Over the last few months I have been reading about the Singularity Theory, a radical new myth for the near future that is currently energising the digital tech industry based in Silicon Valley.
Depending on your point-of-view the Singularity will be either incredible or terrifying. What is clear though is that the real power and influence to guide and alter society has shifted, from politicians and even from financial institutions to the tech billionaires. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Larry Ellison are the new rulers of the world.
This long-form essay, which I will split over the coming days into smaller parts, is my attempt to explain the Singularity, examine its origins and argue my case for why I believe it will ultimately fail to materialise in quite the benevolent revolution the technologists dream.
Part 1
As I sit at the table a waterfall cascades down the side of the kitchen units and onto the surfaces. The foglet swarms amass this projection entirely at the whim of my imagination, I can feel the light spray on my cheeks, hear the churn of the froth, and almost smell the salmon that leap occasionally from the flowing simulation.
The same nanobot entities sluice around my bloodstream, guardians of my biology, monitoring cell and organ performance, teeming along the neural pathways of my brain. These allow me to maintain a conversation with my father seated along the table from me whilst, simultaneously through a separate retinal overlay, teasing my virtualised girlfriend with fingers that spider up the inside of her thigh.
Meanwhile, my personal assistant is busy downloading ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Proust onto the neural net of my consciousness. The waterfall dissipates into a shrink-wrapped shield of advertising and my father disappears from the table. He had always hated these vulgar projections and so in his non-biological form he can avoid them entirely. In many such ways he found his physical death actually very liberating. The year is 2045 and the Singularity is here...
If the above reads as though it’s in danger of breaching the banks of the ridiculous then it would be worth considering that it is merely an imaginative tributary running towards the great delta of possibilities upon the realisation of the Singularity.
The abstract of Vernor Vinge’s seminal 1993 essay ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’ opens with the prophecy that:
‘...within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence...shortly after, the human era will be ended.’
The principles of this new epoch centre around the exponentially quickening pace of evolution, which point to the developments of intelligence itself – from the first emergence of matter and electromagnetic forces, the formation of galaxies, the development of prokaryotes (single-celled creatures), to homo sapiens and the manipulation of technology – occurring at an accelerating rate, with entropy increasing in lockstep.
Following the trend of Moore’s Law (the exponential growth rate of computational power, shrinking unit size and affordability over the last half-century), super-intelligent machines capable of self-replicating, self-updating, and expanding upon our own collective intelligence, will surpass human cognitive abilities within the new few decades.
In the process they will solve insurmountable problems from medicine, to the environment, work, education, and the holy grail of scientific inquiry, mortality. Humans and machines will gradually synergise as we soar toward the event horizon at which the intelligence-saturated universe finally ‘wakes up to itself’.
If this still reads like an L. Ron Hubbard-style fantasy to which only the most willfully deluded could subscribe, then you might wish to take note.
It is now a decade since the American scientist Ray Kurzweil published his epic ‘The Singularity is Near’, popularising the transhumanist movement and identifying the holy trinity of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics that currently ignite the pioneering beacon that is Silicon Valley.
Bizarre though many of his predictions may seem you need only look around at our already digitally-dependent society to see just how far such technology has come in such a brief period. Although Google Glass may have fallen on the sword of consumer vanity, the broadly positive response to Apple’s Smartwatch marks the point at which perhaps ‘wearable tech’ will sink its grappling irons firmly onto our biology.
Major multinationals such as Siemens AG and Cisco Systems are forging ahead in developing smart city capabilities through what has become known as the ‘Internet of Things’, in which everything from your car to your toaster will be interconnected via a Cloud-based interface – a lucrative market they have valued at around $1 trillion.
But it is Google who are at the vanguard of the Singularity, establishing the mysterious Google X in which 100 ‘shoot-for-the-stars’ ideas are being explored, unveiling their $1.2bn extended lifespan research centre Calico, and in 2012 hiring Ray Kurzweil himself as their Director of Engineering.
Google’s co-founder Larry Page, has raised the suggestion that we ‘set aside some small part of the world’ where innovation can proceed free from any regulatory control (to which the alarmist might recall to mind H.G. Wells’ ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’). They are also a major corporate sponsor of the Singularity University, founded in 2008 by Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, with ambassadors in 54 countries posted to attract and train the most innovative young minds to ‘think exponential rather than linear’.
Professor Mike Halsall, the UK ambassador for the Singularity University, is disarming and full of bonhomie when I meet him, apologising for not being “a more wacky transhumanist” and enthusiastically describing his involvement in trying to engage government on grand ‘global challenges’ and how new technology can help to transform them.
He describes himself as being a “Singularity pragmatist” (as opposed to the “rather more optimistic” Kurzweil), who is careful to couch any speculation as to current progress towards 2045 with provisos relating to inevitable regulation and uncertain forecasting structures. Indeed he is emphatic that regulatory measures (anathema for many technologists) will at some point have to materialise.
At times Halsall exercises a surprising note of caution – “ethics is the thing that all those in the tech industry need to be a lot more explicit about... there needs to be an infrastructure of ethics acting almost as a cell wall that ensures we don’t over-progress.”
He acknowledges it as a perplexing balancing act though, with those on the more optimistic end of the Singularity spectrum warning that overly stringent regulation could result in the technology gestating into nefarious forms in the underworld; already a considerable issue with reports of dubious Bitcoin exchanges and the rising threat of the ‘dark net’.
The Singularity then has become the 21st century’s most enigmatic myth, one that has the potential to alter humanity and the world in ways more radical than any previous historical transformation. Yet it is my contention that it will be unable to avoid withering on the ideological vine as so many other progressive dreams for the future of humankind have done before.
(Part 2 coming soon)
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