Aligning for the
Singularity!
It
occurred to me recently - what with all the commentary and supporting evidence
- how many government systems, commissions and think tanks; how many public
institutions and services; and how many private enterprises and organizations
are actually aligning for the Singularity?
How
will the Singularity affect kingdom
realms and nation-state constitutions, civil rights, and the integral
Parliaments, Senates and International Unions that are hermetically coupled to
such charters?
How
will it impact on private and public healthcare, education, social security,
town and county councils?
And
as for entrepreneurial startups, and small and medium businesses, what are they
planning for the Singularity?
It
seems to me, considering cultural evolution time-frames, that the Singularity
is not merely just hovering at the door, but beginning to eat off our best
china!
If
the long list of technological innovations - supra-sentient machine
intelligence, instant low-cost instant
production of any metamaterial, gadget and food stuffs, not to mension
ubiquitous super-automata – that is being reported hourly, even
minute-to-minute on the web, then why is the Singularity not daily ‘headline six o’clock news’ or top of
the strategic agenda for governments?
The
likes of the giants Google, Microsoft and IBM; even lead Universities like MIT,
Caltech and Cambridge are well on the way to meeting the
meta-challenges, and in many cases actually the instigators of the Singularity!
Scary?
Well
it will be terrifying if the general public are not conditioned and prepared of
the marvel happening. And the use of
language like marvel needs to be
taken into mindful consideration as we near the Singularity.
It
may be the case - as Ray Kurzweil maintains - that the Universe is about to
wake up. Ray Kurzweil and his confederates need to rigorously think about all this and bring it up at the SU
(grossly assuming they’re not already).
The
Singularity involves the following principles (from Ray's book: The Singularity is Near):
The
rate of paradigm shift (technical innovation) is accelerating, right now
doubling every decade.
The
power (price-performance, speed, capacity, and bandwidth) of information
technologies is growing exponentially at an even faster pace, now doubling
about every year. This principle applies to a wide range of measures,
including the amount of human knowledge.
For
information technologies, there is a second level of exponential growth: that
is, exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth (the exponent). The
reason: as a technology becomes more cost effective, more resources are
deployed toward its advancement, so the rate of exponential growth increases
over time. For example, the computer industry in the 1940s consisted of a
handful of now historically important projects. Today total revenue in the
computer industry is more than one trillion dollars, so research and
development budgets are comparably higher.
Human
brain scanning is one of these exponentially improving technologies. As I will
show in chapter 4, the temporal and spatial resolution and bandwidth of brain
scanning are doubling each year. We are just now obtaining the tools sufficient
to begin serious reverse engineering (decoding) of the human brain's principles
of operation. We already have impressive models and simulations of a couple
dozen of the brain's several hundred regions. Within two decades, we will have
a detailed understanding of how all the regions of the human brain work.
We
will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence with
supercomputers by the end of this decade and with personal-computer-size
devices by the end of the following decade. We will have effective software
models of human intelligence by the mid-2020s.
With
both the hardware and software needed to fully emulate human intelligence, we
can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable
from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s.30
When
they achieve this level of development, computers will be able to combine the
traditional strengths of
human
intelligence with the strengths of machine intelligence.
The
traditional strengths of human intelligence include a formidable ability to
recognize patterns. The massively parallel and self-organizing nature of the
human brain is an ideal architecture for recognizing patterns that are based on
subtle, invariant properties. Humans are also capable of learning new knowledge
by applying insights and inferring principles from experience, including
information gathered through language.
A key capability of human
intelligence is the ability to create mental models of reality and to conduct
mental "what-if" experiments by varying aspects of these models.
The
traditional strengths of machine intelligence include the ability to remember
billions of facts precisely and recall them instantly.
Another
advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that once a skill is mastered by a
machine, it can be performed repeatedly at high speed, at optimal accuracy, and
without tiring.
Perhaps
most important, machines can share their knowledge at extremely high speed,
compared to the very
slow
speed of human knowledge-sharing through language.
Nonbiological
intelligence will be able to download skills and knowledge from other machines,
eventually also from humans.
Machines
will process and switch signals at close to the speed of light (about three
hundred million meters per second), compared to about one hundred meters per
second for the electrochemical signals used in biological mammalian brains.31
This speed ratio is at least three million to one.
Machines
will have access via the Internet to all the knowledge of our human-machine
civilization and will be able to master all of this knowledge.
Machines
can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one
million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate
again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate
simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to
do this is fleeting and unreliable.
The
combination of these traditional strengths (the pattern-recognition ability of
biological human intelligence and the speed, memory capacity and accuracy, and
knowledge and skill-sharing abilities of nonbiological intelligence) will be
formidable.
Machine
intelligence will have complete freedom of design and architecture (that is,
they won't be constrained by biological limitations, such as the slow switching
speed of our interneuronal connections or a fixed skull size) as well as
consistent performance at all times.
Once
nonbiological intelligence combines the traditional strengths of both humans
and machines, the
nonbiological
portion of our civilization's intelligence will then continue to benefit from
the double exponential growth of machine price-performance, speed, and
capacity.
Once
machines achieve the ability to design and engineer technology as humans do,
only at far higher speeds and capacities, they will have access to their own
designs (source code) and the ability to manipulate them. Humans are now
accomplishing something similar through biotechnology (changing the genetic and
other information processes underlying our biology), but in a much slower and
far more limited way than what machines will be able to achieve by modifying
their own programs.
Biology
has inherent limitations. For example, every living organism must be built from
proteins that are folded from one-dimensional strings of amino acids.
Protein-based mechanisms are lacking in strength and speed. We will be able to
reengineer all of the organs and systems in our biological bodies and brains to
be vastly more capable.
As
we will discuss in chapter 4, human intelligence does have a certain amount of
plasticity (ability to change its structure), more so than had previously been
understood. But the architecture of the human brain is nonetheless profoundly
limited. For example, there is room for only about one hundred trillion
interneuronal connections in each of our skulls. A key genetic change that
allowed for the greater cognitive ability of humans compared to that of our
primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as
the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of
the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of
biological evolution and still involves an inherent limit to the brain's
capacity. Machines
will
be able to reformulate their own designs and augment their own capacities
without limit. By using nanotechnology-based designs, their capabilities will
be far greater than biological brains without increased size or energy
consumption.
Machines
will also benefit from using very fast three-dimensional molecular circuits.
Today's electronic circuits are more than one million times faster than the
electrochemical switching used in mammalian brains. Tomorrow's molecular
circuits will be based on devices such as nanotubes, which are tiny cylinders
of carbon atoms that measure about ten atoms across and are five hundred times
smaller than today's silicon-based transistors. Since the signals have less
distance to travel, they will also be able to operate at terahertz (trillions
of operations per second) speeds compared to the few gigahertz (billions of
operations per second) speeds of current chips. The rate of technological
change will not be limited to human mental speeds. Machine intelligence will
improve its own abilities in a feedback cycle that unaided human intelligence
will not be able to follow.
This
cycle of machine intelligence's iteratively improving its own design will
become faster and faster. This is in fact exactly what is predicted by the
formula for continued acceleration of the rate of paradigm shift. One of the objections
that has been raised to the continuation of the acceleration of paradigm shift
is that it ultimately becomes much too fast for humans to follow, and so
therefore, it's argued, it cannot happen. However, the shift from biological to
nonbiological intelligence will enable the trend to continue.
Along
with the accelerating improvement cycle of nonbiological intelligence,
nanotechnology will enable the manipulation of physical reality at the
molecular level.
Nanotechnology
will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level,
measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as "respirocytes"
(mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the
human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will
not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic
engineering).
Nanobots
will interact with biological neurons to vastly extend human experience by
creating virtual reality from within the nervous system.
Billions
of nanobots in the capillaries of the brain will also vastly extend human
intelligence.
Once
nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already
started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our
brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least
doubling in power each year. In contrast, biological intelligence is
effectively of fixed capacity. Thus, the nonbiological portion of our
intelligence will ultimately predominate.
Nanobots
will also enhance the environment by reversing pollution from earlier
industrialization.
Nanobots
called foglets that can manipulate image and sound waves will bring the
morphing qualities of virtual reality to the real world.
The
human ability to understand and respond appropriately to emotion (so-called
emotional intelligence) is one of the forms of human intelligence that will be
understood and mastered by future machine intelligence. Some of our emotional
responses are tuned to optimize our intelligence in the context of our limited
and frail biological bodies.
Future machine intelligence will also have "bodies" (for example,
virtual bodies in virtual reality, or projections in real reality using
foglets) in order to interact with the world, but these nanoengineered bodies
will be far more capable and durable than biological human bodies. Thus, some
of the "emotional" responses of future machine intelligence will be
redesigned to reflect their vastly enhanced physical capabilities. As virtual
reality from within the nervous system becomes competitive with real reality in
terms of resolution and believability, our experiences will increasingly take
place in virtual environments.
In
virtual reality, we can be a different person both physically and emotionally.
In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be able to select a
different body for you than you might select for yourself (and vice versa).
The
law of accelerating returns will continue until nonbiological intelligence
comes dose to "saturating" the matter and energy in our vicinity of
the universe with our human-machine intelligence. By saturating, I mean utilizing
the matter and energy patterns for computation to an optimal degree, based on
our understanding of the physics of computation. As we approach this limit, the
intelligence of our civilization will continue its expansion in capability by
spreading outward toward the rest of the universe. The speed of this expansion
will quickly achieve the maximum speed at which information can travel.
Ultimately,
the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the
destiny of the universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it
determined by the current "dumb," simple, machine like forces that
rule celestial mechanics.
The
length of time it will take the universe to become intelligent to this extent
depends on whether or not the speed of light is an immutable limit. There are
indications of possible subtle exceptions (or circumventions) to this limit,
which, if they exist, the vast intelligence of our civilization at this future
time will be able to exploit.
This,
then, is the Singularity. Some would say that we cannot comprehend it, at least
with our current level of understanding. For that reason, we cannot look past
its event horizon and make complete sense of what lies beyond. This is one
reason we call this transformation the Singularity.
And
while I’m in this sophist mood; if it does come push to shove and the
Singularity does start to scare people, don’t forget that we - the human race -
are all one family. Whether black, white, yellow, red, purple; or Jewish,
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Seek; or Street Urchin or President or Prime; we are all
one family; all related to each other genetically. We all share the same
biological legacy and inheritance. We all arose from the same family that left
the planes of Africa two-hundred thousand years ago.
Amen.
