Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Totalitarian Relinquishment.
The only conceivable way that the accelerating pace of advancement on all of these 
fronts could be stopped would be through a worldwide totalitarian system that relinquishes the very idea of progress. 
Even this specter would be likely to fail in averting the dangers of GNR because the resulting underground activity 
would tend to favor the more destructive applications. This is because the responsible practitioners that we rely on to 
quickly develop defensive technologies would not have easy access to the needed tools. Fortunately, such a totalitarian 
outcome is unlikely because the increasing decentralization of knowledge is inherently a democratizing force. 
Preparing the Defenses 
My own expectation is that the creative and constructive applications of these technologies will dominate, as I believe 
they do today. However, we need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies. As I 
discussed, we are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly 
implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century. 
We don't have to look past today to see the intertwined promise and peril of technological advancement. Imagine 
describing the dangers (atomic and hydrogen bombs for one thing) that exist today to people who lived a couple of 
hundred years ago. They would think it mad to take such risks. But how many people in 2005 would really want to go 
back to the short, brutish, disease-filled, poverty-stricken, disaster-prone lives that 99 percent of the human race 
struggled through a couple of centuries ago?
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We may romanticize the past, but up until fairly recently most of humanity lived extremely fragile lives in which 
one all-too-common misfortune could spell disaster. Two hundred years ago life expectancy for females in the record-
holding country (Sweden) was roughly thirty-five years, very brief compared to the longest life expectancy today—

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almost eighty-five years, for Japanese women. Life expectancy for males was roughly thirty-three years, compared to 
the current seventy-nine years in the record-holding countries.
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It took half the day to prepare the evening meal, and 
hard labor characterized most human activity. There were no social safety nets. Substantial portions of our species still 
live in this precarious way, which is at least one reason to continue technological progress and the economic 
enhancement that accompanies it. Only technology, with its ability to provide orders of magnitude of improvement in 
capability and affordability, has the scale to confront problems such as poverty, disease, pollution, and the other 
overriding concerns of society today. 
People often go through three stages in considering the impact of future technology: awe and wonderment at its 
potential to overcome age-old problems; then a sense of dread at a new set of grave dangers that accompany these 
novel technologies; followed finally by the realization that the only viable and responsible path is to set a careful 
course that can realize the benefits while managing the dangers. 
Needless to say, we have already experienced technology's downside—for example, death and destruction from 
war. The crude technologies of the first industrial revolution have crowded out many of the species that existed on our 
planet a century ago. Our centralized technologies (such as buildings, cities, airplanes, and power plants) are 
demonstrably insecure. 
The "NBC" (nuclear, biological, and chemical) technologies of warfare have all been used or been threatened to 
be used in our recent past.
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The far more powerful GNR technologies threaten us with new, profound local and 
existential risks. If we manage to get past the concerns about genetically altered designer pathogens, followed by self-
replicating entities created through nanotechnology, we will encounter robots whose intelligence will rival and 
ultimately exceed our own. Such robots may make great assistants, but who's to say that we can count on them to 
remain reliably friendly to mere biological humans?