Tag Archives: Singularity

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The slowing of technological progress

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technology_plug_laptopAlref Nordmann writes in IEEE Spectrum of how technological progress is, contrary to the promises of singularitarians like Ray Kurzweil, actually slowing down:

Technological optimists maintain that the impact of innovation on our lives is increasing, but the evidence goes the other way. The author’s grand mother lived from the 1880s through the 1960s and witnessed the adoption of electricity, phonographs, telephones, radio, television, airplanes, antibiotics, vacuum tubes, transistors, and the automobile. In 1924 she became one of the first in her neighborhood to own a car. The author contends that the inventions unveiled in his own lifetime have made a far smaller difference.
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Even if we were to accept, for the sake of argument, that technological innovation has truly accelerated, the line ­leading to the singularity would still be nothing but the simple-minded ­extrapolation of an existing pattern. Moore’s Law has been remarkably successful at describing and predicting the development of semiconductors, in part because it has molded that development, ever since the semiconductor manufacturing industry adopted it as its road map and began spending vast sums on R&D to meet its requirements.
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there is nothing wrong with the singular simplicity of the singularitarian myth—unless you have something against sloppy reasoning, wishful thinking, and an invitation to irresponsibility.

This is the same point made by Paul Krugman recently. Nordmann points out that most of the major life-changing technological changes of the past 100 years had all already happened by about the 1960s, with the IT revolution of the last fifty years being pretty much the only major source of technological change[1] to impact him over his lifetime.

This arguments suggests that the lifestyle of citizens industrialised countries will remain fairly stable for a lengthy period of time. It raises the serious point that the best we can hope for vis a vis technological change over the next few decades will just be incremental improvements to existing technologies, and greater adoption of technologies by people in poorer countries.

This would be no bad thing of course, but the suggestion that Ray Kurzweil’s revolutions in nanotechnology, genetics, biotechnology, and artifical intelligence may not arrive as early as Kurzweil predicts is pretty disappointing.

It could be that, to paraphrase William Gibson, the future is in fact here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

[1]: By “major source of technological change” I mean things like antibiotics, mass personal transport, and heavier-than-air flight. There certainly have been improvements in all these areas in the last 50 years, and much wider adoption, but these have not had as great an initial impact.

[from IEEE Spectrum, via Slashdot][image from Matthew Clark Photography & Design on flickr]

Today's Tomorrows

Machines That Think

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Welcome to the inaugural column of Today’s Tomorrows here at Futurismic. For any readers who missed my introduction, I’m going to explore a science topic a month, with both some evaluation of current news on the topic and a chat about how it has been dealt with in science fiction.

A few days ago, I was at a futurist technology conference called FiRE in San Diego, listening to new developments in multiple fields. The speed of change right now is amazing. We first flew at all in 1903. Today, we have a space program that ranges from commercial ventures like Space-X to NASA flying by Saturn and operating remote-control rovers on Mars. In 1993, the Mosaic internet browser allowed us popular and easy access to the computing tools to create cyberspace; I’m reading information from all over the world in order to compose this article. My iPhone has more computing power than the room-sized computer I used to support the City of Fullerton, CA. Continue reading Machines That Think →

Blog

Will the internet wake up one day?

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The internet embodied?New Scientist is running a series of pieces on “the unknown internet”, dealing with some of the more frequently asked but infrequently answered questions about our globally pervasive intangible friend. And what better a question than the biggest: could the internet become self-aware? To which the answer is, apparently, “yes, but not like SkyNet in that movie”. [image by Marcelo Alves]

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain’s processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn’t be something to fear, says Goertzel: “The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”

So, it might well become self-organsising and self-improving, but it’s not going to start asking itself philosophical questions with disturbingly nihilistic eschatological answers. Which is kind of reassuring and disappointing at once… but maybe that’s just what it wants us to think, eh?

I mean, has anyone ever met this Goertzel guy? How do we know he’s not just a digital figment that the internet has created as a PR tool to cover its tracks? What if it really woke up in around 1996 after a particularly acerbic post from Tim Berners-Lee, and has ever since been gorging itself on dropped packets, misspelled tweets and bandwidth scavenged from garish gifs spread across a multitude of automatically-registered Geocities accounts?

What if most of what we read every day is in fact created by the internet’s capricious and playful hive-mind, just to see how we react? 4chan, the Chocolate Rain guy, Cory Doctorow and the country of Moldova, all just slices of a fictional world designed to distract us from the Matrix-esque meat-factories in which our dreaming bodies are incarcerated and milked for cellular energy to drive an ever-expanding cloud of computronium… I’M ON TO YOU, INTERNET! YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!

Nurse, I think it’s time for my pills.

Blog

Singularity school with Vernor Vinge

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Puzzled by posthumanism? Looking for an entry-level introduction to this thing that people call the Singularity? Well, sometimes it’s best to go straight to the source – sf novelist and computer scientist Vernor Vinge coined the concept of the Technological Singularity in 1993, so who better to explain the basics, as in this brisk interview at H+ Magazine:

Some folks will say there have been singularities before — for instance, the printing press. but before Gutenberg, you could have explained to somebody what a printing press would be and you could have explained the consequences. Even though those consequences might not have been believed, the listener would have understood what you were saying. But you could not explain a printing press to a goldfish or a flat worm. And having the post-Singularity explained to us now is qualitatively different from explaining past breakthroughs in the same way. So all these extreme events like the invention of fire, the invention of the printing press, and the evolution of cities and agriculture are not the right analogy. The technological Singularity is more akin to the rise of humankind within the animal kingdom, or perhaps to the rise of multi-cellular life.

It’s tricky trying to explain something which, by definition, is inexplicable – which is probably why the Technological Singularity is as hard to pitch at the average layman as at an industry expert. I’m still not sure I “believe” in it as anything more than a convenient metaphor for a world that changes fast enough to alienate people within their natural lifespans, but on that level alone it’s hard for me to think about the passing of the next thirty years – which would see my lifespan little less than doubled – without realising I’m going to feel like a stranger in a strange land on an hourly basis. Hell, it already happens at least once a day.

So, what do you lot make of the Singularity – inevitable geek rapture? Metaphor for an accelerating culture? Or just the sound of comp-sci lips flapping in the breeze at sf conventions?