Thursday 3 May 2007

Pic of the day: In the near future, breasts will come with local anti-gravity devices. Or perhaps we will dispense with physical bodies altogether and live entirely in virtual realities. Who knows? Everything is changing, even ourselves.

Google & the singularity

The future always comes while we look another way. If you go back far enough that people wrote science fiction about the early 21st century, you will notice that they did no such thing. They wrote about some transformed version of their own decade. It could be hideously transformed, but it really wasn't about us, about what we live now.

Vernor Vinge probably has pulled most of the weight in popularizing the concept of technological "singularity", an upcoming change so profound that it is impossible for us to imagine what comes after it. In astronomy, a singularity is the point inside a black hole where (theoretically) all mass and energy is gathered, without any volume or surface, just a single point. At a distance from this point is the event horizon, which is the edge of what we can observe. The inside of the black hole, and the singularity itself, are beyond our observation. In a similar way, the technological singularity is a point, a single event that ends history as we know it, and starts another history that we cannot have any ideas about.

The single event is the rise of a greater-than-human intelligence. The favorite candidate is artificial intelligence, run on future generations of computers. Since computers double in efficiency every 18 months, it is possible to predict that they will have greater computing power than the human brain sometime in the early 2020es. Of course, writing an operating system that can actually take advantage of this will be a challenge. Most of us are probably very happy our brain doesn't run Windows... but once the hardware and the software are in place, the superhuman computer can design new and better computers, which can design new and better computers, and so on. Humans will no longer be on top. There are various theories about what will happen to mankind, ranging from extermination to eternal life in a computer-created paradise (or both of the above). Unsurprisingly the Singularity has also been called "the Rapture for nerds". Although "apocalypse" may also come to mind.

Not everyone thinks Artificial Intelligence will do on its own. There are some who think the superhuman intelligence will be a kind of cyborg, human with assisted intelligence. By implanting the future super-chips in the brain, we will get radio telepathy, unlimited photographic memory and unerring logic. And of course genetic engineering is about to begin at the same time. So each generation will be able to improve the next and to a lesser degree themselves. It may not be quite as fast as having robots build better robots, but it will still be pretty impressive by any standard of the past.

The appealing thing about the second scenario is that we are moving in that direction already. Yes, people think it would be beyond creepy to have a radio chip implanted in their brain, but they still keep their mobile phone by the bed. And if they are teens, they probably use it there. If they forget the phone at home, their day is ruined. And this is so commonplace that people don't notice it themselves. Ironically, I seem to be pretty near the only one who isn't like that. I do in fact carry a mobile phone with me all day, but I don't think I have used it to call anyone this year, and it almost goes without saying that I don't get many incoming calls either, except occasionally a plea from work. Now wouldn't that be something, if the Singularity comes and I'm the only one left behind. The Last Human. Heh.

Not much risk of that, since I certainly am attached to the unlimited shared memory. In this case, Google. To tell the truth, I could not remember if Vinge's name was Vernor or Vernon, so I had to Google it. More broadly, I would never have heard of Vinge or the Singularity if not for the Internet. The first time I read about it was on a Usenet newsgroup (ironically it was theoretically a group dedicated to the writing of Robert Jordan, a Sword & Sorcery writer.) More recently there have been references on the website of Ray Kurzweil (whom I would probably spelled with tz if not for Google, not to mention that I came upon his AI site while Googling for something else, namely his low-fat approach to living longer). Kurzweil, incidentally, was responsible for creating the progenitor of my speech recognition software from Nuance. (Unfortunately my computer with NaturallySpeaking on is still broken, though.) The thing is, without the Net I would not have heard of either of these entities. Not Vinge, not Kurzweil, not the Singularity and not Nuance (formerly Scansoft). I would still have read in the local newspaper that tens of secretaries had been replaced by computers taking dictation at the hospitals in southern Norway, but I would have no background for understanding what happened. This is probably how most humans experience the world.

So, without Google I couldn't have written this. And without the Internet I wouldn't even have thought of it. I did in fact write a pretty frequent diary before the Internet age, using an old typewriter until I got the first very personal computers. (I wrote my own text processor in a mixture of Forth and assembler.) Expressing my thoughts has always been vital to me, although in the past only I could read it. That certainly makes a difference: If I compare the Chaos Node with my old offline diaries, it is barely possible to guess that they are written by the same person. (Even adjusting for the fact that they were in Norwegian rather than English.)

Therefore, if anyone is on the Net, he is a new creation... wait, that doesn't sound right. At least it doesn't sound good. It sounds like blasphemy. Which reveals pretty clearly the magnitude of what is happening to us while we are looking another way. Our very thinking is changed. I have probably mentioned before that I see people use their cellphones as a kind of replacement for prayer, an anchor when they are alone. Just like me, they are never alone wherever they are. The difference is that they rely on their phone and I rely on God for emotional support. (I still think the phone is more efficient if I need to call for an ambulance or some such, but this may be just my lack of faith. Until further notice, however, I'll keep that lack of faith as long as my mobile phone is working.) Anyway, these new options change us in a fundamental way. In truth, they may just be exposing a side of us that was buried deep inside as a possibility. (Hmm, does that make us zombies?) But the thing is, it is a huge change, a global change, and we did not predict it.

The Singularity has already begun.

Of course you may argue that it has always been impossible to see the future. Even 2000 years ago, it was obvious that we don't know what will happen tomorrow. But that is on an individual level. As late as in the middle ages, you knew that your village would still be there 100 years in the future of 500 years in the future, because where there is good arable land, people will always settle and grow food. Where there is a natural harbor, the ships will always come in. So even though your own fate was somewhat murky, and that of your children, you could be reasonably sure that if you had plenty of them, their offspring would live pretty much like you yourself did. The occasional war or plague could stir things up, but only God had the capacity to end the kind of life we knew.

Compare this to today. Empires fall apart and new empires form, even (or especially) in peacetime. Humans fly as if it was an obvious thing to do, and houses are taller than hills. We leave the farms to live in cities, but we still have more food than we can eat (and we eat till it is about to kill us). Ships go against the wind and the currents, and we talk to people on the opposite side of the world. The world is mad, mad, mad. Lately people have started meeting in fantasy worlds that used to only exist in books. Now people from many different countries meet and greet there and go hunt imaginary creatures together. When back in the real world, they run with nowhere to go while listening to music as if an orchestra was running all around them playing their favorite songs. And this is only the beginning. We don't know what the world will look like even ten years from now (and that's provided we haven't accidentally fed it to a man-made black hole). Twenty years from now, will marriage still exist as an official category or is it considered a purely private / religious distinction? Thirty years from now, will women still bear children when their embryos are much safer in a transparent development tank where any structural flaws can be spotted and repaired within 24 hours (or your money back)?

We don't know. We just don't know. As I've said before, the copy pencil was poised to take over the world when some random person invented the ballpoint pen and sent the favorite back to the locker room. (I still have a couple of the copy pencils I bought up from the clearance sale when I was a teen.) The minidisc was just barely starting to edge out the music cassette (and might have done so much faster if not for the elaborate copy protection built into it) and then came the MP3 player. Right now, speech recognition seems to be inching toward its final breakthrough – but perhaps we'll get thought recognition instead. Who knows? The paradigms shift as rapidly as anime heroines change panties ... and always when we look another way. I guess that is as good as it gets. I hear it can be very dangerous indeed to see a naked singularity.