What is it when intelligence ceases to be something that a person is born with and is something that a person plugs?
The singularity has been used since decades as a form of cultural stress-test: a thought experiment concerning when human and AI intelligence merge so closely the boundary between the two becomes more of an aesthetic than a technical thing. Futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has continued to repeat this assertion with particularly inordinate persistence: human-level artificial general intelligence is reached in 2029, and a deeper merger soon follows. In his 2024 book The Singularity is Nearer, he pushes that reasoning to the more extreme goal of humans enhanced by a million fold intelligence by 2045 and relates it to a particular technology, brain interfaces made out of nanobots, which he envisions as non-invasively injected through the capillaries of the human body.
The vision offered by Kurzweil is not that of smarter machines, but of a new cognitive supply chain. Desire, attention, and identity are still mediated through the human brain, whereas the backend has changed to a hybrid stack of biology and computation. The Kurzweil said in an interview with The Guardian that we will become a blend of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic one, and it will all be integrated into a single thing. Our intelligence is going to increase a million times by 2045 and it will enhance our perception and consciousness. The appeal is obvious: augmentation is presented as an external aid, but as internal enlargement, an extension of perception, memory and meaning-making. The danger is also quite explicit: as soon as cognition is infrastructured, the issue of governance ceases to belong to the app store and transfers to the nervous system.
There is a growing stiffening of that governance talk into policy, at least along its extremities. In California, the neural data were classified as a form of sensitive personal data by the lawmakers through SB 1223, which put the brain-derived neural signals under a higher privacy set of data compared to more standard types of biometrics. This argument is more about a common trend: data ecosystems grow at a rate that exceeds the regulations that govern them. The identical neuroethics text urges against neuroexceptionalism, the belief that neural information is uniquely particularly harmful, but contends that the lesson of the past decade is that common behavioral indicators already form people at scale. In the event that brain-computer interfaces become a reality, they are bound to have the promise of medical usefulness as well as the legacy of the larger attention economy.
The consideration of human life is made in lieu of hardware even in those thinkers who consider a synthesis between human and AI as probable. The philosopher of Oxford, Nick Bostrom, has been arguing that AI, once fully advanced, would allow a post-scarcity enlightened big pie, freeing time of toil and transforming optimization of what people should optimize in their daily lives. According to his social behavioral explanation, he believed that it is more acceptable when you are doing well and when you have a large windfall, and he termed abundance as a condition that can actually change the social behavior. It is time, not money or compute that is the rare resource worth recovering. Brain interfaces in that frame are not about transforming people into workers who are faster and more about transforming the very meaning of work.
Arguments on singularity tend to degenerate into arguments about timelines. The importance of Kurzweil dates lies primarily in the fact that this necessary dates the reader to ask the specific questions: whether the intelligence can be multiplied, who defines the conditions of the access, at what borders the consent and to what extent is the sense of acceptable influence. The near-term direction of neurotechnology is still incremental, whereas the governance stakes are immediate, since the object of interest is now not only information about an individual. It is an inlet to the way an individual perceives the world.
