Singularity is Coming (or not)

Aready some time ago, I read Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Now I saw his talk at TED. There is also a documentary out, The Transcendent Man (official site). The message is very simple and often repeated: we are developing faster. He is the techno-cult guru and his message may be a consolation for people afraid of technological change or afraid of dying. In this post I will look at some points of his talk at TED.

Watch Ray Kurzweil talk at TED. His talk is titled "how technology will transform us."



I found a joke while I was peering through some articles and I found it very to the point. Credit goes to slashdot commentator L. VeGas [1]:
Pessimist: "That glass is half empty."
Optimist: "That glass is half full."
Kurzweil: "The self-cloning milk in that glass will replicate thanks to nanobots and end world hunger."

Kurzweil basically shows graphs to prove that we are approaching the "singularity". The concept of singularity denotes a point in time where change accelerates very very fast (sloppy wording intended). It seems obvious that growth is accelerating (maybe every generation experiences it anew) and the notion of singularity is very fuzzy. Basically Kurzweil is doing a technical chart analysis extrapolating the graphs into the future and saying "hey, see how fast!" This was critized as exponential growth fallacy by Paul Davies in Nature reviewing Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near.

However I like to see the graphs and since they are licensed under creative commons (attribution), I wanted to put one here on my blog to see it more often. So the graph below was created by Ray Kurzweil and I found it on wikipedia.

Jürgen Schmidhuber, an eminent German scientist in artificial intelligence, also shows historic dates on his history page and argues for an omega point. However he cautions it could be a cognitive bias that we remember recent dates better than more ancient and states that historians in the 16th century thought, speedup of breakthroughs of Western bookprint (around 1444) and the re-discovery of America (1492), the Reformation (1517), indicated a convergence of history.

The growth in knowledge is due to so-called second order feedback factors of technological growth (increase in the carrying capacity of land, better health care, demographic growth, more inventions, ..., see wikipedia entry on Andrey Korotayev). I found graphs of market penetration of technologies together with an analysis of these factors such as found in The Skeptical Environmentalist, see earlier post, far more useful than chart hanami.

An interesting point he makes is that transhumanism will come unavoidably with technological progress, but this will be the topic of another post.