A futurist post: Noahstradamus predicts The Singularity (and lack thereof)

io9 has a good primer on the notion of the "technological singularity," a futurist favorite:

The term singularity describes the moment when a civilization changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations. Think of it as a point-of-no-return in history.

Most thinkers believe the singularity will be jump-started by extremely rapid technological and scientific changes. These changes will be so fast, and so profound, that every aspect of our society will be transformed, from our bodies and families to our governments and economies...

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized the idea of the singularity in his 1993 essay "Technological Singularity." There he described the singularity this way:

It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.

Specifically, Vinge pinned the Singularity to the emergence of artificial intelligence. "We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth," he wrote. "The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence."...

As we mentioned earlier, artificial intelligence is the technology that most people believe will usher in the singularity...AI will allow us to develop new technologies so much faster than we could before that our civilization will transform rapidly...

Another singularity technology is the self-replicating molecular machine, also called autonomous nanobots...Basically the idea is that if we can build machines that manipulate matter at the atomic level, we can control our world in the most granular way imaginable...

And finally, a lot of singulatarian thought is devoted to the idea that synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and other life sciences will eventually give us control of the human genome...Many futurists, from Kurzweil and Steward Brand, to scientists like Aubrey De Gray, have suggested that extreme human longevity (in the hundreds of years) is a crucial part of the singularity.

A lot of people are skeptical of The Singularity. Exponential change, they argue, always eventually levels off. We drive cars that are not exponentially better than the cars people drove a century ago. Our airplanes have stopped getting faster too. Similarly, they argue, the IT revolution will hit its natural limits, and our progress will slow down until we hit the next brief period of rapid technological change.

I have a lot of sympathy for this skeptical view. But all the same, it does seem like many of the technologies we are now developing (or looking for ways to develop) will cause qualitative changes in human life unrivaled even by the introduction of agriculture.

So which Singularity technologies do I envision living up to their potential? Well, let's run through the short list:

1. Artificial Intelligence - Yes, but not the Vingean kind, and not as soon as people think. We have already succeeded in creating machines that can do many mental tasks much better than we can (play chess, etc.). Eventually machines will be able to create scientific theories and draft business plans. But humans' notion of "intelligence" encompasses more than simply the ability to do difficult mental tasks - it requires independence of action. And this is what there is no guarantee AIs will have. Even if we make machines that can create machines smarter than themselves, why will they be motivated to do so? For a true AI-driven Singularity to happen, AI's must be Autonomous Intelligences.

2. Molecular Assembly - Yes, but not for much longer than many believe. We can make molecule-sized machines that can put other molecule-sized machines together; we are working on ways to give these tiny assemblers the go-ahead to start assembling. But there's a much bigger problem here - the ability to tell large numbers of tiny assemblers what to do all at once. Building, say, a piece of wood from the ground up seems feasible - just make a wood molecule, then make another, then another - but hardly an economic use of nanoassemblers, given that wood already nanoassembles itself. Building a complex machine with nanoassemblers will require a lot of very complex but cheap-to-implement molecular-level quality control, which means solving a lot of difficult IT problems. As for "grey goo," it already exists, and is called "bacteria."

3. Personality Upload - No. Not now, not soon, and possibly not ever. Because here's the rub - suppose someone invents a computer into which you can upload your personality. Suppose that the uploaded you feels exactly the same as the real physical you feels. How could you be certain that it feels the same without uploading yourself? Two ways: A) split yourself into two divergent individuals, or B) kill your physical self. My bet is that almost no one will be willing to do either of those. On top of that, there seem to be so much potential for horrific glitches that the technology will take a ridiculously long time to develop, even if it can be done.

4. Extreme Longevity - Yes. I'm not sure when we discover this, but when we do, it will rapidly change the nature of human life and society. Unless the technology becomes cheap very quickly, it will divide human society into fast-dying haves and seemingly near-immortal have-nots, with all the resulting social disruption.

5. Control of the Human Genome - Yes. This one, in my opinion, has by far the most serious, profound, and far-reaching consequences for our race, because the genome is the race. Forget about making ourselves smarter and stronger; the real posthuman moment will come when we start tinkering with human desires. Imagine if we could make people who love working hard all the time, or people who love having ten kids, or people who never get angry, or people who always take orders, or people who are just happy all the time no matter what. THAT, my friends, will be one bizarre world.

So, to conclude: No, I don't think that a Technological Singularity will soon accelerate technological change to infinite speeds. No, I do not think that we will soon see godlike self-improving AIs or sentient swarms of nanobots eating everything in sight, or people living like virtual gods inside of computer programs. But when we find ways to change what it means to be human, the human race as a basically singular entity will be over, and we will abruptly be left with a number of successor species. That day is coming sooner than we'd probably like.

To explore strange new worlds...is expensive.

When I was a kid, I was a big supporter of manned space exploration. New frontier! Push the boundaries of the human race! Escape this limited little planet! Onward and upward! Give humans some bigger future to hope for, etc. etc....

But now I read articles like this one and find myself nodding:

Consider the enormity of an effort to send astronauts to Mars. When Mars is closest to Earth, the distance is still about 200 times that between Earth and the moon, which means it would take several months to reach Mars. The amount of food, water, oxygen and other basic supplies necessary for such a journey would require a far larger spacecraft than anything built yet. And it's by no means certain that humans could survive the trip.

The astronauts would be exposed to cosmic radiation and other dangers when in outer space or in the Mars environment for two years...

And the physical issues are enormous. Even with vigorous daily exercise, will an astronaut be able to walk on Earth after two years under no gravity? Will the astronaut's digestive system operate properly? What of the heart and other organs? What if there is a medical emergency? Finally, upon arriving on Mars, astronauts would find blood-freezing temperatures (more than 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit at night, even at the equator) and a suffocating atmosphere of carbon dioxide and no air.

And the logistics are overwhelming, from the massive solar arrays that would be necessary to provide constant electric power to the challenges of resupply and refueling.

The difficulties of manned missions to Mars are only part of a larger truth: manned space exploration is now too expensive to justify economically. Orbital travel will be viable as tourism, but missions to the other planets - whether for science, or for some commercial venture like mining - can be done almost as well by robots, at a tiny fraction of the cost in money and lives.

But let's consider the question: what would justify putting humans all over the Solar System? As I see it, it would be worth going if we could live there indefinitely in large numbers. Assuming we don't break Einstein's laws, and are thus stuck in this Solar System, being able to live offworld would require either:

A) the ability to terraform other worlds, or

B) the ability to adapt humans to be able to live indefinitely in zero-G.

(A) is going to take amazing new energy sources (i.e. fusion); for that matter, building the fast, reliable, safe spaceships to ferry us quickly back and forth between our newly terraformed colonies would take awesome energy too. I'm not talking about total energy (which, with solar power, is unlimited), I'm talking about energy density, i.e. the energy a spaceship can carry on it. The best thing we have right now is fission, which, even if we made it safe (by using thorium), involves taking a very limited resource from an overpopulated and energy-hungry planet. Until we get fusion or its equivalent, factories in China and farmers in the Midwest are going to be able to outbid space exploration a thousand times over.






(B) is an interesting possibility, since all it takes is really spiffy biotech. If we could design humans to live in zero-G, we could conquer space with only slightly better technology (mostly radiation shielding) than we have now. Of course, those humans wouldn't be quite the same as the rest of us, so it's not clear if people would support creating a race of spacemen if that left the rest of us stuck in this gravity well. But it's certainly a thought.

If we don't get at least one of those technologies, manned space exploration will have to wait until Earth is no longer resource-constrained - until the human race either improves its efficiency dramatically or decreases in number significantly, or both.

In the meantime, we should remember that explorers didn't cross the Atlantic in oared galleys. They waited until they had lateen sails, compartmentalized hulls, compasses, astrolabes, etc. You and I may not live to see the golden age of manned space exploration. We'll have to comfort ourselves with the thought that it will come...someday.

Yglesias on utopia

Yglesias:

[I]f you look at how life in the developed countries has changed from 1930 to 2010 what you see is that people spend more and more time in school, more and more time retired, and more and more time on vacation. In other words, people are step-by-step liberating themselves not from market capitalism as a means of obtaining consumer goods but from wage slavery in the worker-capitalism relationship...

[I]t’s more possible than ever for people’s non-commercial labors to have a meaningful impact on the world. I think open source software is very exciting. I think amateur mashups are very exciting. I think digital distribution of albums recorded on the cheap by people playing music for fun while holding down day jobs is exciting. I think fan fiction is exciting. I think people who work at universities and other non-profits writing blogs to inform and entertain is exciting. I think people diligently recording the progress of their neighborhood and organizing for a better city is exciting. Wikipedia is, of course, indispensable these days and Wikileaks has done a tremendous job of making a difference...

Meanwhile, of course, for many people around the world the big story of life in 2010 isn’t the promise of transcending capitalism but the promise of adopting it and thereby escaping what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life.”...what’s happening in China today looks, from a number of points of view, an awful lot like the original dawning of the industrial revolution in northwestern Europe and that, in and of itself, is an enormous progressive change compared to what was happening before.

So that’s the agenda I have to offer. For rich countries—productivity growth, social insurance, and efforts to improve public health all aiming at allowing people to live more and more of their time outside the bonds of commercial work. For poor countries—capitalism, to get the process of prosperity and social betterment rolling.

This is a brilliant and far-sighted post. In talking about the limits of pure market capitalism, I often talk about public goods (i.e. why we need a government in addition to private companies). But Yglesias has hit on something much deeper - the existence of incomplete markets. It's just not possible to buy everything. Human nature has a great many needs that cannot be satisfied by proxy, and so cannot be traded for. Among these are: a sense of self-worth, a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of individuality, true friendship, a feeling of being at ease in social situations, the excitement of discovering new ideas, and a feeling of hope for a better future.

Oh yeah, and love.

Of course, money helps a lot with getting these things. It's hard to pursue self-actualization while trapped in poverty; you need leisure, you need mobility, you need communications, and you need a lot of other things that money can buy. Which is why capitalism, which provides us all with money, is absolutely essential to human progress. Socialism is a failure because socialism kills the goose; by restricting the economic activity that makes us rich, socialism also denies us the opportunity to go beyond material happiness.

In fact, as capitalism progresses (i.e. as productivity improves), we'll have so much material stuff that we'll just give tons of it away, and spend most of our effort going after the stuff we can't buy with money. The dream of the socialists - material equality - will one day be realized, but via a path quite the opposite of what many of them envisioned (although I'm sure that some early socialists realized the possibility of what I'm talking about). That won't be utopia, of course - there will always be "rich in love, poor in love" - but it will be better than the materially stratified societies of yore.

I suppose the central point here is: the question of "capitalism vs. socialism" has been settled in favor of the former. But that does not mean that material wealth should be the one and only goal of our society. It's only the first step.