I can’t believe that
this article hasn’t gotten more run. I can’t recall any real discussion or chatter about it at all, yet it struck me as incredibly important. Either I’m going to be immortal around my mid-70’s or I’ll live to see man exterminated like so many insects. Let me explain the Singularity, as it’s called.
The Feb 10, 2011, Time Magazine Article by Lev Grossman (linked above) starts with a proposition… actually, proposition is too timid a word. It starts with a fact – Raymond Kurzweil’s appearance on Steve Allen’s “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1965, where he played a short piano composition for the four panelists, who then questioned him about the piece to learn his secret. His secret, as it turns out, was that he had designed and built a computer (kinda cool in ’65)… that composed the music that he played for the panelists. You can watch the show here on Youtube – (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4).
Needles to say, Kurzweil is a smart cookie. He’s got degrees, patents, and more brain power than you and I will ever have. He’s also made a study of what I’ll call a corollary to Moore’s Law (Moore’s law says that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles every two years.) Kurzweil did some number-crunching and determined that this seemed to hold for things like the amount of computing power you could buy for $1000 (measured in millions of instructions per second that the computer could do – or MIPS). The article notes that-
“Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. ‘It’s really amazing how smooth these trajectories are,’ he says. ‘Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions.’ Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.”
Now, you may be saying “No Duh” to yourself as you read this. Everyone knows that the pace of technology is increasing. Best Buy has a great commercial that satirizes this, that ends with a scene of a guy watching the movers unload his latest 3D television, while he looks at the advertisement on the side of the truck for the NEW 4D television. Your laptop is likely not “cutting edge” by the time it arrives after being shipped and you finish unpacking it. Seriously. Before your cell phone plan ends, even if you bought the latest and greatest, you need an “upgrade” to your phone if you want to keep pace.
Alvin Toffler wrote about this in “Future Shock,” in 1970, although Toffler’s book predicted people’s and society’s inability to cope with the change. But no one thought Toffler was nuts for suggesting that the speed of change was accelerating. But “accelerating” isn’t a concept our minds handle easily. Our minds are wired to deal with linear movement, and thus linear growth, and linear change. Linear growth does not look at all like exponential growth.
If I say I will give you a million dollars today or one penny, doubled every day for one month, which would you take? The million dollars seems like the no-brainer, right? Except that 1 penny, doubled every day for just 30 days equals $1,073,741,824. That’s over one BILLION dollars, or more than a thousand times the million I offered initially. It’s not that you suck at math, it’s that our minds just don’t handle that kind of accelerative growth very well at all. And if you guessed right, it wasn’t because you knew the answer, it’s because of the setup. You simply guessed there was a punchline.
So, what the hell does this have to do with Aristotle, the Terminator movies, and being human? I’ll explain in Part 2…
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| I’ll be back… |
