I
wish I could show you the real future, in detail, just the way it's going to
unfold. In fact, I wish I knew its shape myself. But the unreliability of
trends is due precisely to relentless, unpredictable change, which
makes the future interesting but also renders it opaque.
This important notion has been described metaphorically--both in
science fiction and in serious essays--as a technological Singularity. That
term is due to Professor Vernor Vinge, a mathematician in the Department of
Mathematical Sciences,
San Diego State University (although a few others had
anticipated the insight).[1] `The term "singularity" tied to the
notion of radical change is very evocative,' Vinge says, adding: `I used the
term "singularity" in the sense of a place where a model of physical
reality fails. (I was also attracted to the term by one of the characteristics
of many singularities in General Relativity--namely the unknowability of
things close to or in the singularity.)'[2] In mathematics, singularities
arises when quantities go infinite; in cosmology, a black hole is the
physical, literal expression of that relativistic effect.
For Vinge, accelerating trends in computer sciences converge somewhere
between 2030 and 2100 to form a wall of technological novelties blocking the
future from us. However hard we try, we cannot plausibly imagine what lies
beyond that wall. `My "technological singularity" is really quite
limited,' Vinge stated. `I say that it seems plausible that in the near
historical future, we will cause superhuman intelligences to exist.
Prediction beyond that point is qualitatively different from futurisms
of the past. I don't necessarily see any vertical asymptotes.' Some proponents
of this perspective (including me) take the idea much farther than Vinge,
because we do anticipate the arrival of an asymptote in the rate of
change. That exponential curve will be composed of a series of lesser sigmoid
curves, each mapping a key technological process, rising fast and then
saturating its possibilities before being gazumped by its successor, as vacuum
tubes were replaced by transistors at the dawn of electronic computing.
Humanity itself--or rather, ourselves--will become first `transhuman', it is
argued, and then `posthuman'.
While Vinge first advanced his insight in works of imaginative fiction,
he has featured it more rigorously in such formal papers as his address to the
VISION-21 Symposium, sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio
Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. He
opened that paper with the following characteristic statement, which can serve
as a fair summary of my own starting .
`The acceleration of technological progress has been the central
feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of
change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of
this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater
than human intelligence.
The impact of that distressing but apparently free-floating prediction
is much greater than you might imagine. In 1970, Alvin Toffler had already
grasped the notion of accelerating change. In Future Shock he noted:
`New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external
world erupt into our lives in the form of increased turn-over rates--shorter
and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily
life.' [3] This is the very definition of `future shock'.
Thirty something years on, we see that this increased pace of change is
going to disrupt the nature of humanity as well, due to the emergence of a new
kind of mind: AIs (artificial intelligences). With self-bootstrapping minds
abruptly arrived in the world, able to enhance and rewrite their own cognitive
and affective coding in seconds, science will no longer be restricted to the
slow, limited apertures granted by human senses (however augmented by
wonderful instruments) and sluggish brains (however glorious by the standards
of other animals). We'll find ourselves, Vinge suggests, in a world where
nothing much can be predicted reliably.
Is that strictly true? There are some negative constraints we can feel
fairly confident about. The sheer reliability and practical effectiveness of
quantum theory, and the robust way relativity holds up under strenuous
challenge, argues that they will remain at the core of future science--in some
form, which is rather baffling, since at the deepest levels they disagree with
each other about what kind of cosmos we inhabit.[4]
in other words, we do
already know a great deal, a tremendous amount, corroborated knowledge will
not go away.
Meanwhile, what I call the Spike in my book of that title--Vernor
Vinge's technological Singularity--apparently looms ahead of us: a horizon of
ever-swifter change we can't yet see past. The Spike is a kind of black hole
in the future, created by runaway change and accelerating computer power. We
can only try to imagine the unimaginable up to a point. That is what
scientists and artists (and visionaries and explorers) have always attempted
as part of their job description. Arthur C. Clarke did it rather wonderfully
in his 1962 futurist book Profiles of the Future. I was greatly
encouraged to read something he said about The Spike in his revised
millennium edition: `Damien's book will serve as a more imaginative sequel to
the one you are reading now.' If anyone else had said that, I might be
worried, but I'm pretty sure that, for Sir Arthur, `imaginative' is not a term
of abuse. So let's see if we can sketch a number of possible pathways into and
beyond the coming technological singularity
First, though, one must ask if the postulate is even remotely
plausible. In mid-March 2000, the chief scientist and co-founder of Sun
Microsystems, Bill Joy, published a now much-discussed warning that took
such prospects very seriously indeed. He declared with trepidation: `The
vision of near immortality that [software expert Ray] Kurzweil sees in his
robot dreams drives us forward; genetic engineering may soon provide
treatments, if not outright cures, for most diseases; and nanotechnology and
nanomedicine can address yet more ills. Together they could significantly
extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with
each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible
advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great
danger' (Wired Magazine, April 2000).[5]
He is right to be concerned,
but I believe the risks are worth taking. Let's consider the way this deck of
novelties might play out.
|