Many people are afraid of our accelerating future. I doubt that the name for our destination – “The Technological Singularity” – helps relieve any fear. There’s something sinister-sounding about any singularity, but this is a black hole in our timeline. You don’t have to be especially prone to worry for this to cause concern
In some ways “Singularity” is the perfect name. It accurately represents our ability to predict the future at some point – perhaps after super intelligence arrives. But for glass-half-full guys like me, the Singularity is less a falling to zero than an explosion in personal power – more life, more liberty, and more happiness.
The engine powering all this is exponential increases in computation. This is a trend commonly called Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law states that the size of each transistor on an integrated circuit chip will be reduced by 50 percent every twenty-four months. The result is the exponentially growing power of integrated circuit-based computation over time. Moore’s Law doubles the number of components on a chip as well as the speed of each component while price remains roughly constant.
Ray Kurzweil takes a broader view of this trend. Computation via the integrated circuit is just the latest paradigm that goes back to the arrival of RNA, if not before.
Wherever you place the starting line, the effect of exponential doubling is mind boggling. Here’s a graph showing the effect of twelve doublings. Each step forward is equal to all the progress of the past in just one unit of time. Phil has illustrated the power of this trend with an old parable:
A prince wanted to reward the inventor of chess for the wonderful new game. So the inventor asked for one grain of rice for the first square on the chessboard, two grains for the second, four for the third square and so on doubling for each square.
[The prince] dispatched one of his stewards to fulfill the order. It took the steward a while to report back, and when he did the news was not good. Although harvest was just completed, the gift was going to completely exhaust the royal granaries. And they were only on the 40th square!
In fact, it turns out that if you were to keep doubling until you reached the 64th square, you would have an amount of rice greater than the total yield of every rice crop in the history of the planet earth.
As remarkable as this story is, it fails to capture the full power of the trends we are experiencing. We aren’t just getting better computers. The exponential improvements in computation are fueling exponential trends in all areas of technology. To picture this we have to add a z-axis to our graph.
Our civilization is playing the rice game on Mr. Spock’s chessboard! Advancement on the computation board buys our way onto new boards: nanotech, genetic engineering, life extension, self-replicating universal constructors, etc. Advancement on the new boards can further fuel the progress of any other board or create new boards. It’s an explosion of knowledge in all directions.
