The Ultimate Fight?: The Singularity v. Resource Depletion and the Limits to Growth
Posted by Prof. Goose on June 29, 2008 - 3:00pm
| It seems to me that one way the problems we are facing can be analyzed is as a "race." The factors/variables contributing to said "race" are captured by the following concepts: |
-The Singularity or "The Law of Accelerating Returns", a concept most attributed to Ray Kurzweil. Other corollarial concepts to this idea include Moore's Law and The Quickening.
-And in the other corner, resource depletion/peak oil/net energy and the consequences/limits of exponential growth (population, pollution, and the like).
I had been thinking about this idea for a while, mentioned it to my colleagues, etc. Then I saw this piece by John Tierney entitled "Malthus v. the Singularity" at the NYT a couple of weeks ago, which has kept it on my mind. My questions for you and some other ideas are under the fold.
It seems to me that what we are all ultimately trying to figure out is how to handicap this race (or fight or pick your metaphor) if it exists and which factor will win out in the end knowing what we all know and making educated guesses at what we do not.
So, I ask you, are there other ideas/factors that should also be thought of "in this race" that are not already captured by these two concepts? What is the end point or criteria by which this race can be judged? Is it whether or not we reach this singularity (e.g., what if we end up one ounce of coal away from accomplishing the singularity?)? Is it net human suffering we incur along the way? Is there a/another signpost by which we can gauge progress/failure? What other factors need to be considered in this race? Is petroleum just distracting us from other resources, that efficiencies and other marginal replacements with less net energy and elegance will help us continue this move towards the singularity? or is this just the 1970s revisited and we're engaging in "Limits to Growth Discussion #2?", with the same result?
I realize this is inherently theoretical and rather reductionist, but I've been thinking about it all morning, so I thought I would throw it out to you all as it seemed apropos of the discussion we are having these days. Feel free to link to arguments or concepts in the comments.
The Ultimate Fight?: The Singularity v. Resource Depletion and the Limits to Growth
PDF version
218 comments
The Ultimate Fight?: The Singularity v. Resource Depletion and the Limits to Growth
PDF version
218 comments
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
I read Singularity a couple of years ago. Regardless of what one might think about Kurzweil's vision of the future, the book is mind-blowing. However, if you look at predictions that he has made, you can see that the timeline is sliding. Things are happening as quickly as he envisions. And he really didn't treat energy as a concern in the book at all, except to say that things are becoming more and more efficient. He essentially blew off any energy worries - and I think that is his fatal blind spot.
to the point of absurdity. the rate new gizmos appear is not a increase in ability in the sense of manipulating core forces in the universe
eg: Fusion... we're all still waiting
Boris
London
Couple of other things. First, above I meant "Things are not happening as quickly as he envisions." This is especially striking if you read some of his earlier books.
The other thing is that Kurzweil keeps claiming that due to all of his medical monitoring and the supplements he takes, he has the body of a 40-year old. You have to wonder then why he looks like a 60-year old.
Finally, the thing that struck me as absurd in the book was that he was implying that our energy demands were going down due to increased efficiencies, when the observation is just the opposite: Demand for energy is climbing.
A capitalist economy will use up whatever energy is cheaply accessible.
But, the essential point is that energy has become a smaller part of GDP than it was 30 years ago, and that means increased efficiency has indeed occurred.
Increased efficiency doesn't lead to less energy use, it leads to greater wealth for the same energy use. You know the old saying, waste not want not.
The market is not going to reduce energy use until it's forced to by supply and demand imbalances.
If you want efficiency increases to result in actual lower energy use, you'll need government intervention.
This old economist's saw seems true over time, but in the short-term (the next critical 5 - 10 years) increased efficiency will likely be used to keep energy expenditures down, since the question isn't saving money because of efficiency/conservation, but rather losing less money because of rising energy/resource prices. So the consumer's goal is to lose less. This is an important psychological difference (which I might have explained in an unclear way). As energy & resource prices rise many activities don't make economic sense like they once did. Demand destruction occurs, corrects the market increase until a later day when it comes back... But demand destruction isn't happening in China because of the subsidies there, or in the Middle East for the same reasons.
"Supply and demand imbalances" aren't per se the reason for demand destruction is, as we see in the case of subsidies. It's price, especially price's cumulative effects over time, which destroy demand. Again the difference is important when you consider subsidies.
Robert,
To be fair, though things are not happening as fast as Kurzweil said and as you pointed out energy is his blind spot, we are now for the first time in history able to build infrastructure that is capable of powering our civilization from renewables.
That we haven't done so (yet) and that since the members of our civilization are not all rowing in the same direction we may not is a different question.
Also: OK so he does look 60 (though I'd have said more like 50) he looks like he's in great shape for his age. Looking at the office where I'm currently working, there are plenty of people in their late 40s in worse shape than Ray.
It's no more a different question than the "above-ground" factors are a different question from the geology. We won't do it because we are not capable as a species. It will, however, indeed happen - that "we" power civilization from renewables. Whatever civilization it is, though, it won't be "ours" and "we" will be a different fork of the ape tree. The other side of this singularity we will become a different species.
I'm concerned that even that expresses too much unfounded hope.
cfm in Gray, ME, parking cars at the End of the Universe.
Following the link on Singularity you come to the Wiki on Kardashev Civilization classifications.
I think it’s about time to start TheSnakeOilDrum.com since, with respect to our Earth-Resource Mastery ( yikes ! ) by 2040 we should be at 0.7Kards. Whew, what a relief! Finally we can stop fretting about regular old pre-Singularity liquid-fuels like oil.
* Presumably a Technological Singularity would lead to a rapid development of a Kardashev Type I civilisation where a Kardashev Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet, Type II of its planetary system, and Type III of its galaxy.[2] Given the fact that we currently will be 0.7 on the Kardashev scale by 2040, a technological singularity between now and then would push us rapidly over that limit.*
I would think Fermi's Paradox would come into force especially on the a priori possibility of a Singularity: if it can happen at all, why wouldn't galactic civilization(s) where it already has be here?
FWIW, Kurzweil does address the Fermi paradox by saying that "well, since a post-singularity civilisation would be easily visible to our current SETI efforts, there cannot be any civilisations which have reached a singularity at any point where electromagnetic waves from them would have reached us by now". I'm not convinced by this argument but it's not something he hasn't thought about.
Sorry guy we gave up on electromagnetics about the time your planet was just a hot rock. We use things like Twerp now, you know we use instantaneous telepathy to take over some twerp like this Crystal Radio and have his fingers do the talking. Greetings to you, Oh brain dead ones, about to die off!
but where is all the in between guys who are not quite at singularity yet? for this sublime alien thing to be true either they all jump to this sublime position OR they are very very very few.... perhaps none!
we should see a spectrum of guys out there on different parts of this curve?
Boris
London
Yet, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
The sentiment of your quote is certainly comforting (to those with a similar view of the Singularity, which I share), but it does not stand well on it's own (despite Fermi's brilliance).
This is a typically Oedipal evaluation of an Interplanetary species' presence. If WE, mighty mighty WE can't "detect" so-called intelligent life in the universe, certainly it must not exist. If NASA and MIT and SETI and the US Gubmint have officially pronounced that ET is not here, has never been here nor has ever been detected, then surely ET remains entirely hypothetical.
An _objective_ evaluation of HARD evidence, e.a., what are dismissively referred to as "UFO sightings", radar returns, photographic evidence, trace evidence, multi-person accounts and thousands of documented military intercepts and interactions with "phenomena" you must come to the conclusion that ET is here, that ET is doing as he pleases without our consultation or consent, and apparently, without our knowledge. All things that I would personally characterize as ample evidence of _advanced_ technological superiority. But that's just me.
I would expect hearty chuckles and snorts and derisive laughter from the hardcore speculator-energy crowd, but it's completely irrelevant.
One of the effects of the Singularity that I use as a personal measure of Change is the rate of disintegration of institutions. Institutions are bureaucratic entities designed to centralize and control the implementation of Process, but when you reach a point when Process itself assumes, let's call it "velocity", Process escapes institutional control and at some point the institutions become irrelevant. Or, more simply put, the institutions fail.
The ET phenomenon is a perfect example of a complete failure of our institutions across the board. Confronted with evidence of a phenomenon that exceeds our technological/creative/institutional limits to understand and/or interpret. e.a., _control_, our reaction is entirely predictable. We simply dismiss it.
So across mainstream, whenever this issue is brought up, it comes down to discussing SETI and the White House Red Carpet reception and the signing of the Intergalactic Trade Agreement with the Zeta Reticulans, and how in the absence thereof, surely this entire realm of interest remains nothing but speculative fiction and whacko fringe babble.
The sad irony of ET in the "official" scientific circles is that ET only becomes real at that point that we have the ability to calculate his existence once and for all. Of course, that moment approaches, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear some "shocking" pronouncement one day soon on the "discovery" or some sort of confirmation of ET life.
An objective, evaluation of such HARD evidence will also teach us the existence of miracles, ghost-sightings, were-wolfs, and the incredible and thoroughly proven record of astrology! The power of prayers should also not be dismissed. I advise you all to start praying so that PO will be avoided.
Of course, I believe not in such nonsense. Those signs and superstitions are only hiding the fear of people to realize and deal with the hard core reality which is planet earth, and obviously the AI machines that control it and the virtual world we are inside.
Thank you for your thoroughly irrelevant comment. As I have stated, I do believe I am aware that the overwhelming number of so-called "rationalists" dismiss the fact that Air Force jets are scrambled and chase so-called "ghosts", and that nuclear weapons officers in charge of Titan missiles with the capacity to kill millions have successful careers even after filing reports of their sightings of these phenomena. You needn't belabor the point. No, but good for you, really.
In God We Trust eh?
Happy investing.
Well, not really. You see, I wouldn't trade the evil conspiracy of OVNIs for an invisible and boring god. At least your theory is exciting.
Nope. I just pass on all the bullshit.
You see, those kinds of conspiracies are always self-delusional, because they can never be unproven, and one can't make predictions or derive anything worthy of it. It's just a lame episode of X files over and over.
Get over it.
Delightful. Unfortunately for both of us, while one superstition is my own little personal proclivity, the other is merely the cause of never ending global warfare, mass murder and if we're REALLY lucky, the end of humanity itself.
Now if you'll kindly let me enjoy my ET self-delusions in peace and manage to somehow swallow your happy self-congratulatory sense of rational superiority.
Thank you sir.
Be my guest, self-delusional friend. Good hunting.
Hi luis,
Thanks for your frankness.
It bothers me when people who generally have a predisposition to look at evidence, just dismiss a particular topic without actually examining the evidence in a thorough manner.
It looks to me like you dismiss the topic, ("UFO sightings"), out of hand. Plus, use insults to do so.
Also, it's a diversion (diversionary tactic) to put one topic in a category with others and then dismiss the entire category. Again with insults and labels, such as "signs and superstitions".
Please keep in mind that this topic is also, like much else we discuss here, not an "all-or-nothing" subject.
It's quite possible that the evidence of certain phenomenon and documented events exists. The conclusions the previous poster draws may be a plausible explanation for these observations and phenomenon. Or, they may not be. (The conclusions are rather mild, in themselves.)
http://www.nuforc.org/.
I strongly suggest (prior to dismissal) that you do your own investigation. Track down people who have made reports and are willing to be interviewed. Interview them yourself. Listen to the thousands of hours of tapes. Etc.
And I ask, most of all, for a respectful tone.
Because Fermi's paradox is one of those silly arguments of scale where no one actually knows what numbers to plug in for the probabilities. Sure theres a hundred billion stars in the milky way and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, but the likelyhood of civilization arising around one of those stars could easily be lower than 1 civilization in the observable universe.
Consider:
1. Rare earth, where water is liquid.
2. Precambrian life existed as simple single celled organisms for billions of years, indicating the multicellular jump may be quite a bit less likely than just forming life.
3. The jump from multicellular life to animal life with nervous systems may be quite a bit less likely still.
4. There are strong environmental factors selecting against intelligence in creatures capable of using tools.
Are you referring to The Drake Equation?
Sure, the drake equation is one expression of it. For some reason people entheusiastic about SETI always ascribe rather large numbers to some of the variables. Like 1% of life that develops being intelligent.
No way. Theres one civilization in the entire galaxy, and you're in it.
your sort of making Fermi's point.
he was the "where are they?" guy
the drake equation is just a list of unknown or poorly known variables.. rather silly as you say
Boris
London
I have studied Ray Kurzweil's writings, been to his speeches and met and spoken with him personally.
He feels that nanotechnology will enable an explosion of cheap solar power.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080219-kurzweil-solar.html
Several schools of thoughts and definitions around Technological singularities
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=209
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2007/07/the-word-singular...
In terms of timelines, I believe Ray's timelines are still on track because he is predicting exponential rates of change. Which for things like computer speed and DNA synthesis and sequencing are all still on track.
A significant increase in the rate of technological improvement and technological capability can
be achieved even without substantial new breakthroughs.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/achieving-mundane-technological.html
A revolution in the speed of construction using contour crafting and other new systems approaches would solve many of the energy infrastructure problems that are limited by the pace of construction. If structures can be built 100 to 1000 times faster then a lot of energy problems would go away. A new nuclear plant built in 1 week instead of 4 years. This could also be achieved with factory produced uranium hydride reactors.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/05/hyperion-uranium-hydride-nuclear.html
DNA sequencing has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread, here is the first and I thought I would comment because for the first time on this site I know what I'm talking about (I sequence the genomes of insects for a living).
The cost decreases have come about though miniaturization - in may ways reminiscent of Feymans "there's plenty of room at the bottom". The field has moved from performing sequencing reactions (some simple enzymatic reactions with DNA polymerases and color labeled pieces of DNA) in 50ul of volume in individual tubes to 20ul of volume in 96 well plates (think 96 small tubes in a plastic 12 x 8 array) to 5ul reactions in 384 well plates (24 X 16 arrays and having to worry about evaporation).
These size reductions have now been moved to the micro scale level where first reactions were performed on 50 um diameter beads (as opposed to being performed in liquid phase in tubes) with nice chemistry and engineering tricks to allow millions of reactions to be followed at once - collecting the information with digital images of millions of beads/reactions and being able to analyze those images quickly due to Moores law.
Now companies are using smaller beads (1um diameter) or other ways to get small patches of many DNA molecules on a solid support to get many (20 - 40) millions of reactions processed and analyzed at the same time. Based on this radical reduction in size the technology is getting cheaper at a rate 5-10 fold per each new generation of technology instead of the 2 fold every year in a half when the chemistry reactions were performed individually.
New companies (still without real products are moving to the single molecule level, and have demonstrated that (for example) a single polymerase molecule can be "watched" as it adds chemically modified nucleotides copying a DNA strand in such a way as the sequence of the added nucleotides can be determined. It remains to be seen if these companies can produce commercial machines that can assess millions of these molecules in a cost competitive manner, but they certainly are trying to.
To bring this back to the subject of the post, both the exponential increase in computing power and DNA sequencing capacity have come from minaturization. There is no increase in mass involved (although the data centers have got a lot bigger). This has to be compared to the much slower (but still impressive) increase in the perfomance of rechargable batteries.
Overall I think in computers the next challenge is to massively parallelize computing so we have millions of processing units in every phone on every chip, and I believe there is much work in this direction. With chip feature sizes of 45nm and atoms at around 0.1 nm in diameter, it is clear that easy gains in size reduction have already been accomplished. If this happens then I could easily believe that a machine could have the computing power to out think a human (although whether we could make one that did think is another question.
But the world runs on energy and mass. On this site we talk about millions of Barrels of oil a day, or US States worth of corn production per harvest. And thus I am never sure how information and wisdom can affect this mass of the physical world. If it does happen it will be through something like nanotech making a better solar panel, but we still need millions of them, and they will still need to be shipped.
Unlike information (which can be minaturized to 1's and 0's (computers) or ACG and T (biological information)) energy and mass cannot be reduced in size and still be useful.
Cheers,
fringy
Still - perhaps the first hyper intelligent AI will tell us how to make fusion small and easy enough to power our laptops without burning our legs like this one is now.
I didn't understand most of that but I am better for having read it. I think your comment about not being able to miniaturise mass and energy is the key to this "Technology will save us" mentiality. Just delivering a hot shower takes a minimum amount of energy. While we may not yet have reached optimal efficiency in hot shower delivery, the law of diminishing returns will act on our efforts to do so at some point. While I can imagine that nano-technology might be able to create new materials that could deliver massive amounts of heat right at the point of delivery (for my shower example), the amount of heat in the water, that hits my back, is not going to change.
Something I read recently was that a group of researchers had succeeded in building a maxwell's demon.
If I remember correctly (I don't - it's vague), a maxwell's demon is ruled out by the laws of thermodynamics.
If this is the case then where does that leave us with miniaturization of energy sources?
Here's more information:
"Maxwell's demon tamed:
A manmade molecular machine that can drive a system away from equilibrium is the first to do so using an "information ratchet", claim researchers in Scotland. The machine, in which a light-powered gate controls the transport of molecules, uses a similar principle to Maxwell's demon, a famous thought experiment devised to challenge the second law of thermodynamics (Nature 445 523).
Nature uses molecular machines to drive chemical systems away from thermodynamic equilibrium in virtually every major biological process. But while scientists have been eager to create similar machines to perform nanoscale tasks, they have so far only had success with simple switches that proceed towards equilibrium.
One way onlyDavid Leigh and fellow researchers at the University of Edinburgh, however, have proved that particles can be driven away from equilibrium using a molecular "information ratchet". To perform the feat, they use "rotaxane", an assembly of molecules comprising a dumbbell-shaped axle on which a ring can slide, hindered only by a gate located part way along. By shining light on rotaxane, the ring absorbs photons and transfers energy to the gate, which then temporarily changes shape to let the ring pass. Once the ring has passed, however, it cannot transmit energy back to the gate, and is therefore stuck – or ratcheted – in place.
A comparable ratcheting process was famously conjured 140 years ago by James Clerk Maxwell in a thought experiment that was later nicknamed "Maxwell's demon". Maxwell supposed that some kind of entity (a "demon") could be invented to act as a gatekeeper between two isolated chambers of gas, letting only fast molecules into one chamber and only slow molecules into the other. In doing so, he proposed, the difference in temperature between the two chambers would progressively increase, thus violating the second law of thermodynamics.
"
Beeep Beeep!
Bullshit detector alarm is ringing!
Beeep Beeep!
Luis,
You set the bs detector on too low a setting. This is just a cut and paste from a news release. BTW for your information, University of Edinburgh is not a bogus diploma by mail outfit.
Ask Euan if it is a reputable university or not.
the demon would have to locate the molecules and measure them a energy input... sorry you lose
Naw it works fine. Feynman's ratchet is an implementation of Maxwell's demon.
The only problem is you have to keep the ratchet cooler than the environment, which well, sort of destroys the purpose of the machine.
is this temperature difference the means or reason the ratchet "selects" the particles?
Boris
London
No. But when the ratchet is the same temperature as the environment, thermal noise will cause it to malfunction half the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
hmmm..... I sort of want to say I rest my case but will just shut up
Boris
London
Well, we're not really even disagreeing. Maxwell's demon can be built, but its got to have a power source to run. You cant outrun the long arm of the second law.
Of interest here might be discussion of Howard Odum's 4th Law of Thermodynamics, called the Maximum Power Principle, which is basically about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, e.g., living systems and any systems open to energy flows, that often appear to violate the second law (i.e., create and maintain order over time). It was a way of synthesizing physics and biology.
The demon sounds a lot like the work of enzymes in cellular membranes. Gradients are created by selecting which molecules can pass into and out of the cell, but these all have energetic costs, and in in fact cellular metabolism is mechanically done using the flow of protons across a gradient.
Craig Venter, billionaire pioneer in gene sequencing, has used gene synthesis to put together 500,000 genes which will be placed into a cleared cell to create synthetic life.
Other companies are using the new genetic capabilities to create enhanced microbes that make more productive biofuels.
The latest AMD and Nvidia GPGPU processors have 500 cores and 30,000 threads in each chip and the price is as low as $200 per chip which have dual precision teraflop performance. Multiple chips are being placed together in workstations and co-processing boards.
A four GPU system in a 1U-sized rack-mounted device that delivers up to 4 TFlops at 700W. It sells for $7,995.
AMD will be coming out with a 70W system for laptops.
Evolved machines uses the Tesla processors to speed up by 130-fold against simulations with current generation x86 microprocessors. They are now engaged in the design of a rack of GPUs, which will rival the world’s top systems, at 1/100 their cost.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/teraflop-chips-amd-firestream-500-cores...
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers are looking at is configurable processor technology developed by Tensilica Inc. The company offers a set of tools that system developers can employ to design both the SoC and the processor cores themselves. A real-world implementation of this technology. LBNL estimate that a 10 petaflop peak system built with Tensilica technology would only draw 3 megawatts and cost just $75 million. It's not a general-purpose system, but neither is it a one-off machine for a single application (like Japan's MD-GRAPE machine, for example). A 10 petaflop Opteron-based system was estimated to cost $1.8 billion and require 179 megawatts to operate; the corresponding Blue Gene/L system would cost $2.6 billion and draw 27 megawatts. Exaflop supercomputers are targeted for 2016-2017.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/02/tensilica-configurable-processors-could...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/05/berkeley-labs-and-tensilica-working-on....
The increased processing power and hardware neuron simulators would be able to scale from current 22 teraflop to get a detailed 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses up to 10 million neurons and 30 billion synapses for 22 petaflops (even without simulation efficiency improvements) and 500 million neurons and 1.5 trillion synapses. A whole human brain has 100 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses. the AI researchers believe that they can increase the efficiency of their simulations to achieve whole brain simulations with exaflop computers
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/blue-brain-status-and-future-of-whole.html
Now there's a genie I want to let out of the bottle, a synthetic lifeform that could evolve in ways totally unexpected. And just the person to do it - a wealthy greedy self-absorbed egomaniac.
The point of the information that was provided was, that those who claim that a technological singularity is "not on schedule" have less data backing that claim.
Craig Venter, Kurzweil and others may be labelled as crazy but they have significant resources to bring their visions into reality.
Also, nature produces a lot of new species all the time. So there would be limited impact from evolution of synthetic lifeforms designed to produce more biofuels.
More impactful would be those who use that technology to purposely create weaponized microbes. But giving up the benefit that can save us from peakoil will not prevent the bad uses. Just as giving up nuclear power does not mean that there are no nuclear bombs. Note: nuclear bombs were made first then nuclear power followed. There were thousands of nuclear bombs in soviet and american and british arsenals before the first commercial reactor.
Thanks for making the point. People here don't seem to understand that one of Kurzweil's main points is that because of its exponential nature, the majority of progress will seem to almost come out of nowhere. In the case of the human genome project, for example, the vast majority of work was done at the very end of the project(s). You have to think therefore in parabolic terms. I don't see why people here seem to miss this point. That said, for our purposes here "The Singularity" with a capital S isn't the point. It's really just technology vs commodity scarcity/global warming that matters. Extraterrestrial musings aren't relevant.
The biggest influence in this race will be us. I read all these utopian wishes that as a species we will all work together for the benefit of all and come up with solutions. The reality, using history as a guide, is that we do not co-operate at all. We fight and wage war over anything and everything. With this being the biggest challenge that we have faced, I believe we will really let loose.
How this is factored in as a handicap, and on which side is beyond me.
This may seem harsh and unpleasant, but that is how I see it.
I agree with this position.
We do not all row together in the same direction.
It is obvious that the various different energy factions view the others as enemies.
Since the president is an oil man, it's no surprise to me that he blocks other technologies as much as he can.
I don't believe for a minute that the president had nothing to do with the bureau of land management's recent decision to block all new thermal solar applications on federal land just exactly when we need them.
For that reason I am cautiously pessimistic though hope for the best that once things start to get bad, the anger of the people will cause any such objections to be dropped.
...one of the primary concerns of any future military will be a source of energy to enable them to continue to fight wars. I believe it was the US Navy that was funding Buzzards IEC device, if something like this where to be pulled off it would be groundbreaking. It's likely that nuclear power would have taken a great deal longer if the 2nd WW had not occurred.
Nick.
I thought the comments to Tierney's article, particularly those from Lee Schipper, were more interesting than the article itself. The number of issues one has to ignore to take a viewpoint similar to Tierney's is simply astounding to me...
It's a very interesting way of looking at things. In many aspects of life, our situation seems either to be described as a normal type distribution (earth stewardship in permaculture), or an exponential curve (techno-fantasy according to David Holmgren).
I personally find atlantis too depressing to comtemplate for long (hoping us humans are indeed somehow smarter than yeast), and green-tech stability unlikely, though that's just a feeling.
I have an emotional liking for the symmetrical curve, however difficult it might prove to achieve.
Andy
Call me naive, but I don't see these two perspectives as counter-opposed. What is stopping 1 billion people from achieving what 7 billion can? I personally believe Kurzweil is delusional. But that's my personal belief, so let's put that aside. Let's suppose that this "singularity" is an achievable concept/goal. Why do we need to plunder and destroy our planet to achieve it? Can seven billion brains achieve what one billion can't? (I really don't buy it.) We can't achieve a singularity without exponentially increasing our population and consumption of natural resources? We can't achieve this singularity sustainably? I'm still not buying it. Or is the plan for humanity to become like the aliens in "Independence Day," a sort of locust species, roving across the galaxy, plundering one M-class planet after another? If so, I want none of it. I'm thankful I'll be long dead before any of it comes to pass.
As 'free market' capitalism has plundered the world, perhaps an intergalactic financier species will come to dominate other planets too - but I doubt it. I've never thought much of artificial intelligence either - in philosophical terms - maybe that's because my computing experience hasn't led me in that direction though.
Isn't the battle for the singularity actually a quest to make ourselves - in some sense - extinct anyway (or god)? Maybe it comes down to whether you regard yourself essentially as an animal, which I tend to do quite a bit of the time.
I'm looking at the Animal in us, too. I think of all these comments that show our chagrin at consuming the planet, and think of those early hunters trying to apologize to the Pre-science gods for so consuming these precious animals, in an apparently sinful yet automatic pursuit of survival.
Now we're apologizing again on a much larger scale, but don't want to address it to a big daddy, so we feel heartwrenchingly guilty, but have nowhere to put it.
I'm not saying everyone feels this way, of course, and not even that they should. Just that I think this familiar response shows up in our nature, both then and now.
Bob
Why do we need to plunder and destroy our planet to achieve it?
By "plunder and destroy," you mean, of course, "develop."
I'm thankful I'll be long dead before any of it comes to pass.
I wouldn't count on that. On bad days, I expect megafires to destroy the entire Amazon rainforest in the next few years. On good days, I expect the Amazon rainforest to be completely "developed" in under 20 years.
You just need to adjust your attitude to the "Negative-sloped Singularity." As we say in the Church of the SubGenius, you're lucky to be living in the End Times.
Yeah, there is no reason the "singularity" has to be a good thing.
cfm in Milliways, the last singularity
I agree. We are sometimes so linear in how project into the future. As if technology going forward has to equate with shooting humans out into the solar system in this linear direction of growth and expansion. We can decouple the growth and expansion part from the further exponential increases of knowledge.
I'd imagine the argument that 9 billion people can do more than 1 billion because necessity demands it. I think of all the idealistic scientists working feverishly on their greatest hope that if successful will lead humanity to a new enlightenment and prosperty! Well, God bless their devotion to sacrifice their own comfort for the rest of us waiting to be saved, right?
Somehow this sane question reminds me of the Prolife prayer joke: "God, why have you not help us cure cancer?" God: "I tried, but you aborted her."
I think for me the repulsion I have toward the singularity is I don't believe that humanity has the wisdom or devotion to replace natural systems and cycles as the sustainer of life, even if somehow we found the power to do so. That's what I tell my dad when he's sure that cold fusion or whatever magic stepping stone will propel us to the next rung on the ladder of progress.
It is interesting to argue with those who only see "higher and higher", and feel cramped by any suggestion that the future might be something different, and worse, that we ought to wish for anything different, or Heaven forbid, actually place limits on "human progress".
I wonder if the mystical "singularity" exists for life and consciousness, and perhaps there might be a trillion worlds out there with advanced life like ours, all striving towards the same unknowable destiny, and perhaps 999,999,999 of them will fail. I can only conclude it is risky, but not whether it was worth the risks. Nature CREATES by vast risks, vast losses, and goes on.
It is certainly fun to be part of the "singularity generation" where tomorrow could be anything at all. It seems less fun to be a part of the generation after this one, if things don't go as planned.
If the Muses are worth their reputation, I'd wish humanity rises up high enough to SEE the impossible detiny, but not high enough to get there, and then we tumble back to the ground again, into dirt and dust, but the vision intacted. Perhaps that glimse at a destiny we are not yet prepared for could create the vision for the next attempt. And until then, there's plenty of messes to clean up and gardens to tend.
Not that I'm cheerleading for capitalism, but capitalism is the only economic system that has produced enough surplus wealth to support a semiconductor industry that doubles transistor density every 18 months. Even the kinder and gentler capitalism of European social democracy is still capitalism.
Capitalism in the sense of the Ponzi scheme demands constant growth in both population and consumption to pay off debts to earlier investors. If we get out of this mess, it won't be humanity that rises up, but the singularity AI that understands the destructiveness and impossibility of exponential growth and puts on the brakes.
I disagree that capitalism requires exponential growth. All it requires that some companies die while new ones take their place.
You could still have an economy with no growth, and be able to pay off debts to earlier investors.
How? By coming up with a new idea that's good enough that people decide to buy from you rather than the person they usually buy from. Innovation. This is what capitalism is great at doing, providing a reward for research, and that will still work whether you have exponential growth or stagnation.
Capitalism is really just a different implementation of survival of the fittest, likewise evolution doesn't just halt if biomass is no longer able to increase.
We'll just have to disagree. The whole system of debtors paying interest to creditors only works if there's a generalized expectation of economic growth, not economic growth IF you sell something innovative.
Your comment sort of begs the question of whether debtors paying interest to creditors is a required aspect of capitalism.
--
JimFive
In the ancient Rome the rate of interest was around 10-20 % yearly and the growth was around 0.01%/year. And other ancient economies had similar rates around the same time. So your point is empirically wrong.
If you read Man, Economy and State by Rothbard, you will learn that the interest rate is function of the time preference of the debtor and the lender for the good lended.
So, a lower interest rate is function of the lifespan of the debtors and the lenders and correlate about the surplus of goods they can produce and lend or repay.
Nature is nothing to admire. It is a cruel and abhorrent machine that is fuelled by the life and death struggle of it's participants,. Nature works very much like capitalism, the successful survive, the wasteful and uncompetitive go extinct. Competition is the universes main catalyst for change it seems.
Civilisation as I see it has been a long quest by the most able creatures on the planet to escape natures cruelty and to build something better than it. A species that has the ability to escape nature would be foolish not to take the chance. I guess you could say civilisation is an attempt to make the 'New Deal' for nature.
To do this however, you need fast technological evolution, and for that you need an economy based around competitive forces.
Understand the idea of the singularity is very powerful for these reasons, it represents the only chance for improvement and progress there is. To say the singularity is a bad idea, is the pessimistic idea that humanity is inevitability doomed to natures barbarity. I do not see why I should give up hope like that, we have a good chance of success.
I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of Nietzsche's superman. That man is limited and flawed, and there is a need for a next step beyond man. We could actually really do something like that. Development of artificial conscious will be mans most significant discovery.
1. I doubt that any species capable of Intersteller flight would need to plunder a planet when there are far more easily digestable chunks of 'stuff' floating around up there -from the Oort Cloud to the Asteroid belt. Why bother fighting gravity?
2. Supposing they did take a shine to our planet why bother fighting us? Simply decode our DNA -taken from a few captives- then lace the upper atmpsphere with some human-only-plague. We would all be dead in a week or two... Job done. Mind you, the thought of seeing Bush get back into his combats would send a shiver down any aliens spine...
3. Galaxy Mandate #124.561 specifically forbids "...the usage of non Home Solar-System resources where a Class 1 civilisation (or part thereof) has been detected without first consulting and getting grants/permits from said species for the usage of all or part of said system(s) resources..."
Nick.
I've wondered before whether the "singularity" and peak oil / resource depletion are mutually exclusive. In fact, I've wondered if the mad push for innovation caused by a peak oil / resource depletion scenario might actually be the catalyst for the next major surge forward in technology. Could ecological catastrophe actually cause the technology curve to go vertical?
My true views are a bit more moderate. I don't think it's going to "go vertical," nor do I think we're all going to die either. But I do understand from having studied both the history of technology and evolutionary biology that resource constraints and challenges often cause the greatest leaps forward. It's a myth that systems get more complex when they have unlimited resources... in reality it is *limits* that cause complexity in both nature and in engineering.
An evolving system without limits becomes fat, bloated, stupid, and "flat" from a complexity and biodiversity point of view. Our global technological system is no different. Cheap oil has given us meaningless, stupid monoculture. A world of greater scarcity might actually be more interesting, more intelligent, and more advanced.
The concept of singularity isn't dependent on a growing human population and consumption. The Unforeseen emergence of technologies that give rise to an exponential increase in our ability to understand and manipulate our environment is not dependent on the 7 billion plus inhabitants on the planet. Up until now these exponential advances in technology like the rise of agriculture and the industrial revolution have resulted in exponential increases in human population and consumption but why should this necessarily continue? Theoretically speaking could there be a continuing of the singularity phenomenon at the same time the human population would contract? Or maybe more interesting to consider is that the next unforeseen revolution that will be comparable to agriculture or industrial revolution may emerge as a result of the pressures we will experience on the descent of our human population. Any really intelligent machine or organism or culture that masters the control and manipulation of their environment to such a dominant position will have to look in the mirror and apply their mastery to themselves. Or they will perish.
I disagree. It is *complexity* that causes limits.
Then why isn't the entire planet just covered with an endless mat of undifferentiated photosynthetic bacteria? That would be the thermodynamically and evolutionarily optimal solution if what you say is true.
That statement makes absolutely no sense, at least biologically.
What you do see however is complexity barriers. The best analogy I've ever heard for how this works is the game of Tetris. You build and build and build complexity and then something falls into place and a lot of complexity is lost. Another analogy would be building an arch: you build the scaffolding, place the stones, and then the scaffolding is no longer necessary.
I agree complexity seems to be a response to limits. Maybe most people who agree with this would agree with malthusian ideas, whereas people who think complexity causes limits are more inclined to have some sympathy with the ideas of singularity.
Another loose analogy might be fractal sets such as the mandlebrot.
These tend to be characterised as having increasing (infinite) complexity at the limits.
In my observation of computer technology which is my field....
It's easier to make something complex than it is to make it simple.
You improve something by finding out how to do it more simply. So you go from complex parts to a large number of simple parts, which makes scaling things up easier.
Engineers struggle towards making things simpler. That is because generally a large number of simple parts do the job better than a single big complex part.
So yes, complexity does cause limits.
Although that's not all there is to it, you run into physical limits always.
Memory, CPU speed for software.. Transistor density and energy consumption for microchips, very important lately with the amount of electricity they leak thanks to how small the interconnects are these days. Industry couldn't push CPU's past 3ghz due to very poor efficency at high mhz, so they went for multiple cores.
The best way to put this is. Complexity is the enemy of efficiency.
I think there are a number of examples of complexity causing limits. The software business is rife with projects that have failed because of complexity greater than human ability to handle. Success in these cases comes with figuring out how to simplify as you say.
I was also thinking of the Joseph Tainter thesis of the fall of complex societies in which a point of diminishing returns is reached for complexity and things collapse back to a simpler state.
"Complexity is the enemy of efficiency."
I think you have rolled together two very different concepts.
1. Human beings have a limit to the amount of complexity they can handle.
2. Efficiency is often simple.
In nature, however, things do not necessarily follow these two principles.
For example: a forest ecosystem is perhaps the best possible way of extracting every ounce of nutrients out of the environment, due to highly specialized organisms evolving to exploit every niche of the system.
A human constructed system to try to do the same would be simpler and much less efficient.
One huge missing factor is any kind of unbiased frame of reference to allow meaningful comparative measurements. This problem shows up clearly with inflation and the various hedonic corrections.
This problem also shows up in biological evolution. One point of view is that humans are the most advanced life form. By the most obvious object measure, all life forms on the planet today are equally advanced - we are all in the same snapshot of where the evolutionary process has got to today. Are Manhattan's skyscrapers a more advanced architectural accomplishment than the reefs constructed by corals? Of course we humans will tend to say so! But we are hardly unbiased.
Another funny question is that of whether the global economy can continue to grow, give resource constraints. Of course! Folks can trade beanie-babies for ever higher prices - where's the limit? Haiku of ever greater sublimity can be written & assessed monetary value. What limits the stakes of a poker game?
It seems that species are going extinct these days at an accelerating rate, due to human causes of various sorts. How should we value that loss?
Really, our measurement and classification systems are always local to some ecological and social regime. It's like coordinate patches in differential geometry - like a flat map used to describe the surface of a globe. A flat map is fine if you are just wandering around some small region of the globe. But if you go far enough, there is no map that doesn't break down at some point.
So, as scoiety shifts and planetary ecology shifts, whatever measurement systems we've set up, they'll become irrelevant.
That's one fundamental problem with Kurzweil: he judges the past in terms that are relevant to the present. People in tribal societies could remember thousands of verses of their epics etc. etc. People these days remember almost nothing. It's not hard to come up with measures with respect to which the present comes up very short compared to some past cultures.
I think the real game is to let go of the idea that social and ecological systems can be assigned a total order in any unbiased way. Instead, we might look at the ways that such systems evolve & shift. We need to decouple the notion of evolution from the notion of progress.
Evolution and Consciousness, edited by Jantsch and Waddington, is a fun book to get some flavor of such thinking.
There are two other forces competing to save/doom humanity. The financial system and the government.
Technology fixes need huge amounts of capital and a functioning monetary system, and the government's ability to be counterproductive is currently being demonstrated (corn ethanol, lifting the gas tax...).
Mind-blowing=brain fart
Kurzweil is a idiot who believes in the Cornucopia of Science.
The man who made a study of Peak Science is our own Dr. David Goodstein of ASPO.
I heard he thinks things today are even WORSE than they were 14 years ago.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
The linked paper makes almost no connection to the question being asked in the posting. It's almost entirely about conditions in academia and whether there are too many people being involved in basic science research for the amount of results being achieved (and is a bit sneering about the quality of results with it's aspersions to sorting and ore). This doesn't touch upon the question of whether those scientific and technological developments which are produced (and may be in non-basic research in industry) are leading to exponential increases in the general world (the paper seems to avoid any empricial look at the world in general). The transistor is not particularly deep physics (even though it did lead to Nobel prizes) but it has had a huge effect on the world.
In my post downthread I explain why I think Kurzweil is probably wrong, but I do think it's a complicated question and not an obvious "Kurzweil is a idiot who believes in the Cornucopia of Science." situation.
Here s what Ray Kurzweil writes on the future of energy:
http://www.blacksunjournal.com/books/68_ray-kurzweil-on-future-energy_20...
Good link. Here is what I am talking about with respect to his take on energy. Some excerpts:
"The bulk of the additional energy needed is likely to come from new nanoscale solar, wind, and geothermal technologies."
"Although the nanotechnology revolution will require new energy resources, it will also introduce major new S-curves in every aspect of energy–production, storage, transmission, and utilization–by the 2020s."
"The energy requirements for nanofactories are negligible. Drexler estimates that molecular manufacturing will be an energy generator rather than an energy consumer."
"A billion-dollar demonstration plant called FutureGen, now being constructed, is expected to be the world’s first zero-emissions energy plant based on fossil fuels."
I should note that FutureGen is in trouble, with the DOE having withdrawn support.
In a nutshell, he completely downplays the possibility that an energy crunch will slow down his rush toward the singularity.
"...Drexler estimates that molecular manufacturing will be an energy generator rather than an energy consumer."
- And it came to pass, that while the manufacturing end of the Nano-Nano Campus was, indeed a net- energy producer, the Marketing/PR department at the other end of the campus quickly consumed that surplus in its zeal to print massive Billboard Images of these sub-visible wonders..
It's called wishful thinking and it is the most powerful force in all men's mind.
One has to dream, no?
Energy crunch could just as well speed up development of some new technologies. You don't need a lot of energy to do R&D in the field of nanotechnology or genetical enginering.
As for transportation or alternative energy sources I think we pretty much know by now what we can expect and how much energy you need to move people around. If we now can convert sunlight to electricity with the efficiency of 15%, or 30% I don’t think it’ll change much if we can get higher efficiencies or lower costs. The biggest breakthroughs that could change the energy future are technologies that would allow to lower energy consumption significantly. Thanks to computers you eliminate the need to move people around and with nanotechnology you potentially could eliminate the need to move goods around and lower energy use for manufacturing processes significantly.
We all need to remember that we produce and manufacture goods in such a mindless and wasteful manner that there’s a lot of place for improvement. Compare the brute force approach in manufacturing steel or even supposedly hi-tech Kevlar with the elegant and subtle ‘technology’ of nature’s super-materials. They are just as strong or even stronger materials, all ‘manufactured’ by tiny ‘factories’ in room temperature and at atmospheric pressure.
What Kurzweill writes is to me just a possible scenario and not a prediction or even a prophecy as some like to view it. Healthy two year old could become a Nobel Prize winner, or a super-athlete, but it could turn out to be a drug addict or end up in jail for homicide. The same goes for humanity as a whole. We could get to singularity or return to the Olduvai Gorge … let’s just hope that becoming an average Joe is our worst case scenario for the near future.
I spent the years from 1994-2005 boring every one I met with talk about AI's and the singularity.
In 2005 when I first heard about Peak oil I wanted to explain to the fools that Peak oil was not an issue because of renewable technology. The world is using 14.5 Terra watts but the disk of the Earth receives 10,000 times as much energy from the sun.
Shortly there after I had a major shock when I realised that we had not built any of the required renewable energy infrastructure.
Nanosolar can now paint solar material directly on sheet steel. If ever there was a process ripe for massive rapid scale up that must be it.
However ALL the non-renewable energy sources are depleting fast. Replacing 14.5 Terra watts is a mammoth multi-decade task. As I see it the gap is too large, we are at least 10 years to late. Once you factor in EROEI the net energy drop is too steep. We could have had the singularity but we waited too long now it's too late.
I don't know which is worse. We get the singularity AI's and nanotech out compete and render all existing life extinct OR we get peak net energy and 80-99% of humanity dies and is reduced to a primitive existence for thousands of years if not forever.
Have you factored in all the energy that a civilisation must spend to have training centres for scientists and labs etc. R&D sits at the top of a steep apex. There must be a lot of energy spent on all the lower levels of complexity before you get to a Scientist.
Think of it as a knowledge food pyramid. For every 10 people who have basic education maybe 1 graduate university and for every 10 graduate maybe one gets a Masters Degree and only a few of those get a Phd., become scientists etc. and they are supported by a whole ecology of engineering companies that make their research equipment possible.
I used to work for an engineering company that made parts for particle accelerators, biotech lab equipmnet and an endless assortment of one off equipment for the research labs of the world. We were supported by a whole ecology of parts manufacturing engineering companies.
peakoilBob that's an interesting comment.
However, I'm not yet able to see why electricity generation should pose such an insurmountable challenge. Apart, that is, from climate change issues.
Coal is the primary electricity source for the world, but it's not slated to peak until 2025 or so. That gives us a lot of time. Even natural gas shouldn't be peaking until around 2018-ish, from what I've seen.
Compare those with crude oil, especially light sweet crude, which might have peaked already.
Therefore the immediate problem seems to be a new transportation fuel. With that in place I tend to think that electricity shouldn't be so much of a problem because of the scalability of the new technologies. Furthermore those new industries should experience massive growth.
Ok, I can see why you might think that. Let me see if I can explain my reasoning.
You are correct when you say that
There are 3 major non-renewable sources of energy Oil, natural gas, coal.
Coal is unlikely to provide the answer. From a net energy perspective I believe energy from US coal has peaked. Anthracite the highest grade is heavily depleted. Unfortunately I do not have a reference for this at hand.
While attending ASPO 6 in Ireland last year the visiting Chinese delegation informed us that China had abandoned all Coal to liquid projects due to a shortage of coal. China has started importing coal from Australia.
Bellow are a few articles from the oil drum itself on Coal depletion. Search on Coal and you will find even more articles.
Peak Coal - Coming Soon?
COAL - The Roundup
There are also issues with natural gas production. officially the countries with most of the worlds reserves are Russia, Iran and Qatar. Russian natural gas production and exports are going to decline if for no there reason than because their distribution infrastructure is very old.
"However, there's no time to be lost, because the forecasts predict an energy crisis. Capital assets deterioration is now 60% in the oil extraction sector, 80% in the oil refine sector, 55% in the power industry. The coal industry is in permanent crisis. Gas companies have to reduce gas recovery because the most profitable fields are running low. Your readers are well aware of the fact that the pipeline transport, too, has enough problems: One fourth of the total length of trunk pipelines has been operating for over 30 years, yet another one third has been operating for over 20 years. It is widely understood that FPC urgently needs large (up to $30 billion a year) investments." head of the specialized Committee for energy, transport and communications of the State Duma Vladimir S. Katrenko
Iran and Qatar produce from North and south pars fields and I am sure you know what the geological issues are with those fields. Questions About the World's Biggest Natural Gas Field
Natural Gas: how big is the problem?
I suspect that as oil production falls it will very quickly become difficult to maintain and grow the renewable energy infrastructure along with all the manufacturing and mining industry required to maintain it.
Most of the worlds electricity infrastructure is very old. Also without liquid fuels it will become very hard to maintain the electrical infrastructure. Faliors in key systems will bring the whole system down.
Different countries will be affected differently due to their particular energy mix, infrastructure, population, natural resources etc.
Maintaining the current carrying capacity can become problematic.
Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room
Of course there are other issues as well but I don't want to write an essay :)
You realise you're a meme addict that buys into hype, right?
We aren't going to see the singularity the way the transhumanists envision simply because there are too many engineering cycles. You went full bore on a bandwagon that offered a radically different future than the present. It seems you're doing the same thing with peak oil.
New technlogies aren't going to warp the future into something unrecognizable in short order. Likewise resource shortages aren't going to do that either. You're ignoring technology we use today while focusing on undeveloped technology for tomarrow. Nuclear power can provide for all of civilization for millenia before we even toy with breeder regimes. And sure, its a multi-decade infrastructure adjustment, but resource depletion doesn't happen overnight.
"However ALL the non-renewable energy sources are depleting fast. Replacing 14.5 Terra watts is a mammoth multi-decade task. As I see it the gap is too large, we are at least 10 years to late. Once you factor in EROEI the net energy drop is too steep. We could have had the singularity but we waited too long now it's too late."
You're too pessimistic.
Consider the current state of affairs:
One billion people more or less wealthy.
Another billion more or less comfortable.
The rest (five billion give or take) poor.
Let's take a really pessimistic version:
If 90% of the rich join the poor then we still have 100 million people who are advancing science.
Is 100 million people enough to continue the drive to singularity?
The only caveat I see here is global thermonuclear war.
But even then, there would still be isolated areas that will still continue more or less business as usual.
So singularity put off for thousands of years? I doubt it.
The real question is whether singularity is even possible.
Personally I believe we can do a green-tech and permaculture based sustainable future where the rich world is a bit poorer but the poor world is a bit better off.
I am reminded of two books that rip this sort of thinking to shreds with many good examples.
One by the late Garret Hardin called "Living within Limits." The other by the still alive Brian Czech called "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train." The former is quite broad in its assault, the later does a very friendly job demolishing Julian Simon.
Except Simon still won.
Kurzweil is an absolute nutcase. Last I heard, he not only believes that he will become immortal in a robot body, but that the coming few decades will offer that to everyone. It's astounding that anyone listens to him. He is infinitely more likely to be stalked and eaten by killer ducks, or choke on a vitamin.
Kurzweil's ravings are just one more flavor of religion. There's no "race", unless Moore's Law can be said to apply to delusionality. Malthus bats last.
Malthus bats last? Damn. That is good. I mean, that is poetry.
https://twitter.com/gregormacdonald/statuses/846418432
Gregor
Yes! Excellent; I shall definitely be plagiarising that bon mot. Thanks. I'll credit you, Greenish.
It's not that astounding. It has very little to do with what is possible or probable and everything to do with what people want to believe. I want to live 4 centuries in a super bionic body with a photographic memory and super computers, nano technology, and the mapping of the human genome allow me to conceive of a future that holds those things.
There is a big disconnect between what technology could offer and where we are actually headed. We have the technology now to avoid the horrible consequences of an unplanned energy descent but we are headed for one. Technology will not be the determining factor in this race. It will be the size and scope of the disconnect that determines our fate.
Tim
Poetic license?
Ah, you got me, it's not astounding at all. Figure of speech. Hence my identification of it as religion. 'Apalling' is more what I was going for.
Indeed. I have occasionally made the distinction between what is thermodynamically possible and evolutionarily possible, where I use "evolution" in a general sense of what our minds will actually allow us to do. We could physically do a lot of stuff, from Moon colonies to world peace to personal hovercars, etc. However, there are for the most part not statistically possible paths to get there. Overcoming the tragedy of the commons is about as likely as flipping a coin and getting heads every time. This sucks, hence the sobriquet "tragedy".
Kurzweil's existence is useful as a "reductio ad absurdum" example of a fully reductionist worldview. And by useful I mean, of course, apalling.
And say, I found it was fun to copy the text of the Tierney article to a text file and replace the words "human" and "humans" with "yeast", the word "energy" with "sugar", and "world" and "earth" with "vat". Fun AND educational, by which I mean, perforce, apalling.
You people seem to forget that all the evolution / progress made by mankind was not arbitrary, but rather the work of countless people towards their own dreams. There wouldn't be computers if people didn't once dream of them, there wouldn't be bottled water if people didn't dream of it. Everything is not exactly the final result of a given usage of power, but rather the persecution of dreams.
Doomers always like to point towards the bell curve of peak oil. I would ask: who invented the concept of extracting oil in the first place? Was it necessarily a fated thing to happen? Who invented "bell curves"? Who invented the notion of "peaks"?
Things are being constantly "invented". People talk and talk about tech not saving the day but forget that it all comes down to inventions, not anything else.
A bit of salt to counter your sugar.
I think this gets to the heart of this reductionism. It is not really about The Singularity vs. Peak Oil (or about Malthus vs. The Singularity). It is about human nature and the vagaries (and necessities) of human belief.
Belief in technology (or the Singularity, or what-have-you) is a much stronger force than is often recognized (or admitted).
I'm certainly more on the Malthus side of the equation than the Singularity side, so my "beliefs" are shaping my opinions. Yet, humans do not handle complexity very well - they reduce complexity until it is in comfortable bite-sized chunks - or they replace complexity with comfortable simplicity. Each of us does it hundreds of times each day. It is why belief in "technology is the answer" is so tempting, and why Moore's Law is actually believed to be a law (even though exponential growth always reaches a limit - even Moore's Law).
You should read Twain again before posting your own beliefs as if they were facts that debunk other people's beliefs.
Your last burst of opinions has been a bit didactic as well, Luisdias.
Lots of pots calling each other black..
Yeah, but I didn't exactly quote Mark Twain on others, now did I?
It's called hypocrisy.
Green;
You are quite right; Kurzweil is totally unhinged. I was listening to NPR"s "Talk Of The Nation; Science Friday" a few weeks ago, and Ira Flatow interviewed Ray Kurzweil as he went off on various subjects including robotic bodies and teleportation (you know, just like Scotty did on "Star Trek"). Towards the end of the interview, Ira tentatively asked Ray about the limits that a planet such as ours may bump up against providing the energy for such endeavors, much less the physical resources needed. Ray brushed off his questions, stating that it would all just get 'much more efficient.'
In short, Ray Kurzweil, no doubt the genius that he is, sounded like every delusional schizophrenic I have ever taken care of (being a former EMS Paramedic and ER Nurse for a number of years, I've had my share of them.) That man is CRAZY!
SubKommander Dred
Thanks for the enlightenment, doc.
snore.
This sickness is called "genius". If geniuses were normal, they wouldn't be quite so genius, now, would they be?
Besides being a best selling author, he is also invented music synthesizers and reading machines for the blind.
won the 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts
Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002
Kurzweil is on the Army Science Advisory Board, has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
He is not only predicting the changes he is also inventing them and profiting from them.
He has several multi-million dollar companies.
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/companies_flash.html
And GWB runs the world's most powerful nation. Success does not require or imply sanity.
Ray Kurzweil is suffering from one of the most visible cases of ego-attachment I've ever seen. One of my favourite Buddhist quotes is "Suffering comes from the inability to see reality as it truly is." If that is true, then Kurzweil is suffering mightily. The evidence is clear in his attitudes about energy.
but...but... how many starving people have his inventions fed? How much justice have these inventions brought to the oppressed?
All I see is the development of a dystopic future ala 'Blade Runner' with the Palaces of Nanotechnology glistening on the horizon, surrounded by starving masses of peasants. Let me know when *substantial* improvements in worldwide trends and *actual* conditions occur because of all of this starry-eyed techno-babble.
Starving people were fed by the work of Norma Borlaug and his colleagues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
The first green revolution which used science to boost crop production.
Actual technology that saved actual lives, which happened decades ago.
China has fish farming which supplies half of the worlds fish.
New nanomembranes are increasing the energy efficiency of desalination and water purification. Desalination and water purification are key technologies for keeping people healthy and alive.
Dean Kamin is another inventor working on inventions for water purification and energy generation for impoverished areas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
Water and electricity for the poor.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/16/technology/business2_futureboy0216/index...
I guess you missed the articles and memos about substantial trends and condition improvement via technology. The green revolution and technology were why the predictions of mass starvation of the sixties and seventies mostly did not happen except where there was war and other factors going on.
Oh, I am quite familiar with the 'green revolution' etc.
Yes, true, there are certain mega-trends that come down on the positive side. For example the increased caloric intake on average of humans around the world (ala green revolution). These statistics come across to me as being seriously cherry-picked. One has to have a rather unreasoning faith in the ability of the green revolution to continue its trajectory, a trajectory that is already faltering seriously with very real possibilities of peak grain and other peaks approaching rapidly, or already past.
Then, all the starry-eyed talk ignores the persistent 3 billion or so humans that subsist on just-above-starvation diets and just-below-barely-adequate monetary throughput. Worldwatch claims that the number of chronically undernourished is the largest in both absolute and proportional terms. I don't see a clear trend at all that indicates this will improve.
How about a prediction of when we get a substantial indication that these kinds of problems are 'on the run' being chased into oblivion by the approaching singularity. Or is it always 'just beyond the horizon.'
I highly recommend that every cornucopian take an extended visit to a third world mega-city to get a flavor of how several billions of humans live. It ain't pretty.
So you are familiar with the green revolution but your previous comment was asking for any trends and changes. You talk about cherry picked data but then state that stated that there was no positive trends. If there were no positive trends then there would be no cherries to pick.
The percentage of people who are undernourished is declining. China and India are raising hundreds of millions out of total poverty.
You can have a technological acceleration and economic boom where most people do not participate. This is what happened in previous economic shifts. From hunter gatherer to agrarian. From agrarian to industrialized. Each of those shifts was an increase in the economic growth rate.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6274
http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf
The impoverished people that you are referring are in countries that did not make the successful shifts in history. They did not successfully adopt industrialization or in some cases the most productive agriculture.
The difference between those people and the USA is 100-200 years of 1-3% higher growth.
Technology progress is not automatic. The people and the systems need to be coordinated and the effort needs to be made for successful adoption and deployment. Many things have to go right.
So there can be countries that do well with a singularity boom and simultaneously places that go even more to crap. Just like the last three-four times there were big shifts.
Well, it's probably a dead thread by now but anyway...
I never intimated that there were no positive trends, nor did I say I was ignorant of them. I'm not sure how the green revolution has to do with hi-tech. It was largely due to a combination of hybridizing new strains of grain plus heavy use of fossil-fuel based fertilizers.
It seems that every positive trend has its downside, which many seem to ignore or dismiss with a wave of the hands. Green revolution has factors like topsoil and fresh water depletion, ocean dead zones, dangers of mono-cropping, not to mention negative social and economic consequences.
We could argue forever about which trends will dominate. I tend to believe we will muddle along with both bad and good trends persisting to some degree.
This actually makes my point of the IMO very real possibility of a 'dystopic divide' in the future with a small group of humans benefitting from 'singularity' type technology, while the rest live in grinding poverty. I just see the cornucopian tendency to ignore or dismiss the negative trends, and possibilities of negative tipping points, as making talk of a singularity seem moronic.
BTW do you believe that Ray Kurzweil will achieve his immortality? I think his strategy is pitiful. Various paeans to science in this thread completely ignore the fact that Kurzweil's visions of immortality are completely faith-based. His gulping of mega-vitamins will only result in his having very expensive piss.
What is the alternative strategy ? Drinking, smoking and not exercising ? His regimen has already improved his current health. He has a vitamin business and makes millions from his other companies and millions from public speaking and his books alone.
I did not dismiss the fact that many people could and likely will stay poor. But again just because that can happen so what. Everyone should have stayed equally poor and unhealthy?
Plus the question is can technology overcome peak oil and climate change and the answer is yet it can. Then the next question is will those solutions get implemented and how widely. If you want the poor and various parts of the world not get left behind then you should be encouraging widespread adoption of those technologies.
The new green revolution involves genetic manipulation of plants and animals. Rice genome has been sequenced.
http://sundaytimes.lk/080622/FinancialTimes/ft331.html
Hi greenish,
I'm just curious.
re: "Last I heard, he not only believes that he will become immortal in a robot body"
Does Kurzweil have kids?
I grabbed Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near from a library a month ago to check what he says about energy. He actually says
He then goes on to talk about some advanced fossil fuel technologies bridging until various advanced renewables are developed.
As I've said in other posts on previous threads, Kurzweil makes a good argument. However, I tend to think that in positing exponential increase in all technologies and knowledge he's introducing a false generalisation. Technologies and knowledge which benefit from brute-force automation (computing power, disk drive capacity, DNA sequencing, drug simulation, etc) there appears to be an exponential increase in output. In areas where deep thought is required it's not obvious that there's anything beyond linear increases yet (when you normalize over the number of researchers). In particular, a key point in his writings is that we will develop more and more technologies which augment complex human intelligence (which will feed-back into new augmenting innovations), and I really can't think of many modern innovations that achieve that. Google is a good example: I can find much more information on any subject than I could in a library twenty years ago, and with their brute force selectioning via clever collections of keywords I can get much better specificity than I could at the library. But I can't describe a mathematical problem to google and have it find work that is conceptually very close to what I'm talking about; I have to stumble upon a good keyword which brute search then uses to drag relevant info in.
That's the challenge for those who believe the singularity will happen "on schedule": what current technologies can you point to that actually enhance "deep" human intelligence? Indeed, the law of accelerating returns says everything is advancing exponentially. So whether you're a scientist or an insurance clerk or a farmer or whatever, you ought to be able to point to something in your work that's increasing exponentially.
My personal view is that I may be missing seeing some technological developments that are evidence that the singularity will happen in the mid-term future, and I hope this is true. But my reasoned beliefs are that more probably we're advancing in knowledge faster than ever but nowhere near fast enough to compensate for a dramatic decline in easily available energy. So we'll have to reconfigure society and in particular societally nurtured aspirations to deal with this lower levels of available energy. Hopefully this will be in reprioritisation of activities (eg, eliminating the 60 mile daily commute to work alone in your car and the excessively material goods based culture) and we'll still be doing science and technology and maybe the levels of technology envisioned by Kurzweil will be reached in a few hundred years time.
The thing that most worries me is that the majority people will try to use depleting energy resources keep current behaviour right until the bitter end rather than build infrastructure for a new way of life when we've got the available energy and things will fall apart into bare subsistence living.
You're confusing large scale events with isolated ones. It would be the same if I stated that my private well was skyrocketing its production, so PO is debunked right there.
.... and that's the worry that has to come to life, and if everyone gets focused, I envision a new era of enlightenment!
It's like market forces. The least worried people are, the worse things become, but the worse things become the more worried people become. So it seems to me as a very stable system. (I hope!)
Hold on! Don't forget the ultimate limit - Bartlett with his Exponential Growth in a Finite World - and way before that - Tainter and the principles of Decreasing Marginal Return of Complexity and Unsubstitutability. This is where we are today.
This Singularity thing seems to be just some wishful thinking coated with sloppy reasoning and ignorance and denial of inconvenient facts. Brain Fart indeed.
Previously I've argued that higher specialization and technology-centrism leads to science becoming dangerously religious - this is definitely it.
Since Galileo (the father of modern science) placed science in direct competition with religion, science has always been dangerously religious IMO.
Only an ignorant of science could ever speak of science like that.
Even a 4-year-old is capable to see that science is the exact opposite of religion.
It is founded on humility towards the universe, in opposition of pretending to hold the dogmatic and eternal "truth";
It is founded on skepticism, rather than in sheep believing;
It is founded on criticism, rather than in fear of heresy / blasphemy;
It is universal, rather than discriminatory as religion always is;
etc.
I could go on indefinitely.
Science vs religion is first of all a semantic question - we have to define our terms!
I don't mind your characterization of science, but I think you're missing what religion is about... which can open the door to some trouble.
My copy of Ferre's Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion is buried in storage, but from memory, he defines religion as something like "the quest for the ultimate".
An interesting characteristic of science is that every scientific discipline has to start by deciding what aspect of the world to focus on, and what to leave out. The power of science actually comes from its limits.
Religion is really difficult because it doesn't accept any limits. Everything is relevant. That lack of fixed boundaries makes it really difficult to get a solid foothold anywhere - so pretty much every religious tradition just takes what footholds they can find, and keeps discussion within doctrinal boundaries. Without some sort of limit, any tradition will just dissolve.
So there is a kind of complementarity - a scientific tradition like physics or geology or biology limits the scope of research to some particular class of phenomena, but allows an unlimited range of hypotheses. A religious tradition like Christianity or Buddhism will take all of experience as their scope, but then limit discussion to whatever particular doctrinal boundaries.
The danger in science is when experience which is out of scope is assumed not to exist or to be utter illusion. Another way of saying this is that some branch of science start to think of itself as the path to ultimate knowledge/wisdom. Perhaps we can say that knowledge is intellectual competence in a limited domain while wisdom is intellectual competence without any preset limits. So we could say that the danger is that scientific knowledge can be mistaken for wisdom.
That would be great, but that is only a small part of religion. Religion is not about the "quest" for the ultimate, but rather about the impulsive need for a simple, straight, easy answer to the ultimate. It's about a direct connection with the ultimate, a sort of a cheat route. It really doesn't impresses me.
No there is not. Religion is a kind of the philosophy of a fairy tale world. A set of thinking that mixes good philosophy (which is entirely independent of religion) with theology, which is a dogmatic pseudo conceptualization of the world, glued together with self-preserving traits and rules. We have nothing to learn with religion, and there should be no surprise to the fact that all religions are constantly being surpassed intellectually and socially by the overall society.
But that ain't science. You are talking about something else entirely. Scientists (Feynman) and philosophers (Popper) define science quite well by positing that no scientific status has been achieved unless reality really follows the science, that theories really work and should always be possible to prove them wrong.
I have to admit that there is an awful lot of religion around that is very dogmatic and acts more like a prison for people than a path to realization of the ultimate!
This may actually be the core challenge of our time. Out of the religious wars that fractured Europe after Luther and Calvin, science was born as a kind of lowest common denominator - see Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis. By limiting polite discourse to shallow materialism, our modern industrial way of life has managed to spread around the world so now everybody wants cars and cell phones and air conditioning etc. etc.
So now we have two problems. It's been obvious all along that materialistic values are superficial and can only satisfy the most limited needs of human beings, but now it is beoming clear that the program of materialistic expansion is not sustainable - of course, some people will require more obvious evidence than others to see!
So we fooled ourselves. Sure, the depths are treacherous! But the shallows are not sustainable! One way or another, if we are to survive, we humans are going to have to recover sustainable ways to make life worth living. The only sustainable answer is to return to the limitless depths. If our character is to push every boundary, then we need to find boundaries to explore that don't involve ever greater consumption of resources.
The miraculous thing is that we still have such paths open to us. Genuine human culture has not quite been extinguished by shopping malls and cluster bombs. Don't get hung up about labels - find out where real value comes from, that doesn't involve quantity. E.g. making multiple copies of a Shakespeare play doesn't increase the value of the play! There is a way to increase value that does not involve quantitative increase! Write a poem or essay, then keep making it better and better, without making it any longer!
If we can find a way to shift directions, so the polite way to live is to cultivate depth rather than quantity, then we can acheive a sustainable and sustaining way of life. Otherwise, we are doomed to keep pounding our heads against the limits that reality imposes at every level... at least, until we pound outselves into oblivion.
Making multiple copies of a Shakespeare play allows more people to enjoy it. This is a simple demonstration of why materialism is not superficial, it brings knowledge and value to people. To full a 'soul' you use a material device that can provide it with ideas, emotions and knowledge.
Shopping mall is where you get culture from. Books, music, poetry, plays, Shakespeare any way you like it. Culture is just information, and information is stored in materials.
Also don't forget the trillions of neurons in your head. All that is you is contained in materials.
You're doing a lot to support his point, you know.
With all the fine goals of science, it is still tilted and swayed by the vagaries and limitations of human perception, emotion and assumptions.
Mr. Spock was a science fantasy dreamt up by one of our scientific dreamers..
"He - was the - most HUMAN .. ack!.." Capt James T Kirk
Bob
I can't really understand how, unless you support the glaring idiotic claim that humility, skepticism, constant reality-checks, peer-reviewed criticisms all amount to arrogance. It's quite the opposite. And of course it is limited by human perception, otherwise it wouldn't really need those self-imposed mechanisms that I mentioned, now would it?
Because we are (only) humans and not gods we must embrace the scientific method in our hard work of discovering and theorizing about the universe.
You misunderstood the series. Mr Spock was only but a vertice of a triangle composed by a science officer, a medical officer and the captain. The medical officer, dr bones, was all about emotions. The fact that spock was more interesting was due more to the fact that leonard nimoy was an excellent actor and brought us with a true alien mentality. The lack of emotions of spock outlined the very importance of them. So his role is exactly the opposite of what you are talking about.
Funny, I have a PhD a scientific field.
Then why are you so upset by my statement?
Funny. People like Hawking, Hofstader, and Kurzweil don't seem very humble to me. Hawking's quest is to find a Lagrangian that describes the entire universe: The universe in a single equation. What could be more dogmatic and eternally truthful than that?
Sadly, as an actual practitioner of science (which you obviously are not) most of the skepticism I encounter in my work is of the blind "sheep" variety. Most scientific arguments follow the following logic: "Your result must be wrong because I don't like it." Sounds like blind faith to me.
Oh you are so wrong. Go study your history of physics. It is littered with physicists who were ejected from the system for suggesting "heretical" ideas which were later confirmed to be correct and are now an accepted part of the canon. In each case, the pattern is the same: Big important physicist tells young aspiring physicist "No you're wrong, your idea is crap." Young aspiring physicist leaves the field. Big important physicist thinks about the idea a little more, realises it is correct and then takes ownership of the idea and passes it off as his own.
We like to delude ourselves...Go read Lakoff and Nunez, "Where Mathematics comes from." Oh, but you'll probably say it's heresy too. Hmm, a world full of heretics...
Yeah, so could I. I make it a general policy not to reply to idiots, but in your case, I made an exception. I'll definitely stop there.
Oh you are a PhD? You could be Einstein himself. Your rationale still doesn't impress me one tiny bit.
Or are you bringing me arguments from authority? Thought not.
Because it seems that the world is full of 3 year olds concerning even the most basic of truths. When even a supposed PhD professes against science and equates it to religion, I begin to have the urge to kill someone on the spot.
And in this sentence I can only conclude that if you are a PhD, you are a terribly confused one. You are basically saying that science is arrogant because there are scientists who have arrogant ambitions. Ponder about that for a moment. Realize the idiocy of it. And realize that you made yourself a self-fulfilling prophecy because you are arguing arrogantly from authority in your answer, without even knowing if I am or not another PhD! In nowhere those particular scientists (who are in no way representative of the whole class) are claiming to have the langrangian equations that solve the universe. Where's the dogma on that? People hypothesize like they want to, and that is no arrogance at all, unless if such hypothesis upset your solid and conformable dogma. Your indignation is completely worthless in here.
Compare it with the arrogance of people who declare that they do know where the truth is, because it is written on a book which was written with God's "spirit" on it, because it says so. Where is the humility on that?
If you are a teacher, teach them the scientific method. It is not "blind faith", but rather jealousy, fear of new things and fear of disappointment. We can't stop being humans, and THAT's why the scientific method is so damned important. Perhaps you are so deeply inside the scientifc departments that you are simply unaware of the superstitious idiotic world around your walls.
I won't, because I don't exactly buy books just because an anonymous someone from the internet disdainfully told me so. If you want to spare your time at least elucidating why I should read it, but I guess I'm too idiotic for a PhD's debunk of mathmatics.
If you wanted to, you could have brought up Godel Incompleteness theorem, but then again I could also tell you why arguing that "there is no truth" is itself a paradox. But I also guess that this kind of discussion may be a little too hard for a PhD...
Sorry, but I'd credit the concept of the Singularity to Verner Vinge, not Kurzweil. If you read up on the basis of this and what Vinge was thinking, its different to the story you tend to hear as "the rapture of the nerds". In particular AI vs IA is important I think.
As far as a race is concerned, I'd suggest both are extrapolations of mathematical models - trying to predict the world through relatively simple understandings. Potentially both can be derailed via shock events that break the underlying progress towards the finishing post. However both also describe basic relationships, and thus both can come back again and again. To miss either fate requires that disruptive, out the ordinary, 'black swan' type event - each go around is a game of Russian Roulette.
To look outside these simple races you need to look to the complexity of the system, to attractor environments that change the probabilities of occurrence and even allow you to sidestep the simple races entirely.
Don't forget that in Vinge's conception there were major wars with attendant depopulation which preceded and eventually led to the enabling tech.
Phooey. As much as I liked Marooned in Realtime, it's pretty obvious it's not going to happen anytime soon. Almost by definition when a Singularity is approaching technology is advancing so rapidly that's it is a full-time job just to stay current in your field. We should be tripping all over paradigm-shifting tech by now, such as AI or fusion or what have you. Anybody notice that happening?
The only Singularity we're likely to see in our lifetimes is the black hole kind, where our economy is heading.
The reason I have some patience for futurists....
This document is fascinating on many levels:
(from December, 1900)
http://bp3.blogger.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RiR7L_dyCLI/AAAAAAAAAdU/2COTRQtZAk8/...
Great Qs PG - I have been thinking about this for some time now.
At a dinner party with dozens of university profs the other night I brought up PO and the almost universal response is that for all practical purposes the singularity has already initiated its self. The problem was dismissed off hand as something that technology will obviously resolve. As if tech has a mind of its own and is on the case. One Chem Engineer prof. just waved her hand and said "yeah, I just bought a Prius" case solved.
When I mentioned the Tierney piece questioning tech advancement you would have thought I was questioning thermodynamics. It sparked a round of everyones fave new tech, everyone talking about research they know about that WILL be ground breaking. There is an almost religious belief in technology by many otherwise intelligent people.
I didn't point out that none of this will create energy and all of what was mentioned will require huge amounts of energy.
At another gathering I attended, of business and state politicians, I got a slightly different but similar response. These people believe that when the time is right another Bill Gates will pop out and solve the problem, in fact an ex state official said there was probably "dozens of Bill Gates in the works as we speak". Lots of comments following that one about getting in at the ground floor on that investment opportunity.
Again tech will save us and it's on the job already so not to worry.
IMO based on my own research (and reading TOD too much) I don't hold out hope for a big fix or even a bunch of little ones adding up to a medium fix so the issue of Singularity needs to be debated in the open in order to get past it and on to some real work done to address the real issues.
I do think we can be one with nature AND one with technology but nature has to come first.
However, uranium prospectors do essentially this, and in 2006 were doing it at the rate of 100 million BOE/d, and at a cost of US$2.1 million per day.
Linear projections of uranium scarcity based on past snapshots of uranium reserve estimates, and rates of consumption, are misleading if they don't include a rate of recession into the future for the projected depletion date.
This rate of recession typically is positive. So, now-a-days, linearly-projected uranium depletion recedes at the rate of about ten years per year.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html
Do you mean to say that religion is equivalent to being unintellegent?
I don't subscribe to any sort of mainstream religious endeavor and thus I'm not taking your statement personal, I'm just wondering if thats what you meant.
Or is the suggestion only that a religious approach to technology is about as sensible as a technological approach to religion? Isn't it, as David Byrne once said, like "dancing about architecture"?
We've got a lot of people who are basically in the cargo cult phase. They've seen the wondrous technology come into the harbor before, leaving them gifts of colorful beads and steel knives, and now they're certain that if they just conduct the right hopeful rituals on the shore, and prove to the gods who have visited before that their faith remains pure and strong, another ship will come in.
Which is to say, most of us, even in university settings, are barely worthy of civilization. That wouldn't be a problem if we could keep those with minimal understandings - e.g. Kurzweil - from teaching (or voting).
Exactly, except the tiny fact that the gods above never really delivered anything but fireworks, while science gave us... well... almost everything around us.
Or do you believe that the ability to write in TOD was given you by the magical powers of Thor?
There's a problem in your rationale, which is that you believe that PO is in competition against technology. It is not. Rather, PO will force mankind to bring new technologies to the table. And the more stressing and worrisome it will be, the largest the leap it will be.
History teaches us that. It was not until the mayhem of WW2 that "modernism" really took off in europe.
When I worked for the UK medical research authority, I had a project manager who was convinced he would live for ever, because medical science would advance faster than he aged. I went to the funeral of a far more intellegent (and younger) colleague last year. Died of a brain tumour, not yet 40.
We will never and could never reach the singularity because we are fallable animals, who have evolved brains which approximate to intelligence, but rely on 'common sense' which is nothing more than epigenetic rules which served us well in paleolithic times. We are approaching peak knowledge rapidly. We cannot sustain the level of general education we had 50 years ago, and we need to keep training new recruits for longer and longer periods before they reach a level that can contribute to forward progress to the singularity. With peak energy we will reach peak education and the project is lost. We do not live long enough (or our brains degenerate too fast) to learn enough wisdom. We haven't overcome our instinctive urge to procreate faster enough, and indulge our fantasies of unlimited power and consumption. Humans could never reach the level of intelligence necessary, because we would not then be human. Would we be better if we were? the question can never be answered.
I see no reason why the next economic singularity cannot be a nasty, Malthusian event. Regardless, I'm not convinced the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions will be regarded as singular events in the future, as the consensus now holds. Those events might be seen as smaller pieces from a new perspective in the future. Freud's theories about the unconscious, for example, may be seen as a singular event, in the future. Also, I question whether something like the Industrial Revolution is a singular event without the attendant description, and analysis of it. (Marx.)
These questions posed in this post also bring to mind Xeno's paradox. Doubling (halving), accelleration--is all possible in Xeno's but with the idea that the end point is never actually touched.
Gregor
I thought I had coined a phrase in response to you, Gregor: "asymptotic future".
...however, a google reveals that others had thought of it well before us--regarding cosmological futures and such. :( Damn. It was awfully pithy too. Pity.
I believe that Alvin Weinberg used a phrase "the asymptotic state of mankind" in a 1959 Physics Today essay; the same article that discussed fission and fusion as burning the rocks and burning the seas. Georgescu-Roegen (Entropy and the Economic Process) also liked the word. The concept was evident in The Next Million Years and other material by Charles Galton Darwin (1950's). The Next Million Years can be found on the internet. The US dollar has been called asymptotic but may eventually be worse.
Thankyou. I was not familiar with that concept. But having reviewed the concept insofar as it conceives of a time in the (very distant) future when humans are cut-off by changes in the universe, from being able to know of the Big Bang, for example, then I must say I like the concept alot. My hunch would be we are living in that state today. We are likely cut-off by Time from knowing key things about the past, and are left with pals and buddies like Karl Marx to explain to us how "singular" an event was the Industrial Revolution.
http://jamesjchoi.blogspot.com/2007/06/asymptotic-future.html
Richard Gott, the Princeton Astrophysicist who was profiled in the New Yorker a number of years ago--leverages Copernicus to conjecture that very, very few human beings will witness any event that truly qualifies as a singular, humanity-altering event. Most of us will live in the "boring middle" of history.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kagan/holography/AS138/Lectures/GottI...
Gregor
I thought I came across continuous exponential growth when I was interviewing many top researchers in their fields (and trying to make some sense of my own little corner). The surface area of the frontier between knowledge (reasonable working hypotheses) and the unknown was multiplying. The more 'knowledge bubbles' there were, the more perceived unknowns there were available to question. The really good guys seemed to be the most interested in what they did not know.
(PS The only 'known' way Kurzweil could be delaying his aging would be by strict calories restriction, although the degree to which this technique can be applied to humans is not known, let alone any prediction made for an individual.)
The whole 'Deus ex machina' thing reminds me of the story of the Tower of Babel - God getting upset with man's progress towards Him and knocking him back.
Given that silicon chips are effectively immortal, use electricity at the 'renewable' level (watts, not kilo/mega watts) and are now ubiquitous, I see no reason why the singularity should not come about in the future even in a post-oil world.
But yes, it's a hell of a race. Watch the movie 'Pi' or read the novel 'Neuromancer' or short story 'Breeds There a Man?' for a sci-fi take on it.
A few problems:
- circuits built with silicon chips can fail for many reasons like bad solder joints, power surges and overheating
- silicon chips are not self-replicating; they're produced in multi-billion dollar factories
One single chip in the 10W range will probably never have the power to run a singularity AI. It'll have to be at least a worldwide grid of 10W chips which means an electrical and communications grid.
We are all familiar with some posited periodic doubling that leads to ridiculous predictions. This can be seen even for the simplest exponential con schemes. For example, a chain letter is propagating so fast that in three more months everyone on earth will have forwarded ten letters to each of their friends.
Such astonishing predictions can be viewed either as heralds of an unexpectedly thrilling future, or as proofs by reductio ad absurdum that geometrical expansion cannot continue indefinitely.
The last failing phases of exponential growth always highlight these contradictions by exposing harsh comparisons between futures which are plausible only to the credible as well as obstacles which are obvious even to the mildly skeptical.
Care to ride in my jet car, anyone?
Jane, get me off this crazy thing!
My vision of the future (hey, everyone needs a dream)is a hybrid cross between George Jetson and George of the Jungle.
Swinging through the trees while checking email on my palm pilot.
cheers
'Skipper, look out for that (bonk!) .. Singularitree.. ouch!' - Gilligan
I always think of that whenever I read an idiot waving the flag of Malthus.
I wonder if the innovations that will show increasing returns (as opposed to diminishing returns) are the things we don't want so much. A neighbour recalled the days of home delivery of groceries. Update that to online browsing of supermarket aisles, satellite checking of debit cards and it could be done. If our other transport options are electric scooters or the bus we could be grateful for home delivery. We could also watch TV inside a climate controlled perspex box. Our daily ration of 100 grams of protein could be synthetic meat. Increasing returns may be possible at least for a while longer but we hold out for goods and services which must decline.
I think it depends on your perspective.
Taken from the perspective of a late 1990s American, not being able to drive an SUV and live in the suburbs, but instead having to take the bus to work, while living in a cramped apartment in a city of 10 million might seem to be a step down.
However,
Taken from the perspective of a late 1990s Chinese, moving from a farm where they barely had enough to eat, were dirt poor and had to work sixteen hours a day just to survive, the "downsizing" that the American sees looks like a step up.
We do, after all, still have iPods, Cellphones with mobile internet access, downloadable episodes of (insert favorite show here), online groceries etc etc.
So I guess my spin is: if the world average rises to meet the "green tech sustainable future" but that is a drop only for Americans, then who is to argue we haven't moved ahead?
Part 1
I’m reminded of an astrobiological/futurist scale for rating technological progress called the Kardashev Scale. The Kardashev Scale is a method of categorizing how advanced a civilization has become based on how much energy they are able to utilize, and is meant to be applied not only to the human race but also to speculative/yet to be discovered ET civilizations.
A 1 on the scale is a civilization that can harness the power available on 1 planet. On Earth this corresponds to ~10^17 watts (solar irradiance at our orbit * Earth’s cross sectional area). A 2 on the scale is a civilization that can harness all the power of an average star. A 3 can harness the power of a galaxy (3’s likely don’t exists, since we would probably have found evidence by now).
In a pure sense the scale only applies to renewable energy that are a part of that 10^17 watts of solar irradiance. However, most people who talk about the scale tend to rate us at about a .7 with our current energy resource base being 10^12 watts (it’s a logarithmic scale so it doesn’t interpolate linearly).
However, my criticism of Kardashev is that the scale doesn’t take efficiency into account. The scale could certainly be revised, after which we would probably only rate about a .6, given an average thermodynamic efficiency of 10% (only 10% of the energy we use does anything useful, the rest is waste heat or sound).
The reason I bring this up is to show that, intellectually, we are no more than children in the grand scheme of things. We really have no way of knowing what will happen in the next few decades. Given a constrained resource base (Peak Oil), a push for investment in energy efficiency will ensue, which will require more advanced computer hardware, thus a push forward toward the singularity.
Part 2
In fact, peak oil and a constrained resource base could accelerate the coming of the singularity. How do I say this? Because so much of our energy goes toward things like Chinese lead based toys, big screen TV’s, air conditioning of enormous supermarkets and retail stores, etc. None of those things contribute to the progress toward the singularity. And those things are the first to be trimmed.
Think about it. If it gets harder to pay for gasoline to get to work, what do you do? Cancel the cable TV subscription. Cancel 5 of the 6 family cell phones. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Then, cry (whine, in most cases) mercy for someone to come up with a solution. That will move the computer market toward supercomputers (to help increase the efficiency of the machineswe design) and away from useless consumer junk like the Dell computers being pumped into the market now. It will realign resources.
Cable TV dies. Supercomputers live. Darwin at work, DNA not required. It’s called punctuated equilibrium and it applies to biological organisms as well as our creations. When the goings gets tough, the tough get going. Everyone else dies.
Then what happens? It we hit the singularity, we really don’t know. Perhaps this means that the computers we designed to find optimal solutions for energy efficiency will do just that, make society more efficient. Then suddenly 10^11 watts is almost as good as 10^12, and a .6 on the Kardashev is probably better off than our current .7. Either way, humans would, for the most part, leave the decision making loop, whether we like it or not.
Will we hit the singularity? Maybe. Don’t count it out and don’t assume the energy will just disappear.
P.S I made two posts to make this less intrusive
Hi. My remaining life is dedicated to achieving what is now called the Singularity, and my advice to readers of this blog is to ignore any distractions coming from this field. Most here agree that the peak in conventional crude oil production is already behind us and that even if the automotive companies introduce BEV/PHEV electric cars in 2010, it will be too little too late to avoid widespread economic dislocation. As I've previously posted over the years, I drive a Prius, and drive it seldom, My wife works close by in downtown Austin and we subscribe to Westexas' lifestyle advice.
Having said that, I am working full time on artificial intelligence research that I hope will lead to the Singularity. I suspect, but cannot yet demonstrate that perhaps sufficient computer power has already been manufactured to achieve dramatic results if only the right software could be developed.
Maybe in a couple of years I'll be able to report some progress in my field - AGI, Artificial General Intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
Thanks for the challenge, PG! It is intriguing, but your thought-experiment still reminds me of the campfire question in 'Stand by Me', where the boys are asked to consider who would win if Superman fought Underdog. ("You idiot, Superman's a real guy!") [from memory, was I close?]
Hmm, Utopia and Dystopia, armwrestling. The economist steps in to start things up, asking them to just imagine for a minute that they've got a table between them...
The singularity sounds like the tech side expecting this to lead to gold, so to speak. In this case, the alchemy takes the form where the gizmos that still kind of 'seem' magical to us are simply steps along the path to get to 'actual magic', and deliver us the Wellspring of Eternal Youth, Perpetual Motion, Irresistable Forces .. and then oops! Is that an unmovable object that just stopped us? That wasn't on my blueprint!!
I'm not Anti-tech however, and where I would join this Galactic fray between Heaven and Hell would be where we buzzed so fast up the tech ladder, that we left an enormous amount of our toys only half-explored. The Christian Science Monitor had a great article some ten years ago about the confluence of technologies that made the late 19th century bicycle possible, from ball-bearings and spoked wheels, to rubber tires and manufacturing processes.. and how the creation of the bike was seen as a precursor to the automobile, not the other way around.. Today, using simple AND complex tools and the internet of course, people are coming up with and sharing/copying variations on bike technology at a fantastic pace, and then also splicing in the burgeoning EV offerings to arrive at a vehicle that's Human/Electric Hybrid, as light and strong as possible, applied to daily life and to sports. It doesn't meet the 'flying car' standard of Popular Science Future tech, but I suspect it will do more to solve people's problems than the Zero-grav programs, wherever they may be.
I would still love to see how much you can do with an 8088 processor or another of the earliest PC's which were technologically obsolete before they had necessarily been truly stretched to their limits before more zippy processors and memories allowed programmers to keep developing in an ever-expanding room. Of course, the beam-robot developers are pushing the minimal-hdw arena today, as are others I don't even know about.
I guess my answer is that the truth lies between, in moderation and some form of compromise between these theoretical extremes. We have a mind-numbing legacy of techniques and materials and combinations to play with before we 'forget' the last 200 years, and we have printed detailed copies of their makeup and planted them all over the world. If we step back, I don't think it will actually be all that far. (Brutality doesn't count, that was never a 'past' item. It's sadly everpresent) Not very exciting, maybe.. but possibly at least as comforting as a grilled-cheese sandwich.
Bob, who is overdue putting a patient little girl to bed..
"David and Nigel are like poets, you know, like Shelley or Byron, or people like that. The two totally distinct types of visionaries, it’s like fire and ice, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water." Derek - 'This is Spinal Tap' (Harry Shearer)
Vern: Do you think mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?
Teddy: What are you, cracked?
Vern: Why not? I saw the other day, he was carrying five elephants in one hand!
Teddy: Boy, you don't know nothing! Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman's a real guy. There's no way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.
Vern: Yeah, maybe you're right. It'd be a good fight, though.
Not too bad. I got one line right..
'They pronounce it 'VINCHY' but spell it 'Vinci'.. them foreigners could always spell better than they could pronounce.' - Mark Twain
Hopefully I understand you correctly and the limits to growth is the real guy, the singularity is the cartoon.
My graphic analogy would be the "bungee run" events in game shows : the contestant has to run towards a prize but is tethered by a bungee cord. Initially their progress is rapid, but actually reaching the goal becomes increasingly harder.
Since I studied AI over 20 years ago, rapid progress has been made computer power. But in terms of AI, not only has little progress been made, but we have realised the goal of AI is much farther off then we imagined. In that sense, we have gone backwards. The original dream of taking a logical language, adding a fast computer and hey presto! intelligent computers just doesn't work. It was thought that beating humans at chess would be a landmark achievement, but having done it, it really contributes little. We just haven't been solving the right problem. We still don't fully understand what the problem is that we have to solve.
By now, I should at least be able to describe to a computer what to do in terms a child would understand. But I still have to hack out lines of code in a computer language that is over 30 years old. The guys at MIT are pleased to have their robots mimic some of the behaviour of ants, or that they can learn to walk like an insect. That is not "on track" to a singularity in my book.
So I find the idea that we can ever achieve the singularity highly fanciful. And the idea that we are progressing towards it at an exponential rate completely counter to actual progress. Actual progress seems more like an S-curve than exponential.
We might get to the singularity one day, but not anytime soon.
Kay, except we're not really running short of anything that we cant replace.
This isn't the same thing as saying that its an intractible problem. Theres one machine that we know works, and its squishy. There's been a number of developments in computational neuroscience over the past several years, so we can take the long brute force method of doing brain simulation. I see it inevitable that sometime between 20 and 200 years from now we'll develop human level AI that runs in software on a machine you can buy inexpensively.
Now I don't like the term singularity, because it makes it sound like change goes to infinite and the future ends. But you can see when you reduce the capital/labor game to just capital, when you can hire an additional employee by simply buying another computer and copying a program, it completely changes the way civilization works.
I'm a young man and I dont know if I'll live to see brain simulation, because theres some fundamental neuroscience work that needs to be done and there are a number of engineering cycles that this needs to go through. But dismissing AI development is ignoring the inevitable in my opinion.
Except, of course, the millions of years worth of concentrated solar energy that we call oil.
And as long as we think of our brain as a digital computer we will make no real progress in AI. Brain simulation makes this assumption, and further assumes that the brain is a deterministic machine (In the computational sense). Assuming it is possible to make a human level intelligence in software then 200 years isn't nearly long enough.
--
JimFive
I don't know why you think its irreplacable. Its simple chemistry. It takes energy, and we're not running short of that.
When you assume that the brain is necissarily nondeterministic, you're making a much bigger assumption than assuming you can simulate the brain. Every other physical process we can simulate and model, but somehow you believe the brain is different despite having successfully done simulations of simple nervous systems.
I never made that assumption. I said that you can't assume that it is deterministic. More importantly, I said that you can't assume that the brain is a digital computer. (At closest it's an analog computer which makes your simulation limited by the precision of the platform.)
Really? Every other process? What is the weather going to be on August 1st?
Models and simulations are not reality. Modeling the brain will not necessarily create intelligence. Simulation is certainly not guaranteed to create an independent intelligence.
The problem with simulations is that they can't show us anything that we don't already "know". (Argue with this if you want to but a simulation is a chinese room, if you spent the time running through the steps then you would get the same result as the computer.)
--
JimFive
Its a process that you can simulate on a turing machine, like any other process.
Don't know. If I had all the data I could tell you, because even though I can't predict the weather I can simulate it.
Right now you're positing that the random noise that exists in reality is meaningful and necissary for intelligence. Theres nothing magic about the noise, its just noise. We can jitter noise in with a hash algorithm if we need to, which is what we do for testing models of other processes.
The whole chinese room argument is irrelevant and flawed. This is trying to assume theres something magical about biology. There isn't.
We've done simulations of nematodes already, and are working to try to simulate fruit-flies today, along with the neocortical column of rats. The simulation is performing how real neural structures are observed.
A simulation of gravity is not gravity. A simulation of weather is not weather. In the same way, a simulation of intelligence may not be intelligence.
You seem to underestimate the complexity of iterative functions. Without infinite precision you cannot accurately model weather arbitrarily far into the future. Or, in other words, your error factor overwhelms your data in a very small number of iterations.
I posit no such thing. At most I posit that we don't know.
--
JimFive
Doesn't matter. A simulation of a calculator is just as good as a calculator for getting work done.
No I don't. I'm just dismissing this argument as irrelevant. I can simulate a weather system that acts just like you would expect a real weather system to act.
You're making an argument that is at best epistemological in nature. We don't know what the acurate model of gravity is, but newtons works good enough for most people, and einstein's is good enough for anyone that isn't riding an electron into a black hole.
Simulating how neurons interact is a simple matter of computational biology if you want to be as accurate as possible. Proposing that the simulation will act remarkably different than a real network of neurons is presupposing that there is something very different about how brains operate compared to other physical processes. Now its possible that thats the case, just like its possible squirrels are messengers from god and the tooth fairy is the secret chairman for the IMF. All empirical evidence suggest that the brain is a machine like anything else.
Especially since we've allready simulated small brains that act like the real thing.
The problem with the Technological Singularity is that it bites off more than it can chew. What starts out as a pretty simple premise leads very quickly outward into philosophical issues that have been impossible to resolve for two thousand years, and begins to talk in future time spans of hundreds of years. A quick read of the link provided by PG will give you an impression of the scope that singularity attempts to take in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
If we are discussing the energy situation, our problems are much more immediate and practical. This does not mean that the discussion cannot be informed by the ideas of technological singularity, as they already are (and by other philosophical ideas such as anarcho primitivism and deep green ecological ideas).
Right now our first goal may be to retain social and economic cohesion simply to give us enough time to even be able to usefully debate and deal with the larger philosophical questions in the future.
Frankly we do not seem to have a real shortage of alternative technological approaches, in other words, there is no shortage of "intelligence" of the old type so we do not yet need artificial intelligence to confront these problems, at least not yet. Our problem is much more of the nature of implementation of the technology we have, and gaining support from the political/economic/cultural entrenched powers for what are workable technical solutions (or at least, reducing their resistance to them).
The computers and search engines we have now already make it possible to speed up the ability to connect ideas and research from varied fields to one another.
This is why I take a middle path between the "Collapse of science" and technology and the almost mystical theory of Singularity. Long time readers of my posts on TOD (are there really any of those? :-)
have heard me use the word "Confluence" to describe this idea.
"Confluence" is the point at which technical developments in various fields begin to be combined, and by virtue of the combination create very fast development. Computers do not create it, but help speed up the connections. Confluence existed long before computers, and was greatly speeded up by writing in the birth of literacy, and again in the invention of the printing press, both of which were ages of revolution, or what the philosopher Carl Jaspers once called "axis ages". Fast transportation again speeded up the exchange of ideas (the age of conferences, such as the ASPO Conferences) but computers are beginning to make the age of exchange by conferences obsolete (reducing air travel, reducing fuel consumption).
These ideas are not new and did not originate with me. I first encountered them through reading James Burke and seeing the "Connections" series on public television (there has been, by the way no greater disappointment in the speeding up of ideas exchange than television).
In the area of energy production, we are already seeing the exchange of ideas speeding up. As PV solar cell efficiency improve rapidly, batteries also improve by the exchange of technical papers, blogs and online workgroups. Ideas of technical arrangement of thermal solar power are seen by everyone almost as they are conceived. Drivetrains for hybrid and electric automobiles are common public knowledge, creating a degree of redundency not known in proir times, so that if one firm fails to deliver, the research they have done can be quickly picked up by other companies and individuals.
Confluence usually increases to the point that a "tipping point" is reached, and the older obsolete technologies can no longer withstand the competitive pressure. The vested interests in the old technology will hold on as long as possible and attempt to minimize the impact of the new technology ("renewable energy will be marginal for the rest of our lifetime") or slander it ("wind will decrease grid stability") but the real "tipping point" comes when the vested interests realize they are on a sinking ship. The money holders and investors will switch sides VERY RAPIDLY. Those caught in the old technology will be wiped out becoming what Alvin Toffler once called "Gentrified paupers", viewed as useless former elites that still think of themselves as powerful. There is no more pathetic existance, novels and plays have been written about them, the stodgy old outdated class, subject to ridicule. Much of the world political class is on the edge of such a fate now, with the "CEO" class soon to follow.
Everyone is now being asked in one way or another to choose sides, the depleted fossil fuel carbon age, or the age of advance renewables. The pressure to decide increases daily. A revolution of epic scale will occur long before we have to deal with the "rapture for nerds" (to quote a character in a story by Ken MacLeod)known as "technological singularity".
RC
Roger;
I, for one, am a longtime fan of your posts. Well said.
"I first encountered them through reading James Burke and seeing the "Connections" series on public television (there has been, by the way no greater disappointment in the speeding up of ideas exchange than television)."
I was a big fan of Burke's 'Connections' as well. I always look forward to more TV as Chewy as that was, not holding my breath. C-span does good work, I have to insist.. but to invert the current axiom, it seems that 'The Television will not be Revolutionized'. I hope I'm wrong. It would be a great medium to teach history, I think.
One hopeful note about the 'Gentrified Paupers', is that their offspring are not necessarily destined to keep the same attitudes and expectations as the parents. I'm two generations out from Boston 'Society', and I understand that my name is still in the Social Register somewhere. My Dad and his parents carried some of the old crust, but also clearly moved their lives in directions that buried the presumptions of power that you could still hear in their tone.
Bob
Great post, RC. On target.
Though I am not as confident on your own personal "rapture" of the renewables. For a best clue or analogy of the situation, one only has to look at the history of computer systems to visualize the problems involved in changing infrastructures, operating systems, architecture malaises, paradigm shifts and how companies and individuals are key to delay them or leaping them.
One answer that comes to mind is the truism that the future is quite unpredictable. Sometimes we all believe that the answer comes from the right and boom there it comes from the left.
I hope most people recognize that the mathematical definition of a singularity is something akin to a division by zero. This can come about by the solution to certain differential equations.
The common differential "definition" of a Logistic function involves a differential equation. A couple of points, this doesn't show any kind of singularity, and to top it off, the Logistic really shouldn't be considered the solution to a single differential equation. It is the result of solving dispersive discovery, which also does not show any kind of singularity.
There is a way, however to generate a quasi-singularity. All you have to do is solve this equation:
d2Discovery(t)/dt2 = c - a3*Integral(Discovery(t))
This essentially shows an acceleration towards a peak and then it drives hard into the ground past the peak. This happens when a hard feedback term counteracts the acceleration and actually reverses the acceleration of discoveries as you get close to a cumulative limit. Again, this is a bit misleading for our flobal oil reserves and won't work for dispersive discoveries. It may be more true for geographically constrained events such as gold rush towns and life form extinctions, where no dispersion occurs.
I'll look over the equations bit later, but the first question to arise is: why do you want to be modeling knowledge/technology growth with a logistic function? This is a genuine question, ie, what assumptions are you making that suggest you want to model things with a logistic differential equation? I've never really looked at Hubbert modelling (where the logistic function becomes popular) but that's a case where the modelling assumption is that you're modeling depletion of a finite resource and it's not obvious why that's appropriate here. (I guess you could argue for a kind of "low hanging fruit phenomenon": the less you know the easier it is to learn stuff because almost everything, including the easy bits, are available to figure out. But I'm not sure I belive that.)
That is exactly the question I have been battling the last few years. Everyone seems to want to use the Logistic yet they don't know how it gets derived in the context of resource depletion. This blog post derives that relationship:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4171
Like I said, this derivation generates what exactly looks like a Logistic function, yet it does not use the logistic differential equation in the derivation. So I agree with you completely in saying "it's not obvious why that's appropriate here."
If we reach Kurzweil's or a similar 'Singularity', I would expect results reminiscent of Gregory Benford's Galactic Center novels.
That is, maybe there will indeed be a fusion or solar based economy growing to some currently unimaginable immensity, with all the Earth's skies reduced to darkness by a vast cloud of jet-cars. However, at the growth rates posited in the IEEE article - doubling "in somewhere from a week to a month", no less - solar won't do it for long and even the hydrogen in the oceans would be gone in fairly short order. I just can't see that the author could have considered the magnitude of a number like, say, 252 (2^^52), without falling about laughing.
In just months, whatever was in charge would need a giant magnetic (?) pipeline sucking in hydrogen from Jupiter and Saturn. Meanwhile, the jet-cars would be long gone, with the entire substance of the Earth rapidly becoming converted into autonomous machines acting outside of any human control and having no particular use for us, who would be vaporized in the heat of all the activity anyhow. So I really don't see how such a future could possibly be of more than transitory concern to us.
I just don't understand what Kurzweil is thinking, but if he thinks that what he is considering involves us in any meaningful sense, I'd accuse him of being absolutely incoherent and delusional. In that light, I'd really suggest that some previous commenters be very, very careful indeed about what they wish for.
Whether workable fusion ever gets invented is of course another matter. I have no confidence in ITER, which appears to be the only semi-serious game in town (yeah, I know, you can get a few neutrons out of a Bussard device, but, so far, so what?) Managerially, ITER seems like little more than yet another goal-free, deadline-free government-run sinecure and boondoggle-cum-bumf-factory geared only towards producing "conferences" and "papers", not results. And to say that even when it is on schedule it runs at a snail's pace is a monstrous insult to snails.
The thing I wonder is 'Do yeast get Diabetes and Motivational problems when oversupplied with a lot of cheap sugar?' (Do they get yeast infections?)
The Singularity vs Limits To Growth is an interesting premise - but ultimately a false choice. It seems fairly likely that we will Transition to a less energy intensive society, which will derail any human "transcendence" for a long time. LTG wins in the short term.
However, I don't completely refute the whole notion of the singularity/transcendence/omega point etc though as the eventual goal of human evolution. It is just there are much more likely milestones that we will achieve first.
If we get through this transition with our knowledge base and communication systems intact (not nuke ourselves back to the dark ages), then a lower energy society will encourage evolution within the more virtual realms of computer systems.
As said in several comments here - the limits will cause greater complexity to result. From a systems viewpoint, Energy, Matter and Information are the basic building blocks - and in the future Energy and Matter (resources) will be the limiting factor - so Information and human knowledge will be the area that growth will continue. Energy and matter can then be utilised more effectively and efficiently. (Economists and cornucopians are right to use this argument - but dead WRONG to use it in the short term with the current structure of our civilisation.)
This requires better human understanding. Not a mythical AI that may never originate. Rather - greater cybernetic aids are needed to continue improvement in human thought. Our memories, processing power and ability to mentally model complex systems over time are huge bottlenecks to our increased understanding. Our ability to leverage the understanding/processing power of other humans is also low though communication, perceptual and proximity bottlenecks. We need something better.
I don't believe that it is too farfetched to look at the internet as a precursor of a global consciousness. With ever more seamless human/computer interfaces and an internet that constantly evolves to organise and produce more Meaning from the its increasing data, I think some sort of half arsed global intelligence could emerge quite quickly. Check out Principia Cybernetica for a more detailed explaination of the whole global brain concept. It is much more likely in the short term than AI.
In the longer term our cultural/technological/consciousness evolution could really go anywhere. Predicting complex systems is a mugs game. Our potential is limitless as we can evolve beyond our own limitations.
What we should be focused on is survival through this transition to a stable societal configuration - and survival on our own terms. If the world can hold together well enough to keep its knowledge base over this transition period then I think we will recover very quickly. If we don't well...my great grandkids will have excellent knowledge of how to use a club.
I agree with your general rationale, very reasonable. And yet, when you claim that:
I don't think that is the right question. I always laughed at Kurzweil, not because I believe that human race is doomed, far from it, but because I don't think he grasped the true concept of exponential expansion well, by inventing a deus ex machina who will save us from ourselves, and eden will be reached. It's naive at best, and I don't personally buy it.
So, I don't really think "transcendence" is even possible, conceptually speaking. We'll always have to deal with our problems and issues, independently of the level of complexity, wealth and energy available. I also happen to believe that it is when mankind reaches bottlenecks that it leaps forward. This is very important. If this actually happens, then we are truly in interesting times.
A good example of this is wars. Whenever mankind went through wars, the nations involved developed faster and built incredible tools and theories than in peace. Everybody is more focused and so are resources available. This while common sense would tell us otherwise, that in a time of peace there would be more breakthroughs. I rather see it as a sequence of eras of consolidation and of creative destruction, booms and busts, and we are entering in a stressful period.
Thus, "LTG" is not exactly the thing that will restrain mankind from reaching the zenit, rather it is the barrier that will make everybody focus in surpassing it, and make us leap towards it.
In all the other things, I quite agree with you all over the text.
Take any time. Note the most advanced science or technology or society. Find the time past where the facts of that time would derided or ridiculed or dismissed. Take that time and repeat. And repeat. There would seem to be a recurring theme.
Why would today be any different from any time chosen for the above exercise?
A pretty good example of a singularity-like event is the drastic cheapening of transport during the 19th century, with the advent of efficient shipping and railways. It lead to commodities that were once hundreds of percent higher at the center market than at the periphery market to decline to a mere few percentage points.
It was a truly radical change and allowed a specialization that might be unrivaled since then...
However, the dark side of this singularity was that it allowed for stable, but pretty damn evil political situations like the Belgian Congo in the periphery, and the overall saturation of demand (and ensueing employment problems) in the center (which lead to the Great Depression). The latter lead to the 20th Century 30 Years War.
So sure, have a Singularity. Think you'll be on the good side and in Geek Heaven? Or will you be on the bad side and enslaved to create that Geek Heaven?
Great post, but we at ESPN Magazine have been dealing with such questions about racing for months:)
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3454196&campaign=rss&source=M...
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3286359
You've now inspired me to register as a TOD member. Thanks!
Luke
Hello UltimateRacer [Luke Cyphers],
Welcome to TOD! I would love it if you could interview sports-athletes to ask them how much they know and read about Peak Everything, then write a keypost here for TOD and/or ESPN.
Are they willing to set an austere, frugal example for their young generation [I'm 53], or do they wish to continue the profligacy of their multi-millionaire lifestyles [as seen on TV: mucho cars, fancy houses, yachts, and supermodel/actress eye-candy]?
I have numerous postings in the archives [plus an earlier email campaign] where I am trying to get Tiger Woods to do a lifestyle 180 for the sake of his family; to lead the charge in plowing golf courses so they can be initial urban & suburban permaculture organic gardens. Picture Tiger, on international TV, plowing Augusta National as a Master Gardener.
Basically, imagine NIKE paying Tiger to endorse NIKE-brand hoes, pitchforks, scythes, sledgehammers, shovels, wheelbarrows, grass-rakes, axes, misery whips, etc, instead of golfing equipment!
Buick is going belly-up, therefore Tiger should be moving to endorsing passenger rail, restoration of the Erie Canal, emergency home water-filtration devices, composting toilets, condom usage [Don't flub your Love--put a Tiger on your club!] ...and so on.. if he really wants to help his postPeak generation for the Hubbert Downslope ahead.
The future always belongs to the young, always will--He could really help his generation move in the mitigative direction, IMO. Plus, his activism would quickly bring along the other professional alpha-males.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Totonella (Bob),
That's a great idea. I've not given it much thought because so many athletes are coached to give non-offensive cliches, and so many of them have grown up in bubbles of one kind or another and are not exposed to much outside their confined spheres, that I haven't been sure about the efficiacy of it. But I've been noticing a change among event organizers, agents, sponsors, etc... of late, and perhaps it will trickle down. The World Cup in Germany last year put some effort into "greening" stadium construction and recycling, and the US Olympic track trials in Eugene has made a similar "waste less" campaign.
The way to Tiger is through Nike, which, I'm learning, is making a big push to use renewables in their manufacture of sports apparel.
Peak Oil is a bit less politically correct, and a harder sell, since the first thing a poor young athlete wants to buy after his first contract is a muscle car (kinda like a Chinese worker who's been confined to a bike or a bus his whole life and is now discovering the middle class).
But I think a campaign to work on Phil (Knight of Nike) and Bill (Gates) could produce some of the results you seek among the young.
Thanks for the warm reception.
Luke
I think one of the main problems addressing Singularity issues is the misconception that somehow advances will conform to our limited ability to creatively interpret them. For example, several commentators remark somewhat scathingly how Kurzweil's hypothesis doesn't seem to be holding up to their assessment of reality. But based on what?
Technological growth has been staggering the last 50 years, but by no means widespread or uniform. If anything, technological advancement has perhaps increased the wealth-gap between the First World and the Third World.
If you look at a country like South Korea for example you find Kurzweil's prediction's far more "on target" for the simple reason that South Korea has a command-controlled economy where wide-scale advanced technological research, innovation and implementation has been embraced, and therefore evidence of the effects of technology are far more ubiquitous. The South Korean benchmark for growth was also set rather low interestingly enough due to the devastating effects of the Korean War. Which makes Korea all the more an interesting example of Change. In this respect, Korean society has literally leapt from the 17th century straight into the 21st century and is in fact _embracing_ its rapid propulsion into the 22d century. Korea is then literally a society that has compressed nearly 200 years of technological change into as little as 50 years. This is not to say the transition is "easy" or uniform or simple by any means. Let's leave the adjectives aside and stick to observations on the phenomenon of technological change itself.
Also, I do not subscribe to these value judgments, tagging the Singularity for example as "Utopian" or "Cataclysmic". The value judgments are too narrow and almost irrelevant.
Rapid technological innovation is happening at an ever increasing rate. These changes are in turn spurning other changes, and so on.
If anything, the most scientifically neutral assessment I'd make of a Singularity is that the Singularity is simply the Rate of Change Horizon behind which we can no longer make reliable, meaningful predictions on Change.
As with everything under the sun, for some of us, these changes will have staggering effects on our lives, for others hardly any. Some will reap tremendous benefits and some will suffer dire consequences.
Nothing more. But nothing less.
So you can whine about it, or dismiss it, or not understand it, or misunderstand it, or not _like_ it, it's completely irrelevant. Change is coming. And coming faster. And faster still.
Morbius probed the wonders of the Krell nation but was blindsided by the force that destroyed them in a single night. Monsters from the id.
Our biggest problem is cultural.
You forgot to mention zombies and vampires.
watcher,
Don't despair over negative ratings.
Obviously not too many here at TOD who remember Forbidden Planet.
May the Krell force be with you. ;-)
Can you point to any examples of technology usage in Korea which haven't made it to the west which involve augmenting "deep" mental capabilities and in particular are likely to lead to innovation feedback? Ie, a fridge which displays "Hello Kitty" cartoons on its door is entertaining but it does not noticeably augment human capacities (for example for further technological development). Korea seems to be an example of how you can get a rapid take-up and replacement of devices like mobile phones, but the devices themselves don't seem particularly augmenting.
I don't know where you infer technological innovation has somehow been bottled up in Korea? That was not my contention. I have merely pointed out the radical transformative effect of broad technological implementation across a largely agricultural society that had existed within a very limited range for virtually 50 centuries that was suddenly uprooted and tossed into the 20th century kicking and screaming.
Apropos... Cloning.
Oh and, "Hello Kitty"... that would be the Japanese.
0) Fermi's paradox, or where are they?
This of course, has been a long-fruitful ground for science-fiction authors, sometimes via the "paranoid species creates killer robots to wipe out everybody else" route.
I'd actually suggest a Peak Fossil fuel interpretation. At least in our solar system, dinosaur-killer asteroids come by now and then, and are proven to be able to wipe out a lot of life, and presumably clobber any civilization whose space-based technology is insufficient to fend it off.
a) Suppose a civilization arises on an Earth-like planet. If it has no fossil fuels, how likely is it to achieve the necessary technology? Put another way, had there been no coal, gas, or oil around, would the Industrial Revolution gotten going or not? (Free idea for a story).
b) The next case is: suppose they had fossil fuels, but they use them all up, and then civilization collapses. Depending on knowledge retention, maybe they can rebuild beyond the need for fossil energy, or not. Existing solar panels will be like gold...
c) The last case is: they use the fuel, then go extinct. That probably puts the next species to try into case a), unless it's long enough to recreate some fossil fuels.
In any case, this is why in dealing with Peak Fossil, we can't go back to a low-tech world, or the next asteroid gets us... but maybe that's why we don't hear from anybody out there. Maybe fossil fuels are a rarity in the galaxy, or maybe species able to use them to get beyond the need for them a rarity...
=====
1) I'd ascribe The Singularity more to Vernor Vinge than to Ray Kurzweil; I hosted Vernor last year at Hot Chips, where he gave a fun talk on reasons why the singularity might not happen. He's now had several books in which the Singularity does not happen, and for VV fans, you'll pleased to know he's working on a sequel to "A Deepness in the Sky". We've talked a little on Peak Oil.
2) I have some reservations about Kurzweil's book (and I used be a microprocessor architect, and I've helped design and/or sell $Bs worth of parallel computers):
p.57, 58, 59, 60, 63: OK, more or less.
p.61: Microprocessor Clock Speed: NOT OK
Microprocessor clock speed has mostly stagnated, which is why you see all these multicore chips around with lower clockrates. Clockrates are now dominated by wire-delay limits, rather than the good old days when it was transistor scaling limits. Wires don't shrink as fast as transistors. Hence, one can keep putting more transistors/chip, but it's hard to make an individual CPU go much faster, and sorry, but multiprocessor programming is very hard work. Ray's charts in this area just happen to stop just before a major inflection point.
p.64: Processor performance (MIPS): NOT OK
MIPS is a *terrible* metric for real performance on real programs, which is often dominated by memory access times.
For both 63 & 64, Kurzweil totally ignores *power* and *power density*. It does you no good to put tons more transistors on a chip if the result is a hot spot that melts. Everybody worries about this. All of the old neat problems of Bipolar mainframes are back, only wiht worse density.
p.71 Kurzweil says: "In addition to all the invention involved in integrated circuits there are multiple layers of improvement in computer design (for example, pipelining, parallel processing, instruction look-ahead, instruction and memory caching, and many others.)
All of that's true, but we did all those things years ago, and we've gotten the low-hanging fruit, and most new efforts are fighting hard for a percent here, percent there.
BOTTOM LINE: there may be great new technologies coming, but serious microprocessor designers are really worried about the apparent bottlenecks over the next decade. We know the industry can build zillions of cheap micros to embed in everything [Vinge's "localizers", derived from Kris Pister's "smart dust"], but making individual CPUs get faster is getting really hard, and close-coupled parallelism has always been hard.
SO, at least in this part, I'm not convinced.
"and sorry, but multiprocessor programming is very hard work."
People keep saying that parallel processing is very hard work, but we do it on millions of computers every day.
Erlang, not C. Web server, not mail server etc. You simply have to think pull not push... Actually this seems to be generalizable, looking at engineering structures like suspension bridges, even economic structures like market vs command economy.
It is very easy to get a larger number of processor working efficiently in parallel, as long as you get to choose the problem to be solved. It gets a lot harder if you are handed an arbitrary problem and need to figure out how to chop it apart.
This is a nice concrete example of what I posted above, the difficulty of finding an unbiased frame of reference for comparative measurements. Benchmarking massively parallel supercomputers is difficult because their performance varies tremendously depending on the input. It's a big like a dragster vs. a formula 1 car. Which is faster? depends on the race course.
Yes, JimK has it right.
css1971 is obviously thinking about throughput of individual tasks, not parallel programming in the same sense used by people who design computers and software to do. Erlang is fine, but not the solution to all parallel programming problems.
In reply to
a) Suppose a civilization arises on an Earth-like planet. If it has no fossil fuels, how likely is it to achieve the necessary technology? Put another way, had there been no coal, gas, or oil around, would the Industrial Revolution gotten going or not? (Free idea for a story).
Possibly. Plants are the most basic form of solar energy. You could have a civilisation that cuts down forests to power steam engines and metallurgy. You'd need a culture that valued learning and knowledge over power and comfort though because there would be far less energy available. The thing is humans are motived mainly by survival. Power and comfort both make for a pretty low-risk life. Perhaps if you had an alien species with different instincts that gave more value to knowledge and community. Humans pretty much need capitalism to motivate them to work hard. What about a culture that valued scholarly activity above all other pursuits? They might develop the knowledge necessary to gain electricity, nuclear and other technologies if they devote most of their limited plant energy towards research activities.
Plants are not, from a motor-maker's point of view, the most efficient form of solar energy converter. After the civilization had done enough metallurgy and glassmaking, using charcoal, to produce good mirrors and glassware, the stage would be set for its version of Frank Shuman, and some earlier people who weren't quite as successful.
This would have increased the sunlight-to-shaft-work conversion rate by three orders of magnitude. Absent fossil fuels, his products would not, in that planet's mid-19-teens, have been undercut in price by them; solar engines would have powered an industrial revolution on that world for at least a few of the following decades.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html
"The Singularity" fundamentally assumes infinite exponential growth. It assumes there are no limits, there is no energy limit, no heat movement limit. Well unfortunately in the real world, there are real physical limits. That's all that needs to be said about "The Singularity".
You should watch the "are humans smarter than Yeast" video which was posted here a few days back.
I don't think this idea is necessarily cornucopian. It's just that he sets the top of the hill at a very high place.
Moore's Law is an idea of exponential grow. But everyone knows Moore's Law will reach a limit, but we're at least a decade or 2 away from that and in that time things will continue to get dramatically smaller and faster.
And they're developing quantum computing and optical computing, the limits to what is possible with computers is something we are not yet near.
In any event, it's reasonable to expect that we'll reverse engineer the human brain and have capable AI's running. If nature can do it, we can. We just have to advance computers to be able to achieve this, because after this there is really little else to achieve with them. It's not cornucopian, it's just setting the bar very high.
There is plenty of energy out there even if you stick to only sustainable sources of it and there is still a long way to go with efficiency. Advances in robots, nanotechnology, I think we have a long way to go if we can survive the depletion of fossil fuels this century. But that's not the same thing as saying there will be infinite growth.
I would like to address the (cornucopian) VS
(doomer) points of view which cause a great deal of
friction and debate here on TOD.
Please keep in mind I myself have no primary education
and am self taught in all aspects of science,math,
literature,society,history....et caetera.
The only subject I consider myself proficient in to a small degree is human nature.
Having framed the above with honesty I will endeavor
to communicate without ambiguity the following
infallible facts of all groups at large in history.
Discarding the effects and predispositions of
individuals in any given group.
People on the whole loath, resist and have always
feared change, even when its for the common good.
Fear of the unknown is the predominant factor.
For the first time in the history of mankind, we are
being "FORCED" to change......not too the unknown
future, but to the (KNOWN) past.
The recent past no less.
I postulate that its the "forcing" of this change that
has society upset and not the fear of the unknown
since we know what the recent past was like, pre
industrial revolution.
Weather a group or individual resists this change or
actively embraces this future is really of no
consequence.
Tomorrow is comming and bringing with it all of its
luggage and it will cast its shadow on all our
doorsteps come rain and come shine.
With the wonderful human spirit displayed here on
TOD...I believe the rain will further nourish and help
quench the thirst and thereby promote the human growth
for the warm summer sun shine on the afternoon of tommorow.
Morn:
1) Moore's Law is a specific observation about the *number* of transistors that can be put on a die (chip). Smaller transistors switch faster, so the same lithography shrinks that gave us more transistors/die also gave us *faster* transistors. In the happy old days, one could take a design, say at 2micron, and *optically* shrink it to 1.5 or 1.2micron, and it would be smaller and run faster. That hasn't worked for a long time, and as I pointed out before, current designs are wire-delay limited, and wires don't shrink as fast as transistors.
You get large memories on-chip, and that helps performance on many codes, and you get more CPUs per die, and that helps throughput of individual tasks, and maybe performance of suitably-parallelized code, but it's NOT "faster" in the way that CPU designers talk about per-CPU performance.
In addition, in the old days, with better lithography and bigger wafers, you got more die/wafer, even with the same number of layers or processing steps per wafer, which is what costs. Modern chips have many more layers, so that mask sets and processing cost much more.
I'm sure we'll have progress in semiconductor chips for more years, but really, it's getting much harder. There are layers in modern chips that are ~5 atoms thick, already. Those aren't going to be able to shrink indefinitely.
FORTUNATELY, there is a huge potential for smart devices embedded everywhere that trade cheap compute power to achieve energy savings, and those applications still get helped by what's left of Moore's Law.
2) Quantum and optical computing. YES, BUT ... there is certainly renewed interest in the latter, after some of the early fiascoes, but there are sill really difficult issues, such as needing more power, that don't go away easily. As we always said at Bell Labs, "Never schedule breakthroughs."
3) AI: I have friends who are trying, but that's hard, and despite the long history of AI, there aren't as many successes around as one would like, and predictions of success have been pretty far off. [This is not a knee-jerk anti-AI view: the first deployed expert system for Bell Labs was something I encouraged as an offshoot of a project I'd managed.]
By the way, computer victories in checkers and chess owe a little to AI, and a whole lot to brute force compute power. They don't do much for the general AI problem; they don't even help much with poker or Go. [The best Go programs are no better than average *amateur* players.]
4) BUT, if there's a key chart in Kurzweil, it's the one on page 99, which basically thinks that real per-capita GDP keeps rising. Maybe so, but given that the period 1920-2005 also saw a rise in
work = energy-used * efficiency
AND IF folks like Ayres & Warr have it right, and a big chunk of GDP growth is from increase in work, and we're about to hit peak Oil&Gas inflection points in next few decades, it's not at all obvious that the relentless rise in GDP/person is so easy going forward, at least in terms of real welfare. Will water be cheaper? Will fertilizer? Will food?
This is not Heinbergian doomsaying; there's a lot of room for efficiency improvements and there's a lot of sustainable energy out there if we will use it, but the high-EROI "cheap ride" oil+gas is ending, in fact, just like that of Moore's Law giving us increased GHz from smaller transistors is ending.
In general, it is really, really dangerous to project straight lines on log-scale charts through inflection points of underlying physics or where you didn't really understand the drivers of the trend. I think we're in for a century of totally reworking the world's energy systems, and replacing petroleum will not be cheap.
Old school AI runs over half of the worlds financial transactions through programmed trading. AI is a multi-billion dollar industry that touches our every day lives. Medical diagnostics, customer service calling centers, etc...
Kurzweil has a hedgefund that he runs with AI.
Redesigning computers to achieve a zettaflop of performance. One thousand exaflops. One million petaflops. One billion teraflops.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/onchip-photonic-communications-for-2017...
Rethink hardware
–Parallelism is mainstream, but most cores are optimized for serial performance
–Need to design hardware for power and parallelism
Rethink software
– Massive parallelism
– Eliminate scaling bottlenecks replication, synchronization
Rethink algorithms
– Massive parallelism and locality
– Counting Flops is the wrong measure
Enabling technology for Zettaflops
Optical communication and nanomemory.
Recent petaflop computer used to run petavision code for modelling the human visual cortex [work that is already done]
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/petavision-on-petaflop-supercomputer.html
Quantum annealing could be one million times faster than classical computing
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/02/quantum-annealing-millions-of-times.html
Dwave systems is indicating thousands of qubits for a quantum computer by the end of 2008
http://dwave.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/into-the-breach/
Yes, medicine has lots and lots of high-tech, and, in the USA, medicine sucks bigtime in terms of accessibility and user-friendliness. If you are rich, you have access. This fits perfectly my future vision of the 'dystopic divide' between the few ultra-rich and the peasant masses. Ask any medical professional who has been practicing for more than a couple of decades and chances are extremely high they will give you a picture of an extremely negative trend in the overall state of medicine in the USA.
Yes this is quite normal in the computer industry. The paradigm shifts every few years. In the 70's memory was limited and programming was very low level. So CPU's had complex instruction sets with the goal of saving programmers time and reduce memory requirements.
By the 90's, memory was no longer a major limitation. It was the complexity of instruction sets that was becoming the limitation, because so much of the CPU was dedicated towards the instruction set. Then they had the idea of instead, make simple instructions and to rely on compilers rather than careful manual optimisation. That mean a more simple CPU with a smaller transistor count. So you then had spare transistors you could use in pipelined designs, and superscalar designs with multiple execution units. They simplified the design concepts and this let them make a much more efficient design.
Something similar is happening today. Having a branch prediction out of order execution CPU wastes a lot of transistors on trying to get the maximum performance possible out of a program written without parallelism in mind, why give the hardware all this work? The solution is to have a large number of simple cores grouped together, a cluster on a chip. This is essentially what modern GPU's are, infact, with the 240 stream processors on the geforce GTX 280, GPU's don't have the same legacy of ancient software to support and can be made in the way most appropriate for modern fabrication technology. A Geforce GTX 280 can theoretically achieve a maximum of 900 gigaflops where a Core 2 Duo can achieve around 12 gigaflops, that should give you some sense of perspective of how limiting the old paradigm is. The future is parallelism, as long as we can keep shrinking microchips, we can add parallelism. After that, we have to go towards optical or quantum computing.
You should get from this that the computer industry is very skilled and used to overcoming physical limits to established design practises. They have to rebuild the wheel every few years to keep moore's law going.
But to quote Gordon Moore himself "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens"
And here's a quote from Moore on when that will occur. "In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions"
So Microchips have 10 to 20 years before we reach peak transistor counts. ;)
You're understating the challenge. We don't even know how the human brain achieves intelligence and yet we asking people to reproduce what it does. We don't even understand the basic concepts behind how consciousness works. We're a long way from artificial consciousness. This is a much greater challenge than even fusion power. But I think it's achievable.
TOD is not really the place to have ill-informed arguments about computer architecture and history thereof, as they will just confuse people.
If people *really* want to learn about realistic computer architecture and relevant computing technology trends, and aren't already experts, here are some recommendations. [Anyone else: skip now!]
1) I'd recommend studying the best single book, by John Hennessy & Dave Patterson, at Amazon.
My review (the first one) explains how to read it. I have recommended earlier editions to non-techie financial analysts, who much to their surprise, told me they got something out of it. Any university library should have it, since it is *the* standard textbook.
2) If someone is around Silicon Valley, come by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View - we do good tours.
3) If someone wants to get good info on the latest chips, direct from the designers, I recommend the Hot Chips conference at Stanford in August every year. IEEE Micro, March/April 2008 covered last years', including a good discussion of the nVidia Tesla architecture and its programming.
4) Finally, if someone really wants gory future details [and has semiconductor background], then they consult the latest ITRS Roadmap, currently 2007 edition. Read page 54 about interconnects.
====
Gordon Moore's comments were from 2005, he said 10-15 years at that point, i.e., 2015-2020, coincidentally, perhaps about the same time as the end of the PO plateau.
"Technological Singularity" was originally conceived of as arising specifically from the creation of superhuman intelligence. The overriding connotation was that the resulting world would be incomprehensible to anything of merely human intelligence, just as the world created by human intelligence is mostly opaque to other species.
But this quite specific idea has been obscured by a cloud of others - that the Singularity is about salvation from finitude by technology, or about achieving infinite progress in finite time, or just about the future becoming incomprehensible.
Putting aside for a moment the question about the ultimate limits to technological power, I would first defend the anti-doomer proposition that nothing in the Malthusian corner is sufficient to halt technological discovery for all time. Certainly people who think of peak oil, climate change, plague, etc., in terms of extinction are being unrealistic. The world population now is somewhere over 6.5 billion. As recently as 1900 it was just 1.5 billion, and that was not exactly the Stone Age! History shows that die-offs happen and that they can kill enormous numbers of people, but it also shows that the human race has the capacity to undergo decimation and enormous suffering, only to have the survivors keep going. Even the greatest disasters in time become just another historical episode.
So if we rule out extinction, what about the new dark age that never ends? Humanity goes on, but with a permanently crippled civilization, above all because the resource base isn't there with which to recreate the social forms of the twentieth century. This is a little harder to argue against, because we all know that human beings can go on surviving indefinitely in some very tough environments, but a high-tech society seems to require technical education, division of labor, and lots of energy, among other things. It might seem far more imaginable that bad enough catastrophes could break up today's world system irrecoverably.
However, I also find that very unlikely. As I said, it's a lot harder to argue for, because in effect you have to exhibit the structure of a sustainable industrial society. Here, I would distinguish between the previous criterion, and that of exhibiting the structure of a sustainable industrial society that can support 7 billion people. So far as I can tell, we certainly do not know how to do that. But the world is not just one society, it is (if you count polities) almost 200 of them. If just one of them can meets its energy needs entirely without fossil fuels, feed itself in a similarly sustainable fashion, defend itself from the predation of unsustainable competitors, and maintain a culture of inquiry and technological invention, the "unending dark age" thesis stands refuted. And it seems obvious to me, given the number of independent power centers in the world, the vigor with which energy alternatives are being sought, and the fact that those alternatives can be brought to industrial scale, that far more than just one post-oil polity is going to make it.
For those still skeptical, I'd also point out that the present and the past offer many examples of stable stratified societies in which the mass of people are poor but an elite carries on the business of culture. Even if you doubt that the alternatives can sustain a society of mass affluence, what we are discussing is the continuation of technological invention, and that is a different question.
So, I feel free to rule out both the extinction scenario and the end-of-progress scenario. Large portions of the globe may collapse into Mad Max anarchy, but millions of people, somewhere, will still be living in civilization and making discoveries. And that brings all those Singularity issues back onto the table. As I see it, there are two questions to be answered here. One is the question intrinsic to the Singularity itself, or just to the idea of an open-ended technological future: what could happen, and what will happen? The other question is, can "it" happen before we get bad things happening across large chunks of the Earth, and will it?
To start with the second question first, it is obviously, obviously, obviously bad policy to just expect the Singularity to rescue you from Malthus. By all means aim for synergy - try to utilize some of those innovations of the near future to solve the problems of the near future - but don't pretend that the problems aren't looming. My simple formula is that you make quantitative policy using things you can quantify, and you make qualitative policy regarding everything else. Energy supply, energy demand, population growth, economic growth, climatic trends, those are all things we can quantify; unreliably, imperfectly, but - quantifiable. The same cannot be said for the impact of life extension technology, artificial intelligence, or space industrialization. Sure, you can make quantitative assumptions about those things, and reason about the consequences, but those are just hypotheses, scenarios. We are not in a position to know whether the next decade will bring a breakthrough in fusion or in extraction of carbon from the atmosphere, and so you should not base your hopes for a better future on the success of such a gamble. By all means think about it, spend some money on making it happen, and if it moves from the purely qualitative category into the quantifiable, great, it can become one of the basic, reliable tools used in the daily operation of society.
So my answer to the second question is that, so long as the Singularity contains such "qualitative" elements, true imponderables - and almost by definition, it does so right up until it happens - there is no way to answer it, unless things turn bad first, in which case it has been answered in the negative. That part of life which is about balancing budgets and planning for the foreseeable needs of tomorrow must keep its feet on the ground and eschew technological transcendentalism.
Turning to the first question, I am certainly of the view that a Singularity can happen, and that, unlike Malthus, it genuinely does represent an extinction risk. It also means good times if it can be made to take a human-friendly form, only we don't quite know how to ensure that outcome (but see: "Friendly AI"). To sum up then, the Singularity is part of our future, even if that future also includes some grim Malthusian outcomes, and it is very important that someone should be thinking about it, but it is not really relevant to the Malthusian problems, unless, peering into that technological event horizon, you can see some specific possibility that is directly pertinent, and are able to haul it out into ordinary space and time, where everyone else can take a look at it.
My view on the problem of the singularity is that there is a rarely challenged underlying hypothesis for the singularity to happen : that the phenomenology of our conscioussness is only a matter of quantitative computing.
In that we forget one or two things. The current view of our brain process is that we generate an output (motor action) from sensorial inputs which we sift through a complex system which then serve as a food for thought and mental processes which in turn generate the motor output. However those mental processes exist because we always have a goal in mind.
I won't go so far as to discuss what a goal is, but ask : what makes those goals into existence ? If you have an answer, fine. I don't. All the cognitive models are pretty silent about this. When a supercomputer plays chess, it is the programmer who has assigned it a goal, its heuristics and strategies. We are very far from making a computer which invents the game of chess.
Another thing we easily forget is that machines are driven by clocks, our brains, and more so our "consciousness" is driven by the inputs from our senses. No "clock" circuit has ever been demonstrated in our brain.
Are our artificial systems more intelligent than before or are they only better in projecting the intelligence of their makers ? I really wonder if the internet is more intelligent than a book on my shelf. Far easier to use that is true, able to record data about my digital actions that is true, but who really processes this data to make it meaningful ? The "intelligence" of my fellow human beings, no ? I haven't seen the slightest indication how, why or when this embedded intelligence could become autonomous. In my opinion, this idea of intelligence embedded by our brains becoming autonomous, is but a mere projection of our own unconsciousness which expresses itself recurrently in that direction since greek alchemy.
Finally, if we would be able to replicate our intelligence (or an even better intelligence) in an autonomous, self-sustaining system, what meaning would that have ?
WE ARE DOOMED, just the time frame is in question.
6 Million year old 'Lucy", Australopithecus, Robustus and Neandethalis, ran to the end of their capacities and then failed.
Our Homo Sapien brain capacities were evolved about 70,000 years ago. Except for minor cultural evolutionary adaptations we have become no better or smarter since then. The bell-curves tell us that the median human IQ is 100, which is about a smart horse.
Our simplistic Human cycles have been playing out for millennia. Most Plants play out the cycle every year. Birth, grab as many of the resources as they can before their neighbours can get them, procreate, and die when the resources run out
Our 5000 year recorded history shows us that Cultures develop, thrive and then destroy themselves, or are swamped by superior cultures, which then thrive and destroy them all.
We are about to see the collapse of the OIL CULTURE. Not a cosmic event. I do not see a superior culture out there to swamp us, so it will just be a fade into the "Dark Ages"
The Olduvai Theory has great credibility and will herald in a dark age when only the remnants and artifacts of the oil culture will remain. Oil seems to be the key to all other technology.
The present Financial and Business Sub-culture will be the first casualty. It was a false construct based on free portable energy.
The people holding their breath, hoping a "Super brain", Cosmically connected, super culture, will keep us on the path we created with our greed, are going to be disappointed.
Of course there will be the Dominants selling the last barrel of oil for a billion dollars and selling the last fish (2048 they say) for 2 billion dollars, but their trading ways will soon be forgotten.
"We" will still have our genes in the new breeds, just as the Maya and the Inca are still there. There will probably be some religious carry through.
History relates that after Constantine lost Rome, the Irish Monks of the time returned to the Irish Fens for 600 odd years during the Dark Ages, where they created and re-vamped Renaissance Roman Catholicism, which is still with us, a thousand years later.
Nobody reading this blog will be around at the final collapse. We are still playing out the second 300 years of Failed Roman Culture. We here will still be buying futures and speculating on the assumption that things will recover.
Unfortunately there seems to be lots of historical precedent for countries to go to war when resources become unavailable. Hitler being the perfect example. I think the US has to go to war, or else put its tail between its legs and walk away as others try to claim the diminishing resources.
Countries seem to turn increasingly "Right" as things get worse. The US is pretty far "Right" already, God help us. This means that Mc Cain may have to be the next President,(Personally I think he is brain-dead and perfect for the job), unless Obama promises to shut-up and do what has to be done.
These are interesting times
Graham
Nice fiction novel you got there. When will you write it?
There was a special issue of IEEE spectrum about the singularity last month:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/singularity
It features various viewpoints from different scientists.
The problem with the "debate" between Malthus and the Singularity is that they're both wrong.
Re: The Singularity presumes too much: Primarily that all problems yet to be faced have technological solutions. That is, solutions that just require the proper tool to be built. Built into that is the presumption that it is possible to discover and build such a proper tool. There is no guarantee that even the smartest, fastest thinking entity can solve the problem of instellar travel because it is entirely possible that it is an unsolvable problem.
Re: Malthus had it backwards: Population size depends upon food supply. Food supply increases, population increases. Food supply decreases, population decreases. We accept this for all species except ourselves, but it is still true. Population can only outstrip food production if there is a food surplus (see: St. Matthew Island) and when that happens we get overshoot and collapse.
Oil has allowed us to tap into a surplus of energy and increase our food supply. When oil runs out there is no guarantee that some other technological savior will be available. If it is not then we will be in overshoot and our population will crash.
Biology does not make exceptions.
--
JimFive
Very true, it's just a shame that we're not organised enough to introduce population controls and begin working on a replacement to oil for farming technology.
But it would be arrogant to say current farming methods are the most efficient ones that are possible. Hydroponics or nanotechnology might be able to support well more than 7 billion people, even they will have limits of course and eventually run into famine without population controls.
Food supply depends on your technology and resources.
In biology it's similar, we have far more biomass today than 600 million years ago, because modern life is more complex and sophisticated. 600 million years ago, life hadn't even figured out how to survive out of the ocean.
I would posit that it is impossible for imposed population controls to "win" over biology.
Or they may not. As I said, there is no guarantee.
Do we? Or has the biomass of the earth been concentrated into fewer species?
All life, or animal life? It may be true that there was no surface life 600 million years ago. I'll take your word for it. Then we have more biomass because we have increased the resource base as you indicated. That doesn't imply that there is a way to further increase that base.
--
JimFive
Nature has it's own methods of population controls. Our own methods, for example China's, are far more merciful.
That's really my point my part. The state of development you have determines what your resource base is and your efficiency in exploiting it. That has dramatically improved in nature in the last 600 million years. Modern life is greater in quantity and more efficient at using it's resources and it slowly gets even better over time. Of course resources are it's main limitation. But efficiency and sophistication increase over time never the less.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
Do you really believe that there are no limits to improvement in efficiency and sophistication?
--
JimFive
There must be some upper limit of course, I don't think nature has run out of ideas yet though, it only just came up with us very recently!
And I think technology is far from it's limits as well, we don't yet have nanotechnology, AI's, fusion power...
If you're into Star Wars, I hope this is not too much of a silly example, but it's a fictional universe in which technology has been in stagnation for around 5000 years by the time of the movies. It's an image of an advanced technological society in stagnation.
Hope in a singularity is just another promise of Utopia. People have been packing up and heading off to a new promised land for as long as there have been noisy neighbors, repressive governments, persecution, or just alleged golden opportunities elsewhere. In this case, the streets are paved with silicon. Utopias are great, except that when you get there, you find that they’re full of the same people and problems you wanted to get away from in the first place.
Jon.
I've been using "Peak Oil Versus The Singularity" for about a year now as a purposefully naive global macro investment thesis, or rather as the entertaining name for that thesis.
Peak Oil --> Just a reduced term to incorporate physical scarcities caused by global growth and natural restraints. I tend to include Climate Change as part of Peak Oil, just for my own uses. But in reality I imagine that "Peak Oil" might be a godsend, saving us from more extreme climate change. That's my hope at least. "Peak Oil" instead of "Commodity Scarcity" to remind that oil has led commodities, and that where most commodities can be replenished, this isn't necessarily the case with oil (or copper btw).
The Singularity --> A fun metaphor for technological/infrastructure advances. "The Singularity" simply serves to remind that progress can move along an exponential curve, the straight line of a logarithmic chart, so advances might appear to "come out of nowhere," and dour predictions about tech might therefore be wrong. The premise of the Singularity is what lets tech come out a winner in the end, even if we're just talking about a good new mix of biofuels as well as auto innovations, etc. Looks like slow progress until it's really fast progress, that's the gist.
Basically the idea is that rising oil/commodity prices will doom the world economy to ever more severe stagflation, will transfer unbelievable amounts of wealth to oil producers, and may result in wars and famines unless Technology (a new liquid fuel to start with) comes to the rescue. That technology could be as simple as sugar ethanol, if we could grow enough of it. Rapid advances could be in new sugar genes, for example. But ultimately (I think maybe within 5 years) it is the confluence of many sciences that should give us an excellent biofuel, or a few that compete amongst themselves. Then oil prices will fall to compete with the biofuels, and will be disadvantaged by carbon cap fees (set by a carbon futures market in which I will be a trader!) and possible new tariffs on oil or tax breaks for the new fuel. Finally the oil will be too expensive to extract for fuel use.
At $140/bl the world is spending in one year probably close to what it spent on oil during the entire 1990's. This spells economic catastrophe if the trend continues, as you Oil Drummers know.
Obviously the first need is for a liquid fuel since existing fleets of cars can't be exchanged overnight. Some liquid fuels are simple to make, like sugar ethanol.
Sugar ethanol, if we can manage to grow enough sugar (I think it's now about 10 lbs of sugar per gallon of oil) can help at the margins. Algae-based fuels and the rest then need to catch up fast.
This shit isn't about intergalactic travel or whether we can start to live forever in 30 years (although yeah, take your resveratrol in the morning). "Peak Oil vs The Singularity" is about right now, the next five to ten years.
Once we've got clean energy that's cheaper than fossil fuel (plus some kind of replacement for copper), the world should enter an unparalleled economic expansion, fueled more and more by the new sciences and the many new scientists from all over the world. And then we'll be able to approach the more sci-fi sounding stuff... But the gate to that place is this present crunch time, one we don't really feel yet because oil hasn't been so high for long enough yet that we really feel the effects. That's evident simply from the way that most people write here at the Oil Drum, worrying about far-off outcomes rather than the current emergency we need to solve.
One of the major risks I personally see is a continued governmental/political "tragedy of the commons." Blaming oil prices on speculators adds to this.
The marketplace is screaming at governments to invest heavily in a transition away from petroleum. But governments refuse to respond in substantive fashion. The longer we wait, the longer the recessions we'll suffer, and the more power autocratic oil producers will gain. The free market has a large role to play, but if oil falls to $80 or $60, alt energy investments may dry up, although the oil problem will just be taking a temporary nap while people claim you guys were all crying wolf. Massive gov't funded research on the other hand would be able to continue despite even a let's say two year respite in oil prices, probably caused by massive demand destruction...
Sounds reasonable-by 2013 the world will have a brand new biofuel which will be so plentiful and cheap it will cause oil prices to implode. Could work for your hedge fund-if you have the right friends.
1) the singularity may be a mind-machine contraption that may not want to or know how to communicate with the outside world (fermi paradox9 because we couldn't understand its language.
2) it may be in a solid state civilization that is self contained and doesn't communicate anything of meaning outside.
3) it may enter pleasure circuits, loops, internal states that are no longer comprehensible to humans.
4) the new brains may come about by just experimenting with chemicals and signlas in human brains but not throug any scientific understanding.
Check out:
http://transsurvivalist.blogspot.com/2008/02/transhuman-anthology-about-...
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=162692
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=163667
I'm vaguely interested in your concern about copper. Copper isn't used up in the same way that oil is. The copper is still there. If you need more copper then convert telephone to fiber optic or wireless and pull out the telephone wires.
There are also, other metals that conduct as well, or nearly as well, as copper (gold comes to mind, but it is pricey). While we probably wouldn't want to run gold power lines but using gold in computer components is already being done.
So, why are you worried about copper?
--
JimFive
Hi JimFive.
I don't think the world will come to a halt because of copper shortages. However the demand for copper will rise, has been rising, for use in everything from construction to batteries. As the world demands more and more electricity, even all of the copper we already have could seem like it's not enough. Other metals will work, but as you know they're much less efficient. Given time I imagine people will learn a workaround. For example a new fleet of electric cars would require a lot of copper, I can't say how much, but a lot... Copper is simply one of the few metals we could actually run out of. Traders and economists sometimes call the metal "Doctor Copper" because demand for it presages economic expansion and rises in other commodity prices. However in times to come, supply shortage as well as demand may play a role in its rising cost. I don't know what the substitute for copper would be, but minus something that doesn't exist yet, copper's relative scarcity puts a natural break on economic growth. Batteries made of aluminum don't seem like they'd cut it.
There are a lot of old pipes to melt down, but there are probably even more new uses than old.
Think of how much less efficient electric energy is without copper, and you get the point. And when copper's expensive, builders skimp on it, using less wiring than they should and therefore building energy inefficient constructions.
Sorry if this sounds vague or rambling -- it's one am and I'm about to collapse!....
This is not a cornucopean comment, but actually:
1) AC transmission grids generally use aluminum wire. it is also used in some home wiring, although one must be careful, as noted in the URL.
2) Aluminum was used for many decades in semiconductor chips. Only in the last 8-10 years have people switched to copper (it was very hard work by the process folks), and the total amount used in the chips themselves is pretty small. In tiny circuits, copper is superior.
3) Aluminum is about 2X better than copper in conductivity per unit mass, so if you're more worried about weight than density, and you're careful, aluminum may be a better choice. See aluminum vs copper for motors. Aerospace people sometimes use aluminum or CCAW (copper-clad aluminum wire), as do automobile designers:
Google: copper clad aluminum wire automotive
Copper is fairly far down the list of things to worry about running low on.
I agree with your comment. One additional factor to consider: we need some type of breakthrough, because the renewables we have now don't scale up in time, and they are not energy dense.
The following is a bit from my peak oil webpage:
Will a scientific breakthrough come in time to save us from a worldwide energy famine?
"...the tactic of using the remaining fossil fuels to prepare to prepare for a post-fossil fuel future is a matter of buying time until "they," the scientist-nerd-innovator-geniuses, come up with a new a superior energy source. For all I know, this miracle will occur.
...but it puts the human race into a jam, cramming for a final exam that it can't afford to lose."
-- James Howard Kunstler, "The Long Emergency"
I had a colleague and good friend who contracted a deadly form of ovarian cancer. She was a scientist, and she investigated the medical literature herself; she read every research article she could find. She was convinced that if she could live another five years (the limit of her prognosis), a breakthrough cure might be found in time to save her. Tragically, it did not come in time.
A scientific breakthrough cure for our terminal energy decline might come in time, or, it might not.
To save us, the breakthrough must provide renewable, dense clean, safe, and transportable energy that can scale up rapidly, with an EROEI equivalent, or better, than that of oil. It must arrive in the next couple of decades.
It is rather as if civilization itself has been diagnosed with a terminal disease with a estimated mortality due in about 20 years. The scientists tell us they are working on several ideas with great potential. But, we've heard that before.
We await our fate anxiously.
-- Mike
http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm
A quick and simple solution is the use of mass transit transportation. Just add thousands of BUSES across the USA and the rest of the world and make people use BUSES. Just this could decrease our use of oil 70 %. Buses are available, are relatively cheap and can be deployed anywhere quickly and easily.
If you use internet scheduling to optimize the paths and people calling buses and planning through the internet and software, you could achieve a very good public transport network very quickly. Where are all the private companies on this ? The first guys who get public transit right will make huge profits. And it is truly insane that China and India and other countries want to follow such an insane model as the USA private automobile system. They don't have roads and parking and they want to buy millions of cars. Just set up thousands of efficient BUSES and rotues and software and internet scheduling, their standard of living would grealty increase...
Hi old6598
Have you passed this by Alan Drake, by any chance?
Intelligence is overestimated. Natural evolution occured completely blindly without no intelligence. We think intelligence is fundamental, but it is just a small quirk self referential language a species called humans uses to decode and manipulate matter. But the new Instant Singularity will occur blindly, without any increase of understanding of our brains, but by just simply and directly experimenting with new neural circuit combinations in our brains, or future brain - minds.
And technology evolution presumes a linear understandable path where logic and language is activated, but the future minds will be outside of logic and language, outside of time, so linear advances will make no sense.
Check out:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=164006&p=198973...
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=162953
In particular:
"But that was the old model of the Technological Singularity that expected exponential "progress" in computer intelligence that would reach and suprass human intelligence and design smarter and smarter and more capable brains. That model is mostly over, the singularity will be obtained directly by manipulating our neural circuits in our brains and creating new brain designs. "
"There is no reason why they have to be intelligent, in fact intelligence means nothing, is only a cultural and primitive measure of experiences, it was uselful for solving real world problems, but in the new Instant Singularity, the world is decoded differently, may be decoded in trillions of different ways and may produce trillions of different new experiences. So the new modified brain with chips and new sense organs and new circuits will be something that is not human and is not a computer but will be in a new universe with completely different laws of physics. This will be equivalent and will surpass a trillion years of old fashion scientific and technological evolution, it will bypass the process instantaneously, it will leapfrog old fashioned "progress", which is anyways completely over. "
And about the Fermi Paradox: it is amazing how smart people assume that any other "intelligent" item that evolves in the unverse must follow exactly our human path of evolution with the right mix of chemicals, the exact same cell structures, the same energy use, the same kind of logic and language as humans etc. If there is another "self conscious" species, it may be in the center of stars, as an "intelligent" plasma or living plasma, or in solid state rocks that are somehow alive etc. Aside from the fact that intelligence is a very narrow way of viewing the world, matter - energy can evolve and react and create structures that are alive and have emotions and have self consiousness and maybe billions of other states and we could be completely blind to it, we could be completely unaware. An ant is unaware of what goes on in people's minds, so the aliens or singularity beings could be just as far away from us. We just dismiss that they don't exist.
In the article:
"The innovation he’s envisioning, of course, is the rise of intelligent machines (or humans with artificially enhanced brains) capable of being far more productive than today’s humans."
It depends on how "productive" is defined. If you just casually experiment with a brain (or your's, or who's ?) and change the neural wiring, the circuits, associate different emotions to different inputs, insert different chemicals, etc. you may end up with a given brain having a life experience greatly "better" or "enhanced" or "pleasurable" or whatever, even if the reason why is unknown because the science isn't known or developed enough. In fact the point is that the science doesn't even have to know or be developed (given that I doubt that the science can ever understand consciousness or emotions and how to "design" a brain with different emotions - conscious states) since these new experiences, conscious states, new sense organs, new associations can be discovered by the experiencing brain by casually manipulating it's own circuitry and chemicals and design.
In this sense an Instant Singularity can occur instantly by just modifying a brain in some unknown way, and that brain enters a new universe with new laws of physics.
So the entire assumption that a singularity must "evolve" through technology, or advancing technology is wrong and probably not at all necessary. In fact not even increasing intelligence is necessary, all you need is some wild guess at which neural circuits configurations will bring you to new worlds. So it is more a simple combinational game, a pure experiment with no theory that can bring on singularities, which have probably already occured many times over and even just using pure thought.
And then once that modified brain enters a stable circuit or pleasure loop or whatever it would remain there forever having reached a kind of metaphysical Nirvana never having to communicate with any outside world. A solid state civilization...
All concepts of technological advancements and productivity lose any meaning in this context.