The World in 2030

94 The World in 2030
multiplied by billions, won’t take place until the mid
2040s. 185
Clearly, it is impossible to be precise about when The
Singularity will occur, but it will be the most momentous
development in human evolution since our species
discovered language and began using tools (the earliest form
of technology).
There are many who will be sceptical about the notion
of machines ever becoming more capable than humans
but, after forty years of observing technological progress, I
personally have little doubt that this will be achieved, and
probably by this report’s time line of 2030. And, despite my
robust defeat in the debate I sponsored in 1965, I have little
doubt that later this century humans will begin to upload
their minds and their memories to machines.
Of course, the idea of super-intelligent machines becoming
our successors (with or without our brains uploaded into
them) is not new, or even a product of 20 th century thinking.
In 1864, Samuel Butler, 186 a writer, philosopher and New
Zealand sheep farmer, wrote to Charles Darwin, the man
who first developed the theory of evolution, suggesting a new
chapter to end Darwin’s famous ‘Origin Of The Species’:
Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is:
We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man
will become to the machine what the horse and dog
are to man; the conclusion being that machines are,
or are becoming, animate. 187