects.

With regard to strong AI, we’ll have both the hardware and software to
recreate human intelligence by the end of the 2020s. We’ll be able to
improve these methods and harness the speed, memory and knowledge-sharing
ability of machines.

Ultimately, we will merge with our technology. This will begin with nanobots
in our bodies and brains. The nanobots will keep us healthy, provide
full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, provide
direct brain-to-brain communication over the internet and greatly expand
human intelligence. But keep in mind that non-biological intelligence is
doubling each year, whereas our biological intelligence is essentially
fixed.

As we reach the 2030s, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will
predominate. By the mid 2040s, the non-biological portion of our
intelligence will be billions of times more capable than the biological
portion. Non-biological intelligence will have access to its own design and
will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle.

This is not a utopian vision: the GNR (genetics, nanotechnology and
robotics) technologies each have perils to match their promises. The danger
of a bioengineered pathological virus is already with us. Self-replication
will ultimately be feasible in non-biological nanotechnology-based systems
as well, which will introduce its own dangers. In short, the answer is not
relinquishment. Any attempt to proscribe such technologies will not only
deprive human society of profound benefits, but will drive such technologies
underground, which would make the dangers worse.

We won’t experience 100 years of technological advance in the 21st century;
we will witness in the order of 20,000 years of progress when measured by
the rate of progress in 2000, or about 1000 times that achieved in the 20th
century. Some commentators have questioned whether we would still be human
after such dramatic changes. These observers may define the concept of human
as being based on our limitations, but I prefer to define us as the species
that seeks – and succeeds – in going beyond our limitations.

Because our ability to increase our horizons is expanding exponentially
rather than linearly, we can anticipate a dramatic century of accelerating
change ahead.

Intuitive view

In 2003, Time magazine organised a “Future of Life” conference celebrating
the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of
DNA. All speakers, myself included, were asked what we thought the next 50
years would bring. Most of the predictions were short-sighted.

James Watson’s prediction was that in 50 years, we’ll have drugs that allow
us to eat as much as we want without gaining weight. “Fifty years?” I
replied. We’ve already demonstrated it in mice and human drugs using the
relevant techniques that are in development. We can expect them in five to
10 years, not 50.

The mistake that Watson and virtually every other presenter made was to use
the progress of the past 50 years as a model for the next half-century. I
describe this way of looking at the future as the “intuitive linear” view:
people assume the current rate of progress will continue. But technological
change is not linear but exponential. You can examine the data in different
ways, and for a variety of technologies, from electronic to biological. You
can analyse the implications, from the sum of human knowledge to the size of
the economy. However you measure it, the exponential acceleration of
progress and growth applies.

Understanding exponential progress is key to understanding future trends.
Over the long term, exponential growth produces change on a scale
dramatically different from linear growth. Consider that in 1990, the human
genome project was widely regarded as controversial. In 1989, we sequenced
only one-thousandth of the genome. But from 1990 onwards the amount of
genetic data sequenced doubled every year – a rate of growth that continues
today – and the transcription of the human genome was completed in 2003.

Reverse-engineering the brain

The most profound transformation will be in “strong” AI, that is, artificial
intelligence at the human level.

To re-create the capabilities of the human brain, we need to meet both the
hardware and software requirements. Achieving the hardware requirement was
controversial five years ago but is now largely a mainstream view among
informed observers.

Supercomputers are already at 100 trillion (1014) calculations per second
(cps) and will hit 1016 cps near the end of this decade, which is the level
I estimate is required to functionally simulate the human brain. Several
supercomputers with 1015 cps are already on the drawing board, with two
Japanese efforts targeting 1016 cps about the end of the decade. By 2020,
1016 cps will be available for about $1000. So now the controversy is
focused on the algorithms.

To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to
reverse-engineer the human brain. Here, progress is far greater than most
people realise. The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is
progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year. Scanning
tools, such as a new system from the University of Pennsylvania, can now see
individual interneuronal connections and watch them fire in real time.
Already, we have mathematical models of a couple of dozen regions of the
brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons
in the brain.

IBM is creating a highly detailed simulation of about 10,000 cortical
neurons, including tens of millions of connections. The first version will
simulate electrical activity and a future version will also simulate
chemical activity. By the mid-2020s, it is conservative to conclude that we
will have effective models of the whole brain.

One benefit of a full understanding of the human brain will be a deep
understanding of ourselves, but the key implication is that it will expand
the tool kit of techniques we can apply to create artificial intelligence.
We will then be able to create non-biological systems that match human
intelligence. These superintelligent computers will be able to do things we
are not able to do, such as share knowledge and skills at electronic speeds.

New Scientist

Futurist, inventor and writer Ray Kurzweil is responsible for innovations
such as text-tospeech synthesisers and the first musical instrument
synthesiser. His books include The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The
Age of Spiritual Machines (2000) and his new book, released this month, The
Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, on which this story is
based.

That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.

China’s real estate market is so hot that miniature cities are being created with artificial lakes, and the country’s nouveau riche suddenly seem eager to put down as much as $5.3 million for a luxury apartment in skyscrapers with names like the Skyline Mansion.

For decades after the Communists took over in 1949, there was relatively little housing construction or office building under central planning. But since the early 1990′s, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. And this year the building boom is at a frenzy, with the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.

“There’s no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we’ve never seen before,” said Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics. “But more importantly, it’s the fastest pace of development in the past 50 or 100 years.”

In Beijing, the remains of an old Taoist temple now stand in the middle of the parking lot of a new mall more than twice the size of the Mall of America. Big developers are acquiring huge swaths of prime land in the largest cities to build huge residential campuses with kitschy names like Cloudland Water Manor, Eastern Venice, Palais de Fortune and Skyway Oasis Garden.

Such developments dwarf anything being built today in the West. “I’m working on a master plan for a 46-kilometer riverfront area,” said Robert Egan, who runs a landscape architecture firm in Beijing called PlaceMakers. “Scale like that doesn’t happen in the U.S.”

It is not uncommon to see a residential development with 10, 20 or even 30 identical high-rise apartment buildings clustered around sculpted green spaces and artificial waterways.

For increasingly wealthy Chinese, the American dream of a home and a yard has become more like a French villa with a community lake, a town square, a post office, a hospital, a cinema, a church, a hotel, a shopping mall and, of course, a power plant.

A top-of-the-line unit at one development project has a 25-acre palm-shaped artificial lake, which brochures say will feature docks with berths for private yachts.

Prices are soaring. Luxury apartments in Shanghai and Beijing with names like Home of the Tycoons now sell for prices comparable to some high-end properties in New York.

Rising prices have created a circus-like atmosphere in parts of China. Real estate fairs are mobbed, land speculation is rampant and some poor farmers dream about converting their wheat fields into the next Beverly Hills.

Indeed, prices have risen so fast over the last few years and the pace of building has been so furious here and in other large cities that the government and some leading economists have been warning about a huge property bubble in China.

The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw material to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage .

China’s heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world’s second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world’s 10 most-polluted cities.

The construction boom is also beginning to wipe out what little is left of the old China, alarming historic preservationists. Indeed, as the world’s most-populous country, at 1.3 billion, rapidly modernizes and urbanizes, producing millions of new homeowners, its social and economic fabric is being fundamentally altered.

China’s housing rush is being fueled by mortgage rates around 5 percent and huge inflows of foreign capital. But the boom is also driven by landmark government housing reforms from the 1990′s that for the first time since the Communist revolution of the late 1940′s allowed Chinese to acquire their own homes rather than live in government housing.

As a result of this privatization, thousands of new residential projects are rising in the bustling coastal provinces. And sprawling satellite towns and luxury villa developments are sprouting in what was once farmland.

This may just a suggestion of what is ahead. China expects 75 million more farmers to move to cities over the next five years, amounting to one of the biggest mass migrations in history, according to CLSA, a brokerage house specializing in the Asia-Pacific region.

“China’s demand for housing is just getting going,” says Andy Rothman, a CLSA analyst in Shanghai.

The boom is most evident in the largest cities like Beijing, which will be host for the 2008 Olympics and is now draped in construction projects that are straining water and power supplies. Every big city seems to have plans for a central business district. And every big housing project seems to have a Phase 1, 2 and 3.

“Everyone wants to build a Manhattan,” said Jun Xia, a principal in the Shanghai office of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. “In China, I say ‘smaller, smaller’ and the clients say ‘wider, wider.’ “

Some of the greatest financial rewards have been going to the country’s new real estate tycoons – people like Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin in Beijing, and Wang Shi in Shenzhen. A property tycoon in Tianjin, Sun Hongbin, once served a two-year prison term for embezzlement but now graces the cover of magazines like China Entrepreneur.

It is not surprising that in a country where 170 metropolitan areas have more than a million people, according to government figures, everyone seems to want to be a developer. State-owned oil and steel giants, automobile companies, shipbuilders and even Communist Party newspapers are creating real estate subsidiaries.

The developer of the Fortune Residence in Shanghai, a high-end property, is a subsidiary of People’s Daily, the leading newspaper of the Communist Party. And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district.

Guohua’s real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.

Foreigners are also scrambling to enter the Chinese real estate market. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have invested in property. And Morgan Stanley has acquired about $700 million worth of commercial real estate this year in Shanghai. The city says it now has more than 4,000 skyscrapers – buildings 18 stories or higher – far more than New York, according to Emporis, a global real estate research group based in Germany.

Also considering investments here are Simon Property, one of the world’s biggest retail developers; Triple Five Group, developer of the Mall of America; and a Japanese real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori, who is spending nearly $1 billion to build one of the world’s tallest buildings – the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong district.

There is, of course, a dark side to this real estate boom. In the scramble to reallocate land and create boomtowns, China has spent much of the last decade demolishing millions of old homes and buildings and relocating tens of millions of people, many against their will.

And there are broader risks. The Chinese government is concerned that soaring prices might overheat the nation’s economy and even threaten social stability. It moved this year to impose new taxes and other tough administrative measures aimed at cooling off the property sector.

Housing sales have slowed since June. But in recent months, real estate construction has picked up steam again, according to UBS. And that growth is bolstering new demand for energy and raw material. China is already the world’s largest producer and consumer of steel, cement and coal.

In his report, “China Eats the World,” Mr. Rothman of CLSA predicted that in coming years, “the Chinese dragon will stay very, very hungry.”

Many Chinese are acting as if the housing boom will not fizzle any time soon. The economy is soaring, income is rising, Ikeas and Wal-Marts are popping up in second-tier cities and tens of millions of people are giddy about the prospects of owning their own homes, driving their own cars and adopting a more modern lifestyle.