Paul Root Wolpe: Kurzweil's Singularity Prediction is Wrong (YouTube Geek Week!) | Big Think

Paul Root Wolpe: Kurzweil's Singularity Prediction is Wrong (YouTube Geek Week!)

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Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe argues that the Singularity envisioned by Ray Kurzweil isn't quite right.

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PAUL ROOT WOLPE:

Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics, Raymond Schinazi Distinguished Research Professor of Jewish Bioethics, Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Biological Behavior, and Sociology, and the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University. Dr. Wolpe also serves as the Senior Bioethicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where he is responsible for formulating policy on bioethical issues and safeguarding research subjects. He is Co-Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), the premier scholarly journal in bioethics, and Editor-in-Chief of AJOB-Neuroscience, and sits on the editorial boards of over a dozen professional journals in medicine and ethics. Dr Wolpe is a past President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the country's oldest medical society.Dr. Wolpe is the author of over 125 articles, editorials, and book chapters in sociology, medicine, and bioethics, and has contributed to a variety of encyclopedias on bioethical issues. A futurist interested in social dynamics, Dr. Wolpe's work focuses on the social, religious, ethical, and ideological impact of technology on the human condition. Considered one of the founders of the field of neuroethics, which examines the ethical implications of neuroscience, he also writes about other emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and prosthetics. His teaching and publications range across multiple fields of bioethics and sociology, including death and dying, genetics and eugenics, sexuality and gender, mental health and illness, alternative medicine, and bioethics in extreme environments such as space. He is the author of the textbook Sexuality and Gender in Society, and edited and is a key author of the end-of-life guide Behoref Hayamim: In the Winter of Life.Dr. Wolpe sits on a number of national and international non-profit organizational boards and working groups, and is a consultant to academic institutions and the biomedical industry. In July, 2010, he testified to the President's Commission on the Study of Bioethical Issues in Washington, DC on ethical issues in synthetic biology. A dynamic and popular speaker internationally, Dr. Wolpe has been chosen by The Teaching Company as a "Superstar Teacher of America" and his courses are distributed internationally on audio and videotape. He has won the World Technology Network Award in Ethics, has been featured in a TED talk, and was profiled in the November, 2011 Atlantic Magazine as a “Brave Thinker of 2011." Dr. Wolpe is a frequent contributor and commentator in both the broadcast and print media, recently featured on 60 Minutes and with a personal profile in the Science Times of the New York Times.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Root Wolpe: Ray Kurzweil has argued that we’re on our way to a singularity, that is that if you look at the change and the interaction of scientific fields over the course of the last century or so and you project it forward, what you see is not a linear progression, but an exponential progression, which means that as things change they’re going to change more rapidly so that the curve will mean that over a very short period of time we will make giant leaps in scientific sophistication.

What he’s argued about that is that that is going to reach kind of critical mass, which will mean that at some point, and there are different dates that have been projected, but it’s not that far in the future; a couple of decades. We are going to be able to so manipulate human form and function, so change the nature of life that it’s impossible on this side of that moment that he calls a singularity, to predict what life will be like...

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