"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." -Vernor Vinge
Technology has increased exponentially. It is leading to something, a change, something that will seem so obvious in retrospect that we will not be able to imagine living without it. The singularity is that point, the point after which nothing is the same. It takes on almost religious undertones. The original meaning of apocalypse is not the destruction of the world, it is the revelation, the "lifting of the veil", the unmasking of truth.
We've had singularities before. Two hundred thousand years ago biologically modern man evolved. For 150,000 years we were nothing but apes, walking upright, intelligent, tool-using, but nothing more than particularly curious apes. Language changed everything. We could organize, communicate. We exploded out of Africa with a fury, committed our first genocides, spread across every surface but Antarctica. And then after forty thousand years, everything changed again. Agriculture. Our population mutated like a virus from a few million hunter gatherers into a few billion city dwellers in the geological blink of an eye. Ten thousand years from agriculture to computers and space craft. The next step in the next singularity.
The key is in the nature of the change. It's not just that everything changes, it's how everything changes. It's not simply that the world after a singularity is different than the world before, it's that the world is all but unexplainable to those who came before. The very idea of the nature of the world is incomprehensible to the forerunners. Explain language to a hunter gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago who cannot speak. "Explain", the very word is indistinguishable from what we are trying to explain. Take a talkative hunter gatherer from forty thousand years ago. Explain to him agricultural society. Explain to him, who has never seen more than a dozen tribesmen and the steppe, explain to him buildings, explain to him crops, explain to him a hundred thousand people living in a single valley, explain to him writing. How can you explain concepts for which there are no words? For which not even metaphors can break down the concepts into an understandable level?
If you took Alexander the Great and dropped him into the eighteenth century, he could cope. The world would be strange and exotic, much would seem like magic until explained, but his metaphors would still work. Muskets are like slings. Printed books are like scrolls. But drop him into our world today and the metaphors begin to stretch. There is so much change, so much variation of the underlying context, that there is no common ground, the metaphors disintegrate. Radio, electricity, computers, these are not memes for which easy metaphors exist, other than the old stand by of "magic". When even metaphors cannot explain the world to an outsider, then you stand on opposite sides of a singularity.
150,000 years from modern man to language. 40,000 years from language to agriculture. 10,000 years from agriculture to today. The exponential increase in change. Some argue that we are in the midst of another singularity today: industrialization, electricity, computers. The pillars of our world are not even magic to Alexander the Great, something can only be magic if its effect is understood, though its cause is not. How do we explain when neither the cause nor the effect exist in an older context. At some point things change so much that explaining them is as reasonable as explaining a newspaper to a dog. There is simply no way to convey the meaning of the object.
The singularities come faster and faster though, and if it continues, we could see singularities occurring one after another, so quickly that the world warps and mutates from minute to minute. We've remade the world in the wake of each singularity before, faster and faster each time, imagine a world that is remade unrecognizably from one year to the next.
Artificial intelligence is the piece that's coming. It is the last invention the man will ever make, because every subsequent invention will be the work of that intelligence. Sound absurd? If we can manufacture an intelligence greater than our own, and then set that intelligence towards manufacturing an intelligence greater than itself, then we have achieved a growth of intelligence on an exponential level. It took us 10,000 years of civilization to get to the verge of creating artificial intelligence. What if a machine could create something more intelligent than itself in a hundred years? What if we threw ten times as many artificial intelligences at the problem? Could it manage it in ten years? And once that second tier of artificial intelligence comes into being, how long would it take for it to create a third tier of even greater intelligence? Intelligence itself becomes the next singularity, an exponential explosion of development remaking the processes of thought faster and faster, riding the edge of an asymptote to something as unimaginably beyond our experience as our world is to the Neanderthal.
What is at that asymptote? The face of God. Nirvana. Enlightenment. Armageddon. Revelation. The end. The beginning.
"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold -- one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity -- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..." -Charlie Stross
Technology has increased exponentially. It is leading to something, a change, something that will seem so obvious in retrospect that we will not be able to imagine living without it. The singularity is that point, the point after which nothing is the same. It takes on almost religious undertones. The original meaning of apocalypse is not the destruction of the world, it is the revelation, the "lifting of the veil", the unmasking of truth.
We've had singularities before. Two hundred thousand years ago biologically modern man evolved. For 150,000 years we were nothing but apes, walking upright, intelligent, tool-using, but nothing more than particularly curious apes. Language changed everything. We could organize, communicate. We exploded out of Africa with a fury, committed our first genocides, spread across every surface but Antarctica. And then after forty thousand years, everything changed again. Agriculture. Our population mutated like a virus from a few million hunter gatherers into a few billion city dwellers in the geological blink of an eye. Ten thousand years from agriculture to computers and space craft. The next step in the next singularity.
The key is in the nature of the change. It's not just that everything changes, it's how everything changes. It's not simply that the world after a singularity is different than the world before, it's that the world is all but unexplainable to those who came before. The very idea of the nature of the world is incomprehensible to the forerunners. Explain language to a hunter gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago who cannot speak. "Explain", the very word is indistinguishable from what we are trying to explain. Take a talkative hunter gatherer from forty thousand years ago. Explain to him agricultural society. Explain to him, who has never seen more than a dozen tribesmen and the steppe, explain to him buildings, explain to him crops, explain to him a hundred thousand people living in a single valley, explain to him writing. How can you explain concepts for which there are no words? For which not even metaphors can break down the concepts into an understandable level?
If you took Alexander the Great and dropped him into the eighteenth century, he could cope. The world would be strange and exotic, much would seem like magic until explained, but his metaphors would still work. Muskets are like slings. Printed books are like scrolls. But drop him into our world today and the metaphors begin to stretch. There is so much change, so much variation of the underlying context, that there is no common ground, the metaphors disintegrate. Radio, electricity, computers, these are not memes for which easy metaphors exist, other than the old stand by of "magic". When even metaphors cannot explain the world to an outsider, then you stand on opposite sides of a singularity.
150,000 years from modern man to language. 40,000 years from language to agriculture. 10,000 years from agriculture to today. The exponential increase in change. Some argue that we are in the midst of another singularity today: industrialization, electricity, computers. The pillars of our world are not even magic to Alexander the Great, something can only be magic if its effect is understood, though its cause is not. How do we explain when neither the cause nor the effect exist in an older context. At some point things change so much that explaining them is as reasonable as explaining a newspaper to a dog. There is simply no way to convey the meaning of the object.
The singularities come faster and faster though, and if it continues, we could see singularities occurring one after another, so quickly that the world warps and mutates from minute to minute. We've remade the world in the wake of each singularity before, faster and faster each time, imagine a world that is remade unrecognizably from one year to the next.
Artificial intelligence is the piece that's coming. It is the last invention the man will ever make, because every subsequent invention will be the work of that intelligence. Sound absurd? If we can manufacture an intelligence greater than our own, and then set that intelligence towards manufacturing an intelligence greater than itself, then we have achieved a growth of intelligence on an exponential level. It took us 10,000 years of civilization to get to the verge of creating artificial intelligence. What if a machine could create something more intelligent than itself in a hundred years? What if we threw ten times as many artificial intelligences at the problem? Could it manage it in ten years? And once that second tier of artificial intelligence comes into being, how long would it take for it to create a third tier of even greater intelligence? Intelligence itself becomes the next singularity, an exponential explosion of development remaking the processes of thought faster and faster, riding the edge of an asymptote to something as unimaginably beyond our experience as our world is to the Neanderthal.
What is at that asymptote? The face of God. Nirvana. Enlightenment. Armageddon. Revelation. The end. The beginning.
"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold -- one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity -- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..." -Charlie Stross
Yay for Kurzweil!
I freak my girlfriend out any time I go on one of these rants. Thing is, they're not actually rants if you're more aware of the historical "longue durée" of human evolution.
Can't wait for what will happen at the next singularity... Good writing, good writing.
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