Support: Amidst the gloom that envelopes both Left and Right, evidence grows that another discontinuity in history approaches — a singularity. If so, it will evaporate many of today’s problems and create new ones. Only aware eyes and open minds can prepare for what is coming. This is another in this week’s posts about good news.
Contents
- The singularity in our distant past.
- The singularity that just ended.
- About singularities.
- We see the singularity that lies ahead.
- Works about the singularity.
- For More Information.
(1) The singularity in our distant past
The great singularities lie in our past. For a fun illustration of this see some “Early Holocene Sci-fi” by Pat Mathews.
Shaman: I have foreseen a time when everybody can have all the meat, fat, and sweet stuff they can eat, and they all get fat.
Chief: You have had a vision of the Happy Hunting Grounds.
Shaman: It is considered a great and horrible problem! People go out of their way to eat leaves and grass and grains, and work very hard to look lean and brown.
Chief: You’ve been eating too many of those strange mushrooms, and are seeing everything backward.
There have been several singularities in our past. Consider these awesome accomplishments of our species, each of which radically changed our world: discovery of fire (giving us power over the environment), agriculture (giving us control over our food supply), and writing (allowing accumulation of knowledge over time).
(2) The singularity that just ended
“The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918. Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses) Check. Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check. Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.”
— “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi (Associate Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon).
The industrial revolution ended sometime between 1918 and 1945, but nobody noticed for decades. Even in the 1960’s people believed the revolution continued. Now it’s obvious. Scores of books describe this, such as The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. … Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that “our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” {From Lights waves and their uses
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Largely as a result of this slowing of scientific progress, US economic growth has been slowing since the 1970s. After decades of observation and research, economists have gained some understanding of what’s happening. The most recent book (well-worth reading) is Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
— Charles H. Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899. It’s a famous fake quote, as false as the idea it expresses.
(3) About singularities
The “singularity” is an amalgam of ideas, some contradictory, about a future of accelerating technological evolution leading to a new world. We cannot understand what will come, much as one cannot see through a singularity in the physical universe. The origin of the concept lies in the mid-19th century (perhaps earlier). The public learned about it from Vernor Vinge’s book Marooned in Realtime
For an introduction to the various visions see “Three Major Singularity Schools” by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky at the Singularity Institute blog, September 2007. Here’s the opening.
“Singularity discussions seem to be splitting up into three major schools of thought: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion. The thing about these three logically distinct schools of Singularity thought is that, while all three core claims support each other, all three strong claims tend to contradict each other.
Accelerating Change.
“Core claim: Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly as much change as has occurred in the past over our own lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000 years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how much change we should expect in the future.
“Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves, typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they will cross key thresholds, like the creation of Artificial Intelligence.
“Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler (?), John Smart.
Event Horizon.
“Core claim: For the last hundred thousand years, humans have been the smartest intelligences on the planet. All our social and technological progress was produced by human brains. Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on human intelligence (brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence). This will create a future that is weirder by far than most science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets.
“Strong claim: To know what a superhuman intelligence would do, you would have to be at least that smart yourself. To know where Deep Blue would play in a chess game, you must play at Deep Blue’s level. Thus the future after the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is absolutely unpredictable.
“Advocates: Vernor Vinge.
Intelligence Explosion.
“Core claim: Intelligence has always been the source of technology. If technology can significantly improve on human intelligence – create minds smarter than the smartest existing humans – then this closes the loop and creates a positive feedback cycle. What would humans with brain-computer interfaces do with their augmented intelligence? One good bet is that they’d design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces. Intelligence enhancement is a classic tipping point; the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.
“Strong claim: This positive feedback cycle goes FOOM, like a chain of nuclear fissions gone critical – each intelligence improvement triggering an average of>1.000 further improvements of similar magnitude – though not necessarily on a smooth exponential pathway. Technological progress drops into the characteristic timescale of transistors (or super-transistors) rather than human neurons. The ascent rapidly surges upward and creates superintelligence (minds orders of magnitude more powerful than human) before it hits physical limits.
“Advocates: I. J. Good, Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
(4) We begin to see the singularity that lies ahead
Possible singularities abound in our future in addition to the technological singularity. Those terrified by the approach of Peak Oil often describe it as a dystopian singularity; those elated by Peak Oil describe it as a wonderful singularity — a forced purification as we enter a new age. I have described the end of the post-WWII regime as a small singularity. Similar discontinuities might lie in our future…
- Space travel — bringing a vast increase in resources, planetary engineering giving independence from Earth as our only nest.
- Widespread genetic engineering — liberating humanity from random evolution, bringing the freedom to shape ourselves.
- Artificial Intelligences — an end to our solitude, bringing independence from limitations of biological intelligence.
- Extended vital lifespans — George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah
Of course, those are only the innovations in the “plausible” realm. Who knows what we might achieve in the future? Given our past, why are so many people so gloomy about our future? We have survived ice ages, natural disasters (such as the eruption of Toba, which exterminated most of humanity), and our own mistakes and follies.
History gives us reason to look to the future with anticipation, not fear. We must remember this as our elites increasingly attempt to lead by arousing fears.
Works about the singularity
- “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era“, Vernor Vinge, 1993.
- Ray Kurzweil: his website; also see his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
- The Wikipedia entry about the singularity is excellent.
- These two Wikipedia entries provide a good introduction to the theories underlying these two visions of the future: endogenous growth models and exogenous growth models.
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For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about forecasts, about the new industrial revolution, about good news for America, and especially these…
- Do we face secular stagnation or a new industrial revolution?
- Three visions of our future after the robot revolution.
- Robots are the solution to our problems, if we enslave them — The different economies of Star Trek and Jupiter Ascending.
- Will we enslave robots? If so, prepare for their inevitable revolt.
- Our future will be Jupiter Ascending, unless we make it Star Trek.
- Potentially horrific effects of drugs and machines making people smarter & stronger.
Contrasting books about our future.
In one, the future holds accelerating growth leading to the unimaginable. In the other, the future holds economic stagnation as far as we can see.
