Its odd to find a book like this. In this day and age of apocalyptic scenarios and doomsday predictions, a world of 2012 hysteria and political carriers being built off of Global Warming scares, one is inundated with dystopian future and grim "we're all going to die/be miserable" tomorrow.
But then this book comes along and suggests that not only will the future be way nicer than previously anticipated but also that the future is going to be way more FUTURISTIC than previously anticipated.
The way to imagine it is thus: In the time between 1100 and 1200, we didn't change very much. People lived and died much as those that were born in 900 or in 1300 lived or died. Nationalities changed and wars were fought, but technology and the way of life stayed fairly constant. And then came the 15th century printing press, which took about 200 years to become fully entrenched in human affairs. Then in the 18th century, we got the steam engine. It took about 80 years for the steam engine's effects to be fully appreciated. In the 19th century, we invented the telephone, which was fully accepted by the 1950s. In the 1980s, we got the cellphone, which was fully adopted by the 1990s! Computers and the internet boomed with just the same speed...Moor's Law, a prediction made by a guy named Moor (astonishingly enough), states that computing power will increase along a predictable, exponential path.
And guess what! For the past 40 years of computing, it has been true. Well, mostly...there was a hiccup in the beginning as Moor overestimated the speed, so he revised and his revised Law is still used today.
Now, if you plot exponential growth, you'll notice that it starts off advancing slowly, then curves upwards till its rocketing up at incredible speeds.
This rocketing point is called the Singularity by the author of this book, Ray Kurzweil, and it will completely change everything in a massive change reaction that will take place over a few YEARS, and yet have more sweeping changes than we have had in ONE THOUSAND YEARS!
After the Singularity, things get rather comfortable. Amazing technology like nanomachines or virtual reality and genetic engineering and other things we can't even think of right now will banish most worldly problems, destroy the economy, and allow us to all live how we wish to live. Want to enhance yourself to think a billion times faster than you can now? Why not! Wanna live your life out in a VR booth, having adventures with other VR dwellers without ever moving? Sure!
And, of course, you can stay baseline. To the view of a baseline human, this future would appear rather similar to our own...the Enhanced (those who have altered their minds and bodies to be faster and smarter than the baselines) will be essentially human...but faster. They won't think the way we think now, and so there would be no reason why they would do any of the horrible things sci-fi authors love to predict. Ya know, things like enslave humanity, or force us to all Enhance ourselves, or anything dumb like that.
Why? What proof do I have that they will do this?
Well, I have only one thing: When you can produce anything, nothing material has value (Buddhist's wet dream) and so the only thing that has value is INFORMATION. And what are we if not information made manifest? We are the expression of information stored in our DNA, creating humans of marvelous complexity. And so, to destroy a human or any other living thing is destroying information, furthering the cause of entropy, and that would be bad...specially to beings capable of thinking of things on the scale of millions of years. And best of all, humans don't *really* need all that much, when we're thinking about this scale.
And so, a baseline will live in a paradise wherein they are provided by servile godlike beings who are always willing to step in and chat with their relatives. The more dickish Enhanced might condescend to humans, but we always have the ability to A) Enhance ourselves and smack them, or B) point out that the universe is big enough for everyone to be what they want to be or C) Just smile and nod and then go back to living in your paradise.
Now, what if you Enhance yourself and get nostalgic?
Well, who said that one has to STAY what you are. The ability to change from state to state would be within our grasp, so you can spend a few centuries as a free floating cloud of nanobots, then reform into a human body whenever you feel like it.
And so, we have a future wherein we design the children of humanity, and they in return, redesign us, allowing us to transcend our biology and become masters of our own destiny.
NOW!
Is this all too crazy optimistic? Possibly. See, this all hinges on one thing: MOORS LAW.
If Moors Law falls off and we stop seeing the same advances in computing technology, then we won't be able to develop A.I, which means we won't be able to figure out some answers to some very serious problems (Like, how do we make matter replicators? How can we live as long as we want too? How can we feed everyone?). Which means we will be in trouble.
However, if we continue to advance at the rate we are advancing, and if our RATE of advancement keeps advancing at the rate our rate of advancing is advancing, then we might see the Singularity by either 2040 or 2100.
I'm hoping for 2040, but planning for 2100.
See you on the other side.
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While Kurzweil is generally considered to be one of the more optimistic futurists out there, even he has some warnings for the future. There are many potential scenarios you've ignored that could lead to a very bad future for us after the singularity.
ReplyDeleteThe direst possibility is that superhuman artificial intelligence is created that simply does not care about human beings. It's intelligence may be so vast that it looks upon us as we look upon bacteria. Were it to run experiments on the world around it with as little concern for us as we have for single celled life, it could kill billions of humans not through any act of malice but simple indifference.
Another possibility is that some humans will object to the coming singularity and violently attempt to prevent it. Doing so might provoke a war between transhumans and "baseline" humans that could be quite deadly. (Hugo de Garis talks about this in a book called The Artilect War.)
There are still other possibilities, such as a posthuman intelligence transforming the Earth's matter into computronium in order to solve some giant mathematical problem. Again, this leaves us dead (or at least without a planet) just because a superior intellect has deemed its needs more important than ours.
A final note is that the coming of the singularity does not depend on the continuation of Moore's Law alone. In fact, Kurzweil estimates that we'll reach the physical limits of the integrated circuit in the next decade or two, which will signal the end of Moore's Law but the introduction of a new "paradigm." It could be quantum computing, holographic computing, or some form of biological computing - who knows. But the idea behind accelerating change is that whenever we run into a barrier, we adapt and soon come up with a new method of continuing exponential growth.
(Also, it's called Moore's Law.)