From: dalec@socrates.Berkeley.EDU
Date: Sat Sep 14 2002 - 10:57:24 MDT
On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, John Grigg wrote:
> Just maybe. I tend to think they would have a "prime directive" which would
> cause them to stay out of the affairs of other races, especially if they
> were at a presingularity stage.
I don't understand this very common usage of the term "singularity". I
thought the idea of singularity was introduced to express the sense that
technological development was accelerating so much that there is an
impending horizon beyond which we cannot confidently predict what it will
mean to live in the world.
"Singularity" expresses an idea similar to Clarke's chestnut that
any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What I don't get is how "singularity" goes from a word expressing our
perplexity about the future, to a word that expresses our confidence about
that future.
People talk about pre and post singularity societies with the
confidence of lab techs stimulating their squids. Why are you so sure a
so-called "post-singularity" society would necessarily employ the same
typology you do?
What is the threshhold event you imagine constitutes the
singularity that is universally passed through in this way? Is it
Drextech? Widespread uploading? Warp technology? What? Why not say
agriculture made us a post-singularity society? Bruce Sterling seems to
suggest that the singularity is reached when longevity medicine succeeds
in increasing life expectancy one year per year. Vinge has it happening
once computers outpace human brains. Hannah Arendt argued decades ago
that Sputnik represented that kind of shift.
Treating "the" singularity as an Event we can characterize with
confidence seems glib, and to introduce confusions into discussions of
technological development. As a registration of the necessity for modesty
and special care when we talk about the likelihood of unintended
consequences of technology in coming years, it seems fine to me, though
this uncertainly, strictly speaking, seems to me already contained in the
idea of "future" anyways. If it is a term designed to make us pretend to
know more than we know, at precisely the moment we claim not to know, it
seems weird and maybe not so useful -- and to the extent that it seems a
way to smuggle into scientific and secular outlooks the old idea of an
Apocalyptic Event we can look forward to, to answer all kinds of deeply
unfulfilled psychic longings and what have you, well, it looks frankly
damaging, and to be an idea worth jettisoning.
Best, Dale
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