Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

years. To the extent that it is used, it would be adopted gradually, and then it will take those generations 
another twenty years to reach maturity. By that time, we're approaching the Singularity, with the real 
revolution being the predominance of nonbiological intelligence. That will go far beyond the capabilities of any 
designer genes. The idea of designer babies and baby boomers is just the reprogramming of the information 
processes in biology. But it's still biology, with all its profound limitations. 
N
ED
: 
You're missing something. Biological is what we are. I think most people would agree that being biological is the 
quintessential attribute of being human. . 
R
AY
:
That's certainly true today. 
N
ED
: 
And I plan to keep it that way. 
R
AY
:
Well, if you're speaking for yourself, that's fine with 'me. But if you stay biological and don't reprogram your 
genes, you won't be around for very long to influence the debate. 
Nanotechnology: The Intersection of Information and the Physical World 
The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large. 
—L
OUIS 
P
ASTEUR
But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately, in the great future, we can arrange 
the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! 
—R
ICHARD 
F
EYNMAN
Nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for 
materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the 
reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance]. 
—N
ATIONAL 
S
CIENCE 
F
OUNDATION 
N
ANOTECHNOLOGY 
R
EPORT
Nanotechnology promises the tools to rebuild the physical world—our bodies and brains included—molecular 
fragment by molecular fragment, potentially atom by atom. We are shrinking the key feature size of technology, in 
accordance with the law of accelerating returns, at the exponential rate of approximately a factor of four per linear 
dimension per decade.
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At this rate the key feature sizes for most electronic and many mechanical technologies will 
be in the nanotechnology range—generally considered to be under one hundred nanometers—by the 2020s. 
(Electronics has already dipped below this threshold, although not yet in three-dimensional structures and not yet self-
assembling.) Meanwhile rapid progress has been made, particularly in the last several years, in preparing the 
conceptual framework and design ideas for the coming age of nanotechnology. 
As important as the biotechnology revolution discussed above will be, once its methods are fully mature, limits 
will be encountered in biology itself. Although biological systems are remarkable in their cleverness, we have also 
discovered that they are dramatically suboptimal. I've mentioned the extremely slow speed of communication in the 
brain, and as I discuss below (see p. 253), robotic replacements for our red blood cells could be thousands of times 
more efficient than their biological counterparts.
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Biology will never be able to match what we will be capable of 
engineering once we fully understand biology's principles of operation. 

---

The revolution in nanotechnology, however, will ultimately enable us to redesign and rebuild, molecule by 
molecule, our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact.
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These two revolutions are overlapping, but the 
full realization of nanotechnology lags behind the biotechnology revolution by about one decade. 
Most nanotechnology historians date the conceptual birth of nanotechnology to physicist Richard Feynman's 
seminal speech in 1959, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he described the inevitability and profound 
implications of engineering machines at the level of atoms: 
The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom 
by atom. It would be, in principle, possible ... for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the 
chemist writes down. . . . How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. 
The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to 
do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed—a development which I think cannot be avoided.
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An even earlier conceptual foundation for nanotechnology was formulated by the information theorist John von 
Neumann in the early 1950s with his model of a self-replicating system based on a universal constructor, combined 
with a universal computer.
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In this proposal the computer runs a program that directs the constructor, which in turn 
constructs a copy of both the computer (including its self-replication program) and the constructor. At this level of 
description von Neumann's proposal is quite abstract—the computer and constructor could be made in a great variety 
of ways, as well as from diverse materials, and could even be a theoretical mathematical construction. But he took the 
concept one step further and proposed a "kinematic constructor": a robot with at least one manipulator (arm) that 
would build a replica of itself from a "sea of parts" in its midst.
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It was left to Eric Drexler to found the modern field of nanotechnology, with a draft of his landmark Ph.D. thesis 
in the mid-1980s, in which he essentially combined these two intriguing suggestions. Drexler described a von 
Neumann kinematic constructor, which for its sea of parts used atoms and molecular fragments, as suggested in 
Feynman's speech. Drexler's vision cut across many disciplinary boundaries and was so far-reaching that no one was 
daring enough to be his thesis adviser except for my own mentor, Marvin Minsky. Drexler's dissertation (which 
became his book