I know what you're thinking: "The Singularity - What is Mike talking about? This must be stupid." I'm here to say that it might be stupid, but bear with me because I can't decide if it is, and I need to know the public consensus.
The Singularity is this theory I have been reading far too much about that there will come a time when "computers transcend biology." Think about that for a moment: computers...transcend...biology. In other words, there will come a time when computers are so advanced that they have moved beyond the limitations of biology; beyond what we now think of as computers, and into some biocomputing nano-thing.
The book I'm reading right now is The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It sounds like a joke, and you'd think he was some two-bit writer that didn't cite his references, or that didn't know his shit, but sadly, the book has over 100 pages of references, and the man teaches at Stanford. So he's qualified to write about crazy future ideas.
Imagine if technological change occurred at an exponentially exponential rate (crazy, I know), and that in about 33 years - give or take - we will experience the Singularity. At that point, computers will be able to build themselves. Software will write itself, and because it is being written by software that doesn't make mistakes like ordinary humans, new versions and steps forward in technology will happen so quickly that we won't be able to keep up. It sounds crazy at first, but then you start to think about it: We have programming languages, and we have Integrated Development Environments that help us mortals to write software. Is it so crazy to think that the two might merge, and that software might write itself?
Yes? OK, you're probably referring to the fact that computers don't have creative powers. This is true, but, like a child, they can learn language autonomously, and build themselves autonomously already. For example, out here in the Bay Area, we're near Google, who has just rolled out a new service called Goog-411. Basically, you call 1-800-Goog-411, and a machine will record your voice, ask you what location and business name. It will then (seemingly without fail), give you the phone number for the location, and connect you (for free). It's great, and what's more amazing is that the success of your call teaches the computer how to better help the next person. The more people call, the better it works.
So, we have computers that can build themselves already, and we have computers that could theoretically write themselves from the ground up. Imagine if we had computers that could analyze the news, and attempt to fix problems.
All of the above seems plausible to me, more or less. I mean, forty years ago, we didn't even have computers. Now we have ones that can write the entire human genome on a CD, or if you prefer, it can do it eight or nine times on a DVD. That's all the information needed to create a human. On a CD. Is it so crazy to believe that computers will be able to do what we humans can? I'm not so skeptical any more. Will the timing be around 2040...I think it may. Freaky.
Yeah write more about this.
But first, have you read Accelerando? Charles Stross wrote it as 9 short stories a few years ago, and they were collected into a novel that he put under Creative Commons. It's hiliarious and thought-provoking, and more than terrifying. It definitely informs my thinking about the "singularity" more than anything else.
Did you check out the Singularity Summit? I went last year, and wasn't disappointed- I got to hear Cory Doctorow, Ray Kurzwiel, Nick Bostrom, and Doug Hofsteadter speak, all of them were very interesting- VERY different viewpoints.
I'm not completely sold on the concept, but at the very least it's an useful lens to view the future through- or be unable to accurately view the future through as the case may be.
I have a copy of "the age of spiritual machines" on my pile, but i'm not sure when I'll get around to it- you're welcome to it if you want.
By the way-
hi mike.
-Nathan
You should see my stack of books. It's well out of control. Actually, I'm only about half through Kurzweil, but I figured I'd post on it a couple times before I'm through.
I hadn't seen the Singularity Summit. We're going next year.
This isn't necessarily responding to your topic of singularity. I just wanted to address the comment of writing the entire human genome on a CD. That technically isn't all the information needed to create a human. There are many theories and models proposed for what influences and directs certain genes to be turned on but not others. The burgeoning field right now is epigenetics, which deals with modification patterns on chromatin. Modifications on histones (the proteins that DNA is wrapped around when compacted) determines whether a particular area of the DNA is accessible to be transcribed or not. The modifications do not change the sequence of the DNA.
There's also the issue of environment. An example is the chirality of a snail's shell. The direction in which the shell spirals has been found, in at least one species (though which one it was escapes me at the moment), to be determined by the maternal womb. An embryo from a dextral snail which should be dextral as well, when transplanted into a sinistral mother will come out sinistral.
Anyway, my point is that annotating a genome in no way explains completely how to create a human. It simply allows for comparison between species because sequence conservation usually translates to something being established early on in evolution. So to try to relate it back to your topic of singularity, computers won't be able to create a human from the human genome, so maybe it will just think that we are obsolete and give up and wipe out people from the planet. Nice! .... Like I said, very Matrix-y.
cathleen
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