From: eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat Feb 26 2000 - 09:51:13 MST
From: Fred Hapgood <fhapgood@world.std.com>
Meeting notice: The 00.03.01 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at
the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the
corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't
recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are.
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Proposed topic: The onset of the Singularity
The question has been lofted at previous meetings as to whether
we are seeing the first signs of 'the Singularity'. This term,
introduced by SF author Verner Vinge in his novels _The Peace
War_ and _Marooned in RealTime_, refers to a phase of
technological change so rapid that historians or archeologists
examining the traces of a civilization passing through that phase
can make no sense of it at all. They would be unable to
reconstruct the order of events or the patterns of cause and
effect.
Vinge's thinking was that at some point technology would become
genuinely autocatylic or self- accelerating. Machines would
accept instructions on the most general level ('amuse me', 'make
me some money', 'reduce the amount of suffering in the world',
'find some new physics'), and be able to go off and without
further input create strategies that satisified those
instructions, even when doing so required developing altogether
new technologies. In a society like that it would be
inappropriate even to describe the pace of change as 'rapid',
since that term is usually taken as implying a direction, and no
such direction would exist.
Obviously no one thinks such turbo-charged AI is anywhere in
prospect, but technological self-acceleration is not critical to
the model. If the rate at which innovations appear and are
adopted is sufficiently high, society will enter a Singularity
phase, whether humans retain a role in the process or not.
At the moment current speculation about the onset of this phase
change reflects a subjective sense that the 'sound' of the flow
of developments coming out of such fields as molecular
engineering, biotech, MEMS, and computing has acquired a deeper
note over the past few years. One senses something large and
violent happening downriver, around the next few bends.
There is another thread of evidence that bears on and confirms
the supposition. Life inside a society passing through a
Singularity would almost certainly be experienced as profoundly
chaotic. Generalizations that hitherto have legitimated and
rationalized development and investment decisions would break
down. As a consequence people would start investing in companies
with business models that made no sense in traditional terms, or
even with no perceptible business model at all (if you don't
count 'and when we've run out of investors we'll get acquired' as
a model).
Investment fashions would wash over the market, attracting vast
amounts of money, and then sink into the sands, losing equally
vast amounts, in days; equity prices would be driven by rumors of
rumors; CEO turnover would soar; marketing horizons -- the date
past which a market for a product is expected to have vanished --
would shrink again and again.
Ring a bell?
There is a body of opinion that all the nonsense in the market
today -- in which investors riot to invest in companies losing
the largest possible amounts -- is a reflection of the moral and
intellectual rot that comes at the end of booms, and that once
the correction imposes itself we will return to the orderly
principles that have guided investors for centuries.
That might be, but it might have another meaning entirely. It
might signal the onset of the Singularity. It is in any case
worth thinking about what it would mean to live and invest,
and for that matter, develop nanotechnology, inside a
radically chaotic culture.
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