The Singularity

I had a meeting today and afterwards me and my business associates (doesn't that sound all professional and formal) went out and had a late lunch. Lunches are usually pretty leisurely when we get together and I had not seen one of the two for a few months so we had some catching up to do.

We chatted about life, my move, what we saw coming in the business world and about cloud computing. Both me and one of the two people I was with manage systems groups. My friends and I (business associates can be friends) all have our own circles and insight into other arenas. Well one of the two had a friend from Silicon valley who he saw recently that was telling him where Silicon Valley saw the next wave coming. It is called the Singularity. I think he was a bit surprised that I knew about it already.

He told me that he had now heard the word used twice in the last ten days, once by his Silicon Valley friend and once by me. I sort of gave him a quick rundown on what it means and why it was disturbing. The purpose of this post is to expound upon it for him and give him some links so that he can get a good starting point.

I will start with a Wikipedia page on the Technological Singularity.

I will attempt to explain the concept in it's most basic terms. The idea is that technology is increasing at an ever increasing rate. This is called Moore's Law. They then extrapolate that artificial intelligence (computer generated questions and answers) are also subject to Moore's law. They believe that life, like technology, is driven by an increase in evolution.

Again the idea is that computers could one day improve upon their own design on their own and thereby someday surpass the intelligence of humans. A super-intelligence. For those who read my prior post on crowd sourcing it should be apparent that I am not in agreement. A Wikipedia article on Crowd Sourcing.

The human rather than giving up control, it is believed, would need to harness this super-intelligence. It is believed that in order to do this humans would need to accept transhumanism. Transhumanism is the modification of human beings using either technology or gene modification so that we could compete with the machines. The term sometimes thrown around is intelligence amplification.

Here is an article written this month by someone who sort of thinks we are already there.

This may all be news to most people; but, I have been writing and talking about these things for quite awhile. Somebody who also wrote about this, though clearly not a pacifist, was Ted Kazynski (The Unabomber). He wrote a "Manifesto" that has ever been quoted by some in the Technology field. He was against where he thought things were going. Apparently the man who committed the recent killings in Norway made his own Manifesto and stole from The Unabomber's Manifesto.

All that I have written and linked to is discussed quite openly by people in the tech businesses. At least the one's at the forefront of it. The problem, as I see it, is that the average person does not even know that this is being discussed, the future of humanity, where we go from here. My friend is a pretty smart guy and does manage a systems group and he had never heard about this till ten days ago. I would bet that 90% plus of the population don't know anything about it and certainly the people in most of the world don't know about it.

I don't believe in the singularity. You see there is something that technology cannot surpass, the autistic, intellectual outliers. They destroy the algorithms. All computer programs make assumptions and the most basic assumptions determine where the logic can lead to. As all paths can lead to an dead end, there is no way of a limited human determining in advance the basic assumptions that the path should have that will lead to the ultimate perfect answer. It is a God joke and he does love jokes.

Now, here is why artificial intelligence cannot duplicate human intelligence, the autistic. People who are autistic have been pre-wired to see things that nobody else in the world can see, not even other autistic people. A little boy that can look at rows and rows of numbers and immediately tell you what they add up to has the gift of Asperger's. No computer can do that as fast as one kid who has the gift in that area. The answers are not calculated, they are known, it is in the DNA.

The idea by Transhumanists is that we can give everyone the mental abilities of those who have Aspergers. It doesn't work that way. In order for the singularity to occur either all outliers would need to be eliminated or all humans would need to have the abilities of those with Aspergers. Here is the problem, people with Aspergers don't work well together and cannot understand each others gift. You see the gene that creates it is never in the same place for any two individuals.

This is one of my longer and more boring posts; but, I do hope everyone of my readers reflects on the whole thing because people are determining your future for you and these things are being worked on. Jail does not imprison a man, that is in your mind. Free will and free thought are what make us human. People with Aspergers have a little less free will because they are born knowing a thing. Having said that, the vast majority of their lives are spent trying to deal with that knowledge and how it effects their personal lives. They also trade understanding social cues because their minds are always calculating.

This then is where the whole singularity thing gets hilarious (God has a sense of humor). When I was born the odds of being born autistic was 1 in 10,000, it is now less than 1 in 100. I do hope you see the humor in it all. Human innate knowledge is evolving faster than computers and cannot be competed with. Rather than face a world of autistic people. Lets talk about that for a second. Intelligence is measured on a curve. There are retarded people (sorry for the language, I don't know what other word to use; but, am open to suggestions and willing to edit) and geniuses. It is no different with people who are autistic, there are really smart ones and less intelligent ones). Right now in the world there are attempts to eliminate them all. I meant "cure".

Wisdom comes by learning and that requires effort and pain. It requires growth. Humans are still evolving and that is all that matters. We grow as a species and rely on past learning and the ability to continue knowing and learning what was previously learned, that is a dead man's switch for nature. No species can too quickly evolve and you can have too many outliers, they do not cooperate well unless all parts are moving forward and have agreement.