Welcome to Singularity – Salvation or Destruction of Mankind. This website will be many things dealing with “The Singularity”. I will collect valuable internet resources, post current news articles, discuss my own theories and views and hopefully collect valuable comments. I hope this turns into a meeting place to learn and discuss the implications, theories and articles dealing with technological singularity.

So what is Technological Singularity? There is no “official” definition that can be looked up in a dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as..

Singularity (sin·gu·lar·i·ty): A point in space-time at which gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and infinitesimal volume, and space and time to become infinitely distorted.

While “Technological Singularity” is a coined term, there is a fairly common interpretation of the meaning. The following are definitions other people have come up with for “Technological Singularity” or “The Singularity”

 

A future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity. – From the website “The Singularity”

 

A change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur): 1. There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.) 2. Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity. 3. Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. 4. Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect. – From a paper by Vernor Vinge, Department of Mathematical Sciences, San Diego State University

 

Hey this sounds like Science Fiction stuff!!! I know this may sound like pure science fiction or something that could possibly happen a long time from now, but I don’t think it is. Since the beginning of time here on earth there has been an unstoppable force called Evolution. Small microbes have slowly over millions and millions of years evolved into intricate amazing lifeforms with incredible diversity. One such life form to come out of this evolution is humans. As humans we have evolved first physically from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. During this evolution the modern human brain evolved into what it is today. The human brain allowed us to do something that had never been done before… evolve intellectually.

This started what I like to consider the second phase of evolution. During the second phase or the intellectual evolution instead of evolving physically we evolved intellectually. Each generation of man learning from the previous generation and building upon what they learned. Languages developed which enabled us to write down our knowledge and pass it to the next generation more easily. We started building machines and looking at the world around us. We started looking at ourselves and learning how the body works, how to fix it when it breaks. Medicine evolved and health care took off, life expectancy increased, and ultimately in my opinion the possibility for further “natural” human evolution stopped. I emphasize “natural” because I don’t believe humans as a species have stopped evolving, we just stopped doing it naturally. Any evolution that takes place now is “created” by man. Natural evolution involves natural selection with random gene mutations. Since we are the top of the food chain we have no predators and with modern health care most genetic mutations are dealt with medicinally or never have a chance to pass on genetically. Technological evolution on the other hand is increasing at an exponential rate.

Look at the last 100 years and think of how far man has come intellectually. Now think about computers and how far they have come in the last 50 years. If we follow Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on a computer’s CPU will double every 24 months. Simply put, a standard PC’s speed will double every two years. This law was developed in 1962 and has held pretty true ever since. To demonstrate let’s do a simple calculation. We will use a standard home pc as a reference for computer speed.

2006 – Baseline Computer Speed
2008 – 2 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2010 – 4 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2012 – 8 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2014 – 16 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2016 – 32 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2018 – 64 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2020 – 128 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2022 – 256 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2024 – 512 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2026 – 1,024 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2028 – 2,048 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2030 – 4,096 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2032 – 8,192 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2034 – 16,384 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed
2036 – 32,768 Times Faster Than Baseline Computer Speed

As you can see here, in just 30 years the speed of the average home PC is almost 33,000 times faster.

 

Moravec’s Extension

graph
click here to enlarge. Graph by courtesy of Hans Moravec.

Moore’s Law can be projected backwards since before the dawn of “silicon chips”, right back through the earlier computer and calculator technologies of clockwork, relays, electronic valves (US tubes), and discrete transistors. Moravec also normalises the data to “processing power per $1000 (1997)” to produce a “bang per buck” version of Moore’s Law. When the data is plotted it can be seen that Moore’s Law has leapt seamlessly from technology to technology, always finding a new one before the old one ran out of steam. So, if this trend persists, we can expect it to leap again, and again, and again. Forever? It turns out that we needn’t worry about forever, because something very interesting indeed happens in the next few decades. Within a few decades $1000 (1997) will be able to buy a computer with the processing power of the human brain, according to our current best estimates of what that is. Such is the magic of this kind of exponential growth of computer power (doubling every 24 months) that it doesn’t matter if we have underestimated the power of the human brain by a factor of 10, 100, or even 1,000. In the extreme case of an underestimate of 1,000 we simply have to wait another fifteen years for the requisite computer power to arrive. And we only have to wait another ten years for these $1,000 computers to be 100 times more powerful than a human brain. Would you prefer to wait until the computers were as powerful as the summed brain power of the entire planetary human population of six billion people? You will just have to wait another 50 years.

Okay so a computer has all this power, so what, it can perform math fast. Power without intelligence does not sound like such a bad thing, right? But, when you add A.I (Artificial Intelligence) to the equation things start to get really interesting. Right now A.I. software is not very impressive a dog or cat is much more intelligent than any A.I. software we currently have. For demonstration purposes lets just say A.I. intelligence currently is at the level of an ant. In twenty or thirty years it may be at the level of a dog or cat. Now imagine your dog or cat with the computnig power of the entire world. This is when it starts getting scary. Then with the power of expenential growth in two years that power doubles and two years after that it doubles again. So what would a computer do with the intelligence of a dog or cat and the computing power of the world. I don’t know, it could be our salvation or our destruction. Technological Singularity is not just about computing power or artificial intelligence, the internet and nanotechnology will also play a huge role also. The internet is this huge beast that is also growing incredibly fast. Its quickly collecting, catagorizing and indexing the knowledge of the entire world. No take the computer that is as powerful as the combined computing power of every person alive, add in an A.I. system as smart as your dog and feed it with all the knowledge of the world. Finally lets look at nano-technology. Nano-technology is in its infancy right now, but following the same rate of advancement it will play a huge role in the future. I see nano-technology being as influencetial as computers were on mankind. We also have to look at how all these technologies will work when they are brought together and nerged with humans, or augmented. Imagine the knowledge of the internet seemlessly connected to your brain, imagine the computing power of every human alive in the palm of your hand, imagine endless amounts of storage space, little computers swimming around in your blood stream repairing your body and an A.I. system making sense of it all for you.