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A gentle but fairly thorough taste can be found in Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". Also check out http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=1
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/

I am sure interested entities can google more.

The Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray Kurzweil

It offers a very well reasoned argument as to 1) why the technological singularity must occur, and 2) why SETI is likely a failure. Actually, I would suggest reading Vernor Vinge's writings on the singularity, then read Kurzweil's work above.

One should then read the story (posted at k5?) called "The Metamorphisis of Prime Intellect".

Finally, read Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's book "Linked" (network theory), Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" and Steven Johnson's "Emergence" (emergence theory), and Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" (The Principle of Computational Equivalence).

There are many more references, both fictional and non-fictional (for entertainment purposes only, I also suggest the anime "Serial Experiments: Lain") - but these which I have listed detail a staggering breadth of information which, after you have digested it and left it to simmer in your mind, just might change your opinions and worldview in radical directions.

Lastly - a plea for help: Does anybody here know of any papers or references from reputable sources which discuss why the singularity can't occur, or is wrong in some manner? I have only read one side of the debate, and I would like to hear the other.

WARNING: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears

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1. Costs too much in comparison to a car that moves in 2-dimensions (in terms of $ and energy).
2. Not as safe - there STILL isn't enough AI computing power to control the traffic and fly the masses safely through the 3D "skyways". Maybe the idiots in the 50s really did think that anyone who could drive could surely be a pilot too?
3. Noise.
4. Parking space.
5. (Why move your body physically, when in many cases it's more efficient to do it virtually?)

What gets me mad, though, is how people like to trot this wheres-my-flying-car(!) example out every time they're waxing pessimistic about present day futurism.

I guess I might as well give up on that Moon vacation. Not going to happen in my lifetime at this rate. :(

Cheer up. As long as you've got at least another decade of life left in you, you'll make it to the crossover point where it can be extended indefinitely, because the rate of technological progress is actually exponential.

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Wow - you actually assume that humans will NEVER EVER improve upon their own evolved design? That we'll NEVER unlock the mystery of the brain and TRANSCEND to better post-human forms?

That's a mighty big assumption on your part; our exponential technological progress is plenty justification that we'll get there sooner rather than later.

So why are you such the bio-chauvinist? Religious reasons? Or are you just not psychologically willing to accept the possibility of something other than the age-old bio-human life?

Biology is not destiny.

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Even if there were a "natural brain" competition class, it would be more like the Special Olympics once most everyone else was augmented. I'd be thinking, "Look at those pathetic meat-brains! They can't even do simple calculus in under 1 millisecond like the X30-implant can! Haha. Amusing luddites."

(the steroid analogy doesn't really apply here because most people aren't on them themselves, but when athletes *DO* use stealthy enhancement drugs, and the latest in training/materials, it makes for a more interesting spectacle despite the 'cheating' hypocrisy. If most people were also physically improved cyborgs, that attitude would change, and it would the 'aided-human' class that got the spotlight.)

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Whatever helps you sleep at night, but the exponential rate of technological progress would indicate otherwise. Our control over matter is getting increasingly finer-grained, and that control will be complete within a few more decades (that is, if we even survive the increasing mismatch between the promise/danger of our tech and our primitive evolutionary psychology).

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As an individual who has always had a fascination with epistemology, I find that I learn better when I see the big picture and the connections/relationships between sets of knowledge. This is the main reason why I so embrace the Wikipedia project in that the user is not limited to the "2-dimensional plane" that a single article might offer, but instead can move vertically between areas of knowledge by using the links within articles.

On that note, are there plans to make use of any innovative user interfaces for organizing knowledge? Specifically, I have in mind something akin to The Brain, a sort of visual neural network for knowledge that I first saw used at Ray Kurzweil's site. Could you forsee a tool similar to this as enhancing Wikipedia's functionality?

No, we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet.

Even though we are now on the steepening knee of the billions-of-years-old exponential curve to Singularity, almost nobody(*) is aware of just how damn fast the rate of change will be accelerating to get us there (in about 25 years). As the pace of progress continually speeds up over the next few decades, though, the Singularity meme will spread as quickly as our inability to understand it (and a rash of crappy Singularity movies will probably be made :)

When your average Joe is forced to abandon his cozy inuitively linear view of the rate of change, and begins shitting his pants, we'll be very close.

(*) Except for a few "whacko" Singularitarians, transhumanists, etc. You could probably fit everyone who's are of the Singularity today -- and takes it dead seriously -- in one football stadium.

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It'll be about 25 years before our computers can match the parallelism and capacity -- but not speed, since transistors've always been faster than a synapse -- of the human brain's hundred billion+ neurons. But in 25 years there will be far more important things happening than Go :)

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I think that robots winning against a human team will happen much much later than 2050.

It's more a gut feeling than a "sicentific based" prediction

Your "gut feeling" is more accurately described as the "common-sense intuitive linear" view of the rate of change, and it would be wrong.

It took evolution 1 billion years to create animals that run around and "act smart".

If you'd look a little closer, you'd notice that each evolutionary advancement took exponentially less time. Exponential progress is a feature of ANY evolutionary system, including technology.

From the Law of Accelerating Returns:

If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.

With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation. In this way, human technology is distinguished from the tool making of other species. There is a record of each stage of technology, and each new stage of technology builds on the order of the previous stage.

The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel--took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn't exist at all a decade ago.

Robotics is just one advancing tech we'll see on the shortening road to the Singularity.

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It's probably the nanotube/nanotech pessimists who are ignorant of the law of accelerating returns.

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It seems like we're always on the cusp of the failure of Moore's law

Actually Moore's law* has been not only held steady, but accelerated for over 100 years. Back through integrated circuits, back through transistors, back through vaccum tubes, back through relays, all the way back to at least 1900 and electro-mechanical devices.

Moore's law is not currently on the "cusp of failing". We have enough known engineering improvements in the pipeline to keep Moore's law on track for over a decade. We have a whole host of experimental technologies, any one of which could give Moore and an etirely new lease on life. Anything from Quantum computation to carbon nanotube networks to optical computation to nanotechnology to who-knows-what in 2025.

Ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Hold on to your seats boys and girls, things are going to be getting extremely interesting over the next few decades.

* Footnote: Yes, Moore's law was orginally stated in terms of doubling the number of transistors on a chip. The more mordern and useful formulation is the doubling of calculations per second per dollar.

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The "3D displays to come" that hold the most promise, however, will require that you wear (non-dorky) viewing glasses. These normal looking glasses will use a safe Retinal Scanning laser to directly overlay 3D imagery onto your field of view. Of course, we won't see this tech in BestBuy until the Law of Accelerating Returns has run the course of a few more years.

It's not too hard to think of several killer apps for augmented vision that make all other conventional displays pale in comparison. Even a wall-sized OLED display would take 2nd.

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Each new tech advance is more powerful and more accessible than the last, but the minds that wield it are relatively stagnant and still saddled with millions of years of selfish evolutionary baggage which we won't be able to fix for quite a while yet.

Humankind is within ~30 years of reaching the vingean Singularity, and the only question is the odds on making it without sabotaging ourselves first. IMO, the odds are very low, but unlike Bill Joy, I don't think there's any point in attempting to STOP or even slow this progress -- all we can do is try to safely guide the tech and hope for the best.

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... Crichton's book Prey, which had a similar discussion of swarming optics. Then the little buggers all turned on the humans and death ensued. That could never happen, right?

I think that Kurzweil is the man. He tends to be a little alarmist, I guess... Either way, I think it's certainly worthwhile to check his site now and then. He's constantly posting new articles about extending life, as well as AI and "the singularity." Interesting to think about, whether you believe him or not.

Molecular manufacturing is "just around the corner"

If you're young, then maybe for your grandchildren.

In our lifetimes, actually - as long as you're healthy and younger than ~60. You see, the rate of overall technological progress (not just "Moore's Law") has been increasing exponentially for a long time, and we're just now on the knee of the accelerating curve to Singularity, so the future will get here much faster than you think. And nanotech itself isn't the (deadly) destination anyway, but a stepping stone.

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Too much energy? We're not even a Type 1 civilization yet. No, what we're going to have to face is intelligent energy use, because demand will continue to grow exponentially.

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Required reading for any so-called Futurist should be The Law of Accelerating Returns , which is more comprehensive than the more familiar Moore's "law".

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

When confronted by this for the first time, a lot of people are understandablyshocked, and quick to dismiss it.

Well, the reason for RIAAs accelerating demise of authority is simply because they have not kept up with the big race.
Uh, Pius-who?

A truly intelligent radio signal would be a compressed, encrypted, low-energy, point-to-point mesh network, and thus indistinguishable from background noise. This is even the direction our comms are going.

An inefficient RF broadcast that sticks out like a sore thumb should last a cosmic blink of an eye in the technological evolution of a civilization to Singularity.

In 100 years (actually, more like ~25), I doubt that we'll still be so limited by our slow organic brains. It's not just hard drives that are improving exponentially...

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First off, it's spelt Asimov.

And it was Clarke who put forward the idea that Geostationary orbits would be ideal for satellite communication.

Asimov and Clarke wrote science fiction as a broad genre - space operas, speculative fiction and the like, and was not tied to any science per-se.

And Gibson sure as hell has won quite a lot of accolades, and some of his books have been made into movies, too (Matrix is based on some of his ideas, Johnny Mnemonic is also a book by him).

It's just that in this context, Gibson fits in as one of the very few authors who would deserve to have their names up there.

The only other author I can think of (and no, Stephenson does not count) who could be up there is Ray Kurzweil.

Here is my 'sci-fi' grant proposal. I hope you approve:

1. Wait for advanced nanotechnology and brain-scanning tech to emerge over the next 25 years. I'll still need funding during this period to analyze the research landscape for suitable bla bla (i.e. sit on my ass.)
2. Launch a 'seed' probe using the old space elevator.
3. Have the seed probe attach to any unclaimed, suitably-sized asteroid and self-assemble the solar arrays, dish, and computing substrate necessary for a couple million transhuman beings + "matrix" environment.
4. "Broadcast" the willing scanned human minds from Earth for $0/lb (and let the bio-luddites join the dinosaurs.)
5. Grow our new home into a dyson-sphere-sized Matrioshka Brain around the Sun to add to the "missing [thinking] matter" out there. :)
6. No profit.

Hahahahahah! 600 years? Not a lot of time? ... AhhhhHahahhahaahah!!!

I've got your short-term & long-term right here.

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Perhaps not, but this paper (posted on /. before) by Ray Kurzeil gives an interesting hypothesis about why it might actually be a 'law' of intelligence http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html

I find that double exponential growth that Kurzeil talks about seems pretty obvious to me, and really gets me psyched up. Also, during the application of that 'limited' amount of computation we'll have after the 600 years to certain human centric problems will probably still leave us enough CPU for some really cool holo-deck programs....

"The parts for a DNA synthesizer can now be purchased for approximately $10,000. By 2010 a single person will be able to sequence or synthesize 10^10 bases a day. Within a decade a single person could sequence or synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet many times over in an eight-hour day or sequence his or her own DNA within seconds. Given the power and threat of biological technologies, the only way to ensure safety in the long run is to push research and development as fast as possible. Open and distributed networks of researchers would provide an intelligence gathering capability and a flexible and robust workforce for developing technology."

Ray Kurzweil wrote an interesting book about the progression of technology over the next 100 years. Based on his law of accelerating returns, he predicts various events for the next few decades until the Singularity.

The book was published in 2000, and already he'd made quite a few accurate predictions, and many since then have been accurate as well.

That might be comforting for you to think, but the truth is that the new "long-term" future isn't really that far away thanks to the exponentially accelerating rate of technological progress.

It's time to update your overly conservative view of the future... (if you can bear to throw out your but-wheres-my-flying-car-cynicism).

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We're experiencing exponentially accelerating change and it only makes sense that the people who haven't tuned out (older farts) will be task switching far more often in an attempt to keep up. Brevity is a sign of the times. Gimme my sound-bites. Is this post too long? Yeah. Skip it. More valuable info out there.

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As to why I claim that nanotech is a near-term probability, rather than hundreds or thousands of years off - it's because the law of accelerating returns convinces me that the future will arrive much sooner than most people are comfortable thinking about.

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This is exactly what Ray Krutzweil describes right here:

KurtzweilAI.net

"We're entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today's rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace."

Faschinating reads can be found on this website!

A quote I have hanging on my wall:

"Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

That will only become more true as the pace of change quickens. Artificial scarcity be damned.

(Right beside that quote I've also got a few Singularity quotes, about the exponential nature of progress, and the likelihood of mankind surving these next few critical decades.)

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No.

Before mid-century we'll have the option to become immortal (if it doesn't conflict with your religious beliefs), and have begun the process of human IA (Intelligence Amplification) on our way to Singularity. More than enough time to live out many fantasies.

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Friend of mine is an airline pilot, and even he will admit that it's likely his career will be cut short by advancing tech.

(OT: and since tech is advancing exponentially, it'll replace many more jobs than it creates, which is too bad if you live a country where welfare is still a dirty word.)

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I wonder if Ray Kurzweil's predictions) about nanotech will be correct. He claims that nanotech will peak in the late 2020's and that we will see it solve a lot of the worlds problems including poverty during this century.

Plus, of course, the expectation in SF is both that the writer gets all current science right, and that extrapolations are (as much as possible) plausible. MC doesn't have to care about that, and it shows (warning: spoilers for Prey): he isn't writing for a science fiction audience.

Back in 1999 the Foresight Institute released the first version of the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology. MC's "nano" researchers followed none of the major principles of molecular nanotechnology safety. Had they done so, the novel wouldn't exist.

That the WaPo article itself didn't mention the Foresight Institute is a mistake: it makes it seem like scientists haven't been thinking about this, when in fact they've been thinking about and writing about these issues for years.

The problem is that most people don't account for the exponential nature of technological progress, and instead project linearly based on the *CURRENT RATE* of progress. If more people would view technological change (in aggregate) in the same light as Moore's Law then they'd realize how much faster the future will get here than they realize (notwithstanding *BAD* predictions like flying cars and meal-in-a-pill).

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Apparently your definition of 'mature nanotech' is a bit conservative. :)

When nanotech has really matured (in less than 25 years), there will be no point in detecting illness, because bio-based humans will always be in a perfect known-good state of health with artificial immune systems and cell-repair for micro to macro problems.

And on the topic of this story - mine detection - one of first uses of mature nanotech will be to make a quick, cheap, finely grained 3D map of the earth down to the mantle without disturbing anything. All the mines will be found, fossils found, oil found, lost treasure found ... no more buried mysteries (boring?).

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luddite (2) - One who opposes technical or technological change. You are a luddite, because you oppose the change. You don't mind technology, as long as it doesn't really change anything. You may accept bigger TV, faster and more efficient car, cheaper computers, but you don't want change, you are afraid of it, you hate uncertainty. That is normal, most people feel this way, but that is because they are weak, stupid and cowardly.

This technology has the potential to change the world. It will change the world, or rather one of it's next iterations. The exponential growth in the number of people connected to computers and in total brain-computer traffic has already started. We don't notice it, like we didn't notice Internet in 1970s, but it is here. Expect brain-computer networking to be a bigger hit in 2015 than Wi-Fi was in 2000.

*sigh* ... You're still stuck in the thinking that technological progress is linear, when history shows that it's in fact exponential, and that we're just now on the steep knee of the curve. i.e. We've reached the Tipping Point and the future isn't as far away as you think it is.

I'm doing my best to help this unpopular meme spread.

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You need to familiarize yourself with The Law of Accelerating Returns.

The future is closer than you think, and getting closer all the time.

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Current estimates by Robert Freitas suggest that it is going to require at least a trillion nanorobots in place within the brain and most probably the installation of an extensive fiber optic network to handle the required bandwidth to provide a matrix-like interface (either for real time full bandwidth human-computer interfaces or for brain/mind uploading into a computer). This may be documented to a limited extent in Ray Kurzweil's forthcoming book The Singularity is Near (est. publication early 2005) and perhaps to a greater extent in several years when Nanomedicine Volume III is published.

Very cool, since you could get that information ANONYMOUSLY (in an open mesh network), vs the current cell providers' plans to provide "location based services" because they know exactly who and where you are at all times.

Augmented reality will open up all kinds of possibilities. Vernor Vinge's short story Fast Times at Fairmont High is great take on such a fast-paced and interconnected future.

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The inevitability of artificial, perfect diamond has DeBeers white in the face. It also provides more fuel for the The Law of Accelerating Returns (rather than "Moore's Law").

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That's because it's human nature to want to see YOUR group succeed at the expense of another -- Tribalism/Nationalism is alive and well beneath the facade of civilization. It really does boil down to the evolutionary psychology of selfish genes.

I don't pretend to be above that, subconsciously, but consciously I truly think that the more intelligent human minds that are this planet (at the same time), the better off we'll all be in the end.

Economic equality (the wealth gap) probably will get much more obscene over the next few years, but soon enough all the minds in India+China+America+Everywhere will invent the end of scarcity (the scarcity that matters most anyway), and that's not just wishful thinking on my part. TRUE equality on all counts would be wishful thinking, though, because it would require some serious genetic engineering to get rid our nastier evolutionary traits.

(I realize that most people reading this comment probably think I'm a nut at this point.)

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Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

AI and IA is an inevitability in our lifetime as long as ancient exponential trends continue on track.

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