Singularity…

This article (the singularity) has been floating around on the internet for a couple years (it is based upon a 1993 talk at NASA by Vernor Vinge). The premise of this idea (conjecture) is that firstly, we are in the midst of a huge paradigm change, a cultural revolution brought on by the growth of computers and the internet. Professor Vinge’s assertion is that there is a likely case where machine intelligence and capabilities of computers and the internet are such that the growth of this power could result in the creation of superhuman intelligences…this would effectively render us (just average human intelligences) as obsolete…

As with Professor Vinge’s fiction works, this certainly is an idea which displays some impressive and far reaching imagination. As an assertion this is as plausible as many other (far less ominous) outcomes. My prime reservation in jumping onto this bandwagon is that it has the same value as a climate scientist decrying the end of the world through global climate change, or of a humanities professor presuming that we are at the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

At least with the Singularity idea and the Gutenberg Parenthesis, I see two different means to describe, and then to extrapolate beyond what is a reasonable notion, that of the fact that the world is indeed changing dramatically because of computer technology. The fact that we are increasingly more and more connected with other people, with data, and with breaking news from all over the world is much more than a mere ‘gee whiz’ , Popular Science kind of experience. The way we do things has changed.

Most of the effort involved in the 19^th century’s development of a nascent world trade (i.e. relentless amounts of documentation, record keeping, and other forms of clerical duties) has been replaced with machines taking on the vast brunt of all of that mindless, droning work. There are few people, in even fewer jobs who haven’t been impacted by this growing change.

I’ve also written about the fact that the methods by which we gather information has been turned almost upside down by this data onslaught…obviously things are in the midst of change.

The Singularity perspective is based upon some (reasonable?) presumptions that the computer industry (hardware and software) may be able to create an environment wherein computer ‘awareness, sentience, or emergent intelligence will arise… there is still so much controversy in this topic area about what this really means, let alone of it could be possible that I probably wouldn’t be banking upon anything in this arena of decades (at the least…).

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is a related bit of conjecture steeped in post modernism, relativism, and could be seen as a standard bearing idea for some sort of antithesis to the 17^th and 18^th century European enlightenment (as well as much of the bits of science and technology since the time of Gutenberg).

It seems that these two disparate visions of the near future see our world as either a machine utopia, or a return to a ‘discursive’ (relativistic perspectives) world. These points are being driven by (in turn) a retired Mathematics professor (and science fiction author), and by what would seem to be a number of European scholastic intellectuals (mostly humanities professionals)… Is it just me, or are both of these perspectives brought on by their owners own biases?

What is The Singularity?
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

THE SINGULARITY
http://www.terrybisson.com/page3/page3.html