Why I am a "Singularitarian."

[oneirophrenia]

Do I honestly think that technology is growing at an exponential rate and that, at some point in the future, that takeoff will be so dramatic and so paradigm-shifting that it's damnear impossible to even guess at what might lie beyond? Damn right, I do. And here's why.

It has absolutely nothing to do with a belief in some kind of "inherent" Law of Technology that postulates exponential growth as a fundamental characteristic of technological development. Moore's Law is not a fundamental law like, say, special relativity...it's a developmental law, powered by economic and market factors: processing capabilities double roughly every 13 months now due to economic and social pressures to build bigger, better, faster, more powerful processors. Human wants and needs power Moore's Law, and power the development of technology. And there is no more powerful human "faction," if you will, in determining these wants and needs than tech geeks.

One of the reasons we have the Internet today is because a whooooooole bunch of geeks, many of them inspired by visions of Gibsonian cyberspace, decided to create a functional real-world analogue of Gibsonian cyberspace. Many technologies that we today consider perfectly ordinary were once thought to be only the wild-eyed creations of science fiction writers. Until inventors, coders, and developers decided to make those technologies reality...or, at least, as real as they could be.

Hence, the Singularity. Science fiction is seething with talk of the techno-Singularity, transhumanism, posthumanism, machine intelligence, and so forth. In fact, the fictional impact of the whole Singularity concept is, right now, about as widespread as Gibsonian cyberpunk was in the '80s--and it has the potential to grow even more. There's a whole new generation of geeks, inventors, and thinkers coming of age reading fiction predicated upon a future point in time when technology becomes Titanian in its scope and abilities. There are already people Out There in the biomed field and nanotech engineering fields working to implement some of these ideas. The Singularity will happen not because it's somehow destined to thanks to Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns or any kind of technological "law"--but because people inspired by dreams of a shapechanging, quantum-processing, programmable-matter future will be doing their best over the next fifty years to make it a reality.

The Singularity is, first and foremost, a social phenomenon. Powered by nerds.

Comments

Part 1

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

Who's to say we'll be gone when the Really Amazing Stuff comes rolling around? Sure, we'll probably both just be these dessicated heads mounted on rollerskates with some cheap lifesupport equipment stuffed under our jaws and wifi antennas in the backs of our heads, but chances are we'll be there for The Freshness!

I like the comparison to the flying cars, but...at the same time, as much as I bitch about not having a flying car in the Year 2005, the concept of the flying car (while nifty as hell) just never made ANY sense because, well, much like the jetpack it doesn't in any way make life better or more livable for people. Think about it: you can go just about everywhere in a regular wheeled car, which is a LOT more fuel efficient than a flying car, a LOT safer, and a LOT cheaper to build. Sure, a flying car may let you get someplace faster and, to some degree, easier...but they're not even vaguely economical. Witness:

I read an article from a 1958 edition of Popular Mechanics speculating that by 1980 everyone would have a personal helicopter--basically a little one- or two-person Sikorsky only a little bit larger than a 1958 Cadillac (which is still fucking HUGE by our standards). The article presented a pretty convincing argument in terms of basic personal utility...but the article was written back in the day when everyone thought fuel would be abundant forever, and human stupidity was decreasing rather than increasing. The fuel needed to run a personal Sikorsky would bankrupt any ordinary person in under a week these days, and compared to learning to drive a car, learning to fly a helicopter is like studying astrophysics. So mass-producing personal helicopters isn't going to make ANYbody any cash.

On the other hand...mass-producing pocket-sized supercomputers? Cheap, effective, and there's already a market for it. Look at how the computing capacity of most cellphones has grown in the past five years alone: my stupid fucking cellphone that I only use to call people is now more powerful than my Palm Pilot. Massive amounts of processing are always in demand, and that demand fuels Moore's Law. Massive amounts of processing let people do more things faster...and, usually, for much less money. The dual-core Pentium D processor in my desktop cost me 1/8th as much as the 4gHz AMD that was in the first real computer I ever bought, and it can do a few million more FLOPs.

Nanotech will be the next big in-demand technology for prettymuch the same reason: it lets people do more for less. Production costs for nanomaterials are dropping every day as more and more economic uses for such materials come up....And nanomanufacturing? What company on earth won't give its collective right arms for a nanofacturing setup that, say, allows them to build an entire device out of atoms for really nothing more than the cost of the atoms and the energy it would take to run the fac? There's already R&D money being plowed into this tech like mad--because it's gonna earn PHAT CASH in the future.

Part 2

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

The Singularity will be driven by money and by sheer nerd-core lust for building something new and 1337. But it's not going to be something that happens like "WHIZZ! BANG! Oh, shit, we all just became posthuman between eating breakfast and taking that first morning dump!" It'll be more like every other industrial/economic revolution of the past: slow to get started (and it already has), but then one day everyone just realizes--belatedly--that over the past decade(s) the technology and its economic indicators have become ubiquitous...just like assembly line production, aviation, steam power, computers, and the Internet. There've been hundreds of technological Singularities over the years, and each one is defined by a revolution in technological capabilities that pre-Singularity people just couldn't guess at, but could speculate about. Before the advent of commercial aviation, no one suspected that the Wright Brothers' invention would give birth to a billion-dollar-a-year worldwide technological enterprise...but some folks kind of hinted at it, and others took those hints and invested in them. And became jillionaires. The exact same thing will happen with this upcoming Singularity, too--but this one just has the potential to beat all the others into the ground by dint of the fact that several different revolutionary technologies (computing, nanotech, biotech) will all be kicking into gear about the same time due to various technical and theoretical interdependencies.

But it will still be driven by money. And nerds anxious to make something cool (and make a lot of cash doing it). Flying cars are impractical because plain ol' cars are just fine. Massive distributed intelligences, direct neural interfaces, and grey goo are actually practical because they'll let us do a whole HELL of a lot more than we can with what we have. And get rich quick doing it!


But we will, of course, still be sitting on our virtual porches joking about what the next Singularity will have to offer us, because we're just not satisfied with what the last one gave us. :) A 10,000-year lifespan? Nanofusion-powered wangs? A multiplexed brain with a few resident semi-intelligent AIs to give us posthuman thinking abilities? BULLSHIT! The really cool stuff--the godlike intelligent, the complete control over matter, the quantum manipulations and spacetime engineering--will still be over the horizon....Which is good. It gives us something to always reach for and dream about.

Re: Part 2

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

Well, a lot of the hype is just that: hype. It's often difficult to separate the legitimate technological breakthroughs from the spazzed-out early-adopter hysteria. None of the technological advances I see coming in the next couple of decades is predicated upon any form of physics not already well-known and understood. Take nanoassembly, for instance: building macroscale objects atom by atom. The fundamental concept has already been demonstrated in the lab with comparatively simple substances such as graphite, buckycarbon, diamond, and some basic organic compounds. The physical act of putting atoms together is ridiculously easy--it's just chemistry--but the true challenge lies in the sheer complexity of a large-scale nanofacturing operation: managing trillions of atoms and trillions of chemical bonds in just the right order and in just the right structures to produce, say, a couch. This is not an insurmountable task: it's merely an issue of computing power--you need a powerful enough computer to handle the calculations, but that's just a matter of processing, and building a better processor isn't that difficult. I've heard a lot of talk about the end of Moore's Law when transistor sizes hit the atomic level and can literally get no smaller...but those nay-sayers just don't recognize the many different possibilities for going beyond 2D processor architectures: 3D multilayered chips, DNA-based computing, photonics, quantum computing, and so forth. Sure, all of these follow-up technologies are still in development and have their own physical hurdles and concerns to deal with, but none of them are ruled out due to physical impossibilities.

One thing that really annoys me about "Singularitarians" in general is that so many of them play the handwaving game, invoking all manner of clarketech (so advanced it looks like magic) and declaring that eventually the AI Gods will make the universe a perfect place utilizing Unknown Matters of Physics. That's not what a tech singularity is all about--that's just fun and dreams...and whereas that kind of stuff is fun to read about, it doesn't have any real grounding in reality. A technological singularity does not require any new physical laws or unbelievably powerful science to be able to work: it's just an accelerated developmental phase (and R&D explosion, if you will) brought about by the human drive to better our existence with new tools and new skills. Anyone who sinks money into a project that promises a lot without even being able to show the slightest real-world potential for that promise is a moron who deserves to lose all his money.

Oh, and as to alternative fuels: no one's bothering to really develop them yet because...well, we still have plenty of gas and oil, don't we? OK, yes, it's $2.03 a gallon, but so what? We can afford that. When it hits $8 a gallon, THEN the US government and the US petroleum industry will start hitting the R&D a lot harder in order to keep the wheels of society spinning. There just isn't enough economic incentive yet to do more than some fairly petty alternative-energy resource...and, right now, most of the cash flowing into the nascent "industry" is going into wind power and better nuclear powerplants to provide more electricity. Our nation uses a LOT more electricity than it does oil. (Even though it uses a lot of fossil fuel to produce a lot of that electricity, most of those fossil fuels are either domestically-available coal or natural gas.)

[rapier1.livejournal.com]

As one of those geeks who helped with this whole internet thing I have to say that few of us were inspired by Gibson. While a lot of us read the books we generally laughed at the conceptualization of cyberspace. It was good fiction but really bad science. The person who generally had it right was Bruce Sterling and in large part because he has a much better idea of what communication and technology is all about.