The World in 2030

The World in 2030 93
the Omega Point – but is, perhaps, indistinguishable
from God. 183
There are many different routes to The Singularity. I
wrote earlier that the world’s networks and the billions of
computers which will be attached to it may prove to have
emergent qualities of consciousness and super-intelligence
on their own. As Professor Marvin Minsky wrote in one of
his most famous books, ‘Society of Mind’ (1988):
This book tries to explain how minds work. How
can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence? To answer
that, we’ll show that you can build a mind from
many little parts, each mindless by itself.
I’ll call ‘Society of Mind’ this scheme in which each
mind is made of many smaller processes. These we’ll
call agents. Each mental agent by itself can only do
some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at
all. Yet when we join these agents in societies – in certain
very special ways – this leads to intelligence. 184
But perhaps the most remarkable 21 st century work on
the subject is Ray Kurzweil’s previously quoted book ‘The
Singularity is Near’. In it, Kurzweil suggests:
Once we’ve succeeded in creating a machine that
can pass the Turing test (around 2029), the succeeding
period will be an era of consolidation in which
nonbiological intelligence will make rapid gains.
However, the extraordinary expansion contemplated
for the Singularity, in which human intelligence is