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The heart of the Singularity argument, as explained by the technologists Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, the leading evangelists of the concept, lies in the power of exponential growth. As Samuel Butler noted, machines evolve far faster than humans. But information technology, which Butler only glimpsed, races ahead at an even faster rate. Digital tools double in power or capacity every year or two, whether they are storing data, transmitting it, or performing calculations. A single transistor cost $1 in 1968; by 2010 that same buck could buy a billion of them. This process, extended into the future, signaled that sometime in the third decade of this century, computers would rival or surpass the power and complexity of the human brain. At that point, conceivably, machines would organize our affairs, come up with groundbreaking ideas, and establish themselves as the cognitive leaders of the planet.

Many believed these machines were yet to be invented. They would come along in a decade or two, powered by new generations of spectacularly powerful semiconductors, perhaps fashioned from exotic nanomaterials, the heirs to silicon. And they would feature programs to organize knowledge and generate language and ideas. Maybe the hardware would replicate the structure of the human brain. Maybe the software would simulate its patterns. Who knew? Whatever its configuration, perhaps a few of Watson’s algorithms or an insight from Josh Tenenbaum’s research would find their way into this machinery.

But others argued that the Singularity was already well under way. In this view, computers across the Internet were already busy recording our movements and shopping preferences, suggesting music and diets, and replacing traditional brain functions such as information recall and memory storage. Gregory Stock, a biophysicist, echoed Butler as he placed technology in an evolutionary context. “Lines are blurring between the living and the not-living, between the born and the made,” he said. The way he described it, life leapt every billion years or so into greater levels of complexity. It started with simple algaelike cells, advanced to complex cells and later to multicellular organisms, and then to an explosion of life during the Cambrian period, some five hundred fifty million years ago. This engendered new materials within earth’s life forms, including bone. Stock argued that humans, using information technology, were continuing this process, creating a “planetary superorganism”—a joint venture between our cerebral cortex and silicon. He said that this global intelligence was already transforming and subjugating us, much the way our ancestors tamed the gray wolf to create dogs. He predicted that this next step of evolution would lead to the demise of “free-range humans,” and that those free of the support and control of the planetary superorganism would retreat to back eddies. “I hate to see them disappear,” he said.

The crowd at the Singularity Summit was by no means united in these visions. A biologist from Cambridge University, Dennis Bray, described the daunting complexity of a single cell and cautioned that the work of modeling the circuitry and behavior of even the most basic units of life remained formidable. “The number of distinguishable proteins that a human makes is essentially uncountable,” he said. So what chance was there to model the human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and quadrillions of connections?

In the near term, it was academic. No one was close to replicating the brain in form or function. Still, the scientists at the conference were busy studying it, hoping to glean from its workings single applications that could be taught to computers. The brain, they held, would deliver its treasures bit by bit. Tenenbaum was of this school.

And so was Demis Hassabis. A diminutive thirty-four-year-old British neuroscientist, Hassabis told the crowd that technology wasn’t the only thing growing exponentially. Research papers on the brain were also doubling every year. Some fifty thousand