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Be there:

Wednesday, 12 December 2012 7:00 PM PST / 10 PM EST

For two days in May, three hundred librarians will meet with visionaries from the disciplines of anthropology, architecture, public policy and science to discuss the future of libraries. By looking outside of the library, we seek to explore unique ideas that will make the difference. Imagine merging information, inspiration and imagination to transform the way we look at our future. And then working together to build a solid foundation that will serve as a concrete plan with which to move forward.

The theme of the conference is an evocative one: Imagination to Transformation. Or if I may paraphrase: “live to see it.”

Speakers at the conference include Ray Kurzweil, Mary Catherine Bateson, Bob Treadway, and others. Should be a fascinating couple of days.

Part of the program will also involve an exercise derived from our Seven Questions About the Future. Remember those? We had a lot of great responses back in the day.

I saw a good show on PBS last night about an a villa excavated some time ago in Herculaneum (Pompeii’s upscale neighbor) where a library of more than 1800 ancient manuscripts was found, each one rolled up tight and toasted by Vesuvius. The efforts of scholars over the past couple hundred years to unroll (much less to read) these ancient books have been nothing short of heroic. There was initially hope that a lost tragedy of Sophocles or dialog of Plato might be found among these books; so far no such luck. But as modern chemistry makes it easier to unroll them, and new imaging technology makes it easier (and in many cases, possible) to read some part of them, we are learning quite a bit about the school of Epicurean philosophy to which they apparently belonged.

One of the papyri from Herculaneum

When picturing the library of the future, it’s hard not imagine some kind of Google interface connecting everything ever published to everything else ever published via logical, cognitive, and semantic linking schemes that we can hardly imagine now. But I think the tireless efforts to decipher these burnt manuscripts give us another hint as to the role that libraries will continue to play. Libraries aren’t just collections of books — they are a link with the past. When ancient books such as these are found, it’s as though some piece of the past that was lost has been restored to us.

This is also why the destruction of a great library — such as occurred in Alexandria at some point 1500-1800 years ago — represents such a tremendous loss. It’s as though some part of the past has been blotted out.

Libraries are the original databases and the original time machines. It will be very interesting spending a couple of days getting a handle on where libraries are going — and how in the future they will be even more effective at showing us where we’ve been.

The Doomsday Clock, based at the University of Chicago, has been ticking off the metaphorical minutes until apocalyptic midnight since the beginning of the cold war between the U.S. and former Soviet Union–circa 1947. In those days, the threat of the U.S.S.R. launching nuclear weapons kept school children hunkered under their desks, practicing bomb drills as naively as they did tornado and fire drills.

The demise of the Soviet Union didn’t stop the Clock, however. Its keepers, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (also Chicao-based) keep it calibrated to the changing face of the treats to global survival. Since 2002, for example, the clock has been set at seven minutes to midnight.

Some purists might argue that the Bulletin is straying too far from its traditional message on nuclear issues. On Jan 17, 2007, the Doomsday Clock was set to five minutes to midnight, and the Bulletin issued this statement:

“We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists–in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates–to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight. “

Could there be mitigating factors the Bulletin scientists didn’t include in their calibrations? In the spirit of Stephen and Phil’s lyrical response to the Doomsday argument, I am hereby issuing a challenge: the formation of an ad hoc Bulletin of Speculists to present an alternative setting for the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

Of course the Doomsday clock is not a measurement of the actual risk of the world coming to an end. It’s always been a measurement of the nervousness of atomic scientists that a major invention of their field will end the world. I suspect politics has played its part. Looking over this Doomsday Clock graph I see a rough correlation between the setting of the clock and the party holding the U.S. Presidency:

click for a larger image

Here’s the official announcement of this latest move:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) will move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” on January 17, 2007 [to 5 minutes to midnight]…the first such change to the Clock since February 2002. The major new step reflects growing concerns about a “Second Nuclear Age” marked by grave threats, including: nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing “launch-ready” status of 2,000 of the 25,000 nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and Russia, escalating terrorism, and new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks.

One problem is that the BAS is trying to set the clock for two different things – actual Doomsday (which I would take to be the end of the world – at least for humans), and nuclear war.

Though it isn’t politically correct to say so, a regional nuclear war would not be the end of humanity. It doesn’t even mean the rise of some weird post-apocalyptic Mad Max world. Our civilization would plod on after a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or between Israel and Iran. If the U.S. got nuked by a terrorist group it would probably be a single bomb destroying a single city – probably a major city. Our economy would be devastated, but our civilization would limp away and then eventually charge back. Ditto on a nuclear attack on U.S. interests from North Korea.

The risk of regional nuclear wars (which includes the risk of a nuclear terrorist attack) has risen as the risk of a big nuclear exchange (the kind that would endanger the human race as a whole) has diminished.

We had some close calls during the Cold War. Everybody knows about the Cuban missile crisis (although you couldn’t tell it from the setting of the Doomsday Clock at the time). Few know how close we came to going out in 1983.

But we made it through somehow.

So, Kathy, I think mitigating factors that those BAS guys aren’t considering include the following:

1. Regional nuclear war doesn’t = doomsday.
2. Mutually assured destruction persists as a deterrent for a bigger nuclear war.
3. The global economy has continued to grow as a factor that decreases tensions between the big nuclear players. China may not like us politically, but they do like having a market for their products.
4. It’s been assumed that mutually assured destruction wouldn’t deter regional nuclear war. I’m not so sure. The nuts that run Iran and North Korea might actually value their lives. Hard to say.
5. Another politically incorrect opinion – The War on Terror is working. The end of this war isn’t in sight, but the terrorists have been too busy with the full-time job of surviving us to attack us directly.

As for where I set the clock, I think that we should first agree on where the lowest and highest risk should be set. There’s no rule against setting the Doomsday clock outside of 15:00 to midnight (in 1991 the clock was set to 17 minutes to midnight). But the Doomsday clock graphic seems to suggest that as long as there is an existential risk, the clock should be set somewhere between 11:45 (lowest risk) and midnight (Doomsday).

But we need more clocks. One “nuclear war” clock could reflect the risk of nuclear war in whatever form. That, I’d argue, is what the BAS Doomsday Clock has become. It’s not a human extinction clock, it’s a nuclear-war-of-all-kinds clock. That being the case, I’d say the current setting of 5 minutes to midnight sounds about right. The risk of regional nuclear war is high.

The risk of human extinction from nuclear war is much less. If I was setting a clock for that I’d put it at 11:47 – just a little higher than the minimum risk. Of course if we actually do have a regional nuclear war, this nuclear extinction clock would shoot close to midnight. There is just no telling how this country would react if New York or Washington were wiped out. Let me put it this way – the War on Terror is also a war to save the rest of the world from our response to such an attack.

A third clock could reflect all existential risks. Risks like these.

I’d set that clock at 7 minutes to midnight.

UPDATE FROM MICHAEL:

Some of the following (which originated in a ‘backchannel’ email exchange among the bloggers here at the Speculist), recapitulates facts and concepts already touched on by Kathy and Stephen. To the extent that our readers find any such repetition distasteful, I offer an apology in advance. However, I think that if these relevant facts are not laid out in these particular terms, it might damage the foundation of the ideas I’d like to discuss.

Begin email extract…

The greatest value to the “Doomsday Clock” (besides as a marketing campaign by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a fairly successful one) is as a fairly visible metaphor for, and estimate of, one sort of existential risk. When the Clock was initially conceived and presented, that existential risk was fairly clearly defined: Global Thermonuclear War between the only two social constructs capable of engaging in that activity. First between the United States of America and he Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then among blocs of nation-states either capable of independently developing nuclear weapons or granted them as clients of such independently-capable states.

With first the departure of France’s independently-acquired nuclear arsenal (The “Force de Frappe” lit. ‘Strike Force’) from the direct control of either the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Warsaw Pact and then the subsequent advent of nuclear arsenals, admitted or supposed, under the control of nation-states either unaligned with or more-or-less loosely associated with the original adversaries, the definition of the risk being characterized by the Clock expanded and became much more complex. While the fundamental risk remained Global Thermonuclear War prosecuted by one or both of the only nation-states capable of accomplishing such a civilization-threatening feat (single-handedly or ‘cooperatively’), the contributing risks represented by escalation and alliances opened a larger number of paths from the status quo to the unthinkable outcome and some of those paths had distinctly lower thresholds standing between origin and outcome. A number of writers in the period made believable projections of these paths their stock-in-trade.

As the definition of the chain of risk evaluated by the Clock evolved and expanded, its utility as a widely-accepted summary estimate of the probability of the fundamental existential risk became diluted.

After the reductions in overall capacity by the relevant ‘players’ in the 1980′s, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the ’90′s, the risk evaluated by the Clock, and thus its overall relevance, was diminished considerably. Other risks, global and potentially existential (catastrophic meteorite impact, pandemic disease, climate changes, collapse of the global socioeconomic infrastructure due to insufficient forward planning “Y2K”) or “merely” regional (local famine, ‘brushfire’ conflicts formerly closely confined by their implications for the balance between superpowers) increased in their relative importance and/or attention regardless of any change in their independent

In order to capitalize on the significant stock of intellectual and moral authority at their disposal, and not least to continue selling their publication in the market in the wake of such decreased attention, the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science (parent organization of the Bulletin) extended the factors considered by the Doomsday Clock. The recently-publicized addition of ‘global warning’ as a sufficiently-significant influence as to notably move the measure in the direction of greater certainty is only the most proximate and public acknowledgement of this evolution.

HOWEVER: The fundamental concept of the Clock was, and remains, to place an easily-understood and widely agreed upon value on the probability of one or more large-scale risks to society. As the exact risk being evaluated becomes less-closely defined the ease of understanding, wide acceptability, and thus the utility of the value is diminished.

In the intervening years since the establishment of the Clock, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, the understanding of risk and means by which it can be rationally estimated, even without a great concentration of highly-accurate information in the hands of a few analysts, have been developed. One such means of understanding and evaluation, leveraging recent improvements in communications and computing technologies, is the concept of Prediction Markets. (Addressed early on in the Speculist: ) Evolved out of insurance underwriting, actuarial science, and futures markets, and attempting to capture information held by, but not necessarily shared among, a wide sample of observers and enlist economic self-interest to drive what might otherwise be a largely- or completely-altruistic exposure of limited information and expertise, such markets operate best (make the most accurate, and profitable, predictions) when the risks being evaluated are clearly and concisely defined in time, space, and scope. In formulating such a risk prediction, or ‘contract’, one would frame the risk to be evaluated in specific and measurable terms. The Bulletin’s Clock, in attempting to remain relevant in light of changing patterns of risk, has sacrificed the specificity necessary to be a reliable estimate of those risks even if its value is established by a large, knowledgeable, subset of the population.

While there is considerable room for debate as to whether it is more or less ethical to frame such risk predictions in specific human terms versus less emotionally-charged, but less specific, purely-economic terms, the more specific the prediction, the more precisely the risks attending to the event(s) or outcome(s) predicted may be estimated.

Perhaps an example would be appropriate:

“One million or more people dwelling in Sub-Saharan Africa will die of starvation and malnutrition by (on or before) 12 ‘o’ clock midnight, December 31st, 2007 as verified by official population and mortality statistics and estimates published by the World Health Organization not later than December 31st, 2008″

is a far more specific statement of risk than a commodities futures contract that says, in effect:

“COB 12/31/07 CBOT Sorghum >= US$10.00 / cwt.”

[Translation: At market close, on the Chicago Board of Trade, on December 31st, 2007, Sorghum (also known as millet, considered livestock feed in North America and Europe, but a fairly popular grain for human consumption in parts of Asia and Africa) will be sold for $10.00 per hundredweight, roughly $4.20 per bushel. Implied in this price are a number of factors including changes in demand among all users, worldwide crop sizes, transportation costs between successful producers and desirous consumers, and, conceivably, the unavailability of appealing foodstuffs in places, like sub-Saharan Africa, where people eat millet.]

Tragedy, too, can be evaluated in futures markets. To a certain extent, it already is. When property insurance is underwritten, in Boise, Bangkok, or Baghdad, some consideration must be made of the threats to that property posed by both natural and man-made causes. However, the specific contribution to the estimated risk posed by causes that others, including ourselves, might be interested in, is not transparent in the insurance contract itself.

While it may seem ghoulish and morally questionable to market a futures contract stating a specific cause of risk to specific property or individuals over a specific timeframe, there is a great deal of value in knowing what others might think about the probability of such a threat. Whether those individuals have vested interests in the proposition under consideration than the possibility of making a certain, limited, amount of money for guessing or estimating that risk correctly in light of the passage of events or otherwise, the society at large gains a great deal of useful information regarding that particular threat and possibly regarding risks contingent upon human action in general.

Finally, as Thomas Sowell points out in his Basic Economics, insurance and futures contracts can serve as means by which risk itself can be transferred from those with fewer resources to absorb and deal with it to those who have greater resources. The farmer who must wait until harvest not only to know how large his crop is (i.e. how many units he can bring to market), but also the size and quality of all other competing farmers’ crops (which set the market price per unit) bears a substantial amount of risk. By contracting with a speculator to sell his crop, however large, at a price per unit established in advance of the harvest, the farmer limits his risk to the factors most closely under his or her own control (the productivity of his or her crop) and transfers the risk that others might out-produce the farmer to the speculator. The speculator, in turn, can hedge his or her bets by investing only a part of his or her capital in any one commodity or market, perhaps reducing the possibility of ‘making a killing’ by paying the farmer pennies on the eventual dollar value of the farmer’s crop in particularly lean years, but offsetting the overall loss should bumper crops reduce the value of the farmer’s output below the price agreed upon in advance.

To make a long two-cents worth short: The Doomsday Clock has outlived its original value in light of the dilution of its prediction and the expansion of understanding of the nature of risk and the possibilities for more successfully predicting and hedging risks developed since the Clock’s inception. If the Bulletin really wished to remain in the vanguard of risk-awareness, the Directors would establish the Bulletin as the definitive window on and sponsor of an openly-traded, cash-based, highly-specific Predictions Market.

…End email extract

AFTERTHOUGHTS: One objection likely to be raised to my call for formulating marketable predictions in a specific, quantifiable, and mutually verifiable manner is that, particularly as predictions become more specific geographically and socially, the market for them also becomes more easily suceptible to manipulation by less-and-less potent actors. The worldwide wheat crop probably couldn’t be materially manipulated by anything less than a nation-state or other actor of similar scope and capability. On the other hand, the continued health and welfare of a single individual can easily be altered (negatively or positively) by deliberate action on the part of another single individual (or the same individual, if the incentives were right). Political assassination is a canonical example here. Deliberate manipulation of the outcome of a prediction market contract could, potentially, deliver a profit to someone who was willing to influence the outcome of the prediction. Such manipulation for gain should, however, be fairly transparent as the trading value of the relevant contracts swung substantially away from previous values just prior to the perpetrators’ intervention. There is considerable evidence of just this sort of manipulation having taken place in the days leading up to the terror attacks on September 11th, 2001 as the downturn in the valuation of airline stocks resulting from the attacks was played to advantage by investors with advance knowledge of the attacks. The fact that this manipulated investment was not only detected (eventually) but that it served as a link that tied these investors back to the organization that committed the attacks (thereby ultimately causing more harm than gain to the manipulators), as well as existing laws regarding securities fraud, insurance fraud, insider trading, and, more directly, criminal and civil laws covering physical and economic harm, intentional or otherwise, committed between persons or corporate bodies, would, I believe, serve to sufficiently dis-incentivize rational attempts at manipulation.

Finally, as my direct answer to the challenge posed in the original posting, I believe the clock should be set at:

Nuclear Weapons Use, >US$2×10¹³ GDP decline, 93 years, = $0.01 ^ $0.005

[Translation: The odds of a nuclear exchange causing the planetary GDP to be cut in half from today's value, (a serious effect, but not quite the civilization-ending catastrophe I grew up expecting) occuring in the remaining years of the 21st century are about 1 in 100 and took a half a chance in 100 uptick recently.]

UPDATE: (January 23, 2007 10:28PM MST)

It struck me that the kinds of ‘existential threats’ under consideration here, and the probabilities assigned to them by whatever chosen representation, are also contributory factors of the factor L (representing the average lifetime of intelligent civilizations) in the Drake Equation (q.v.) first discussed in this blog in July of 2004 (see item #6), again in 2005, and as recently as last week. (Actually the sum of the probabilities of all existential risks, expressed as ‘years of lost life-expectancy’*, would be the reciprocal of L, if I recall my algebra correctly at this hour.)

*See Chapter 8 – Understanding Risk in Bernard L. Cohen’s “The Nuclear Energy Option” for a discussion of formulating risk probabilities in this fashion

BTW – Thanks, Kathy, for providing such an interesting topic for discussion!

Rand Simberg on why 2001 wasn’t like 2001:

It was based on a lot of false assumptions, foremost being that the government was going to make it happen. We believed the rhetoric about “not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard,” and the new frontier, and thought that the government actually cared about this stuff. But even the myth that a visionary president can lead us to the stars, exemplified by the Kennedy worshipers, has been shown to be false — he never gave a damn about space.

The irony is that if we hadn’t been derailed by Apollo, which had much more to do with waging the Cold War on a peaceful front, and industrializing the south, than space, we’d probably be a lot closer to the vision of 2001 today. The Air Force was flying into space with the X-15, and it’s possible that we would have continued along that path, a much more natural one, and that might have spun off into the private sector. But instead, in our hurry to get to the moon, we chose the most expensive way to do it, and established it as the fundamental paradigm for spaceflight that haunts us to this day.

Michael Anissimov on what a person ought to be doing if he or she plans to live forever:

First, read up on issues relevant to the future of humanity. Most of these issues are technological rather than political. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, and Artificial Intelligence. If any one of these technologies were to go wrong, it wouldn’t matter how far along we were in traditional anti-aging research – all of humanity could be wiped out anyway. Second, get involved in the organizations promoting life extension and related futurist issues. For example, there is the Foresight Institute, and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create. Laypeople of all sorts can have a positive impact on the course of the future by cooperating with like-minded individuals. Third, be ethical and moral. Immortalism is a subset of transhumanism, or the philosophy that humanity deserves the right to improve itself technologically and transhumanism originally derives from humanism. All human beings are equally valuable and special. The right to die is just as important as the right to live. Immortalism should be about expanding choices, not forcing a philosophical view onto others. Fourth, if you’re over 50, you might want to look into getting a cryonics contract. Lastly, eat right and exercise! If you’re someone who respects life in general, you should be concerned with the health of your own body.

Adrian Bowyer on what rapid replication means for the future of manufacturing:

A manufacturing machine that can copy itself can create goods like no other technology we have – it is the only way to do so with exponential growth, for example. But by that very fact, both the machine and those goods have a value that, as the technology spreads, asymptotically approaches the value of the raw materials used. If you like to put it this way, the technology kills the idea of added value in material goods. Information is another matter.

Aubrey de Grey on the real reason he wants to eliminate aging:

Well, first of all I have a lot of catching up to do — all the films I haven’t seen, books I haven’t read, etc.— while I’ve been spending every spare minute in the fight against aging. But in addition, there are masses of things that I enjoy doing and will always enjoy — spending time with my wife and friends, taking a punt out on the river Cam, playing a game of Othello, etc.— and I reckon I’ll just carry on doing those things forever.

At root, the reason I’m not in favor of aging is because I like life as I know it.

And finally, Ramona, taking a stab at dream interpretation:

Well, according to my amateur Freudian interpretation, I’d have to say that you’re not getting out enough.

Other favorite interviews would have to include the podcasts with Christine Peterson and James C. Bennett.

In the commencement address Dyson delivered last December at the University of Michigan, he presented his speech layered between the introduction and the conclusion of a fable containing the heresy that misfortune is a gift in disguise. Once he had his audience’s attention, he then proposed three heretical scenarios for the future:

First Heresy: Global warming is grossly exaggerated

“There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens mostly in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than in the tropics, in winter more than in summer, at night more than in daytime. On the whole, the warming happens most where it does the least harm. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.”

Second Heresy:Biotechnology will soon be domesticated.

“…there is a close analogy between von Neumann’s vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food-crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because von Neumann liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.

I see a bright future for the biotechnical industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.”

Third Heresy:The United States has less than a century left of its turn as top nation.

“Since the modern nation-state was invented around the year 1500, a succession of countries have taken turns at being top nation, first Spain, then France, Britain, America. Each turn lasted about 150 years. Ours began in 1920, so it should end about 2070. The reason why each top nation’s turn comes to an end is that the top nation becomes over-extended, militarily, economically and politically. Greater and greater efforts are required to maintain the number one position. Finally the over-extension becomes so extreme that the whole structure collapses. Already we can see in the American posture today some clear symptoms of over-extension. Who will be the next top nation? You should be asking yourselves, not how to live in an America-dominated world, but how to prepare for a world that is not America-dominated. That may be the most important problem for your generation to solve.”

Read the entire transcript.

This is the second half of our groundbreaking interview with John Smart of the Institute for Accelerating Change.(Read Part One)

The Developmental Singularity clear=all style='page-break-before:always'>

I’m familiar with the idea of a singularity from reading about black holes.Â
As I understand it, the event horizon of a black hole is the point beyond which
no light can escape. Perceived time slows to an absolute standstill at the
event horizon. At the singularity, gravity becomes infinite, and what we normally
think of as the "laws of nature" cease to function the way we expect
them to. The singularity seems to be the ultimate physical enigma. What then
is this technological singularity, and in what way is it analogous to the singularity
of a black hole?

This last question
may be the most important of our time, with regard to understanding the future
of universal intelligence. Or it may be a greased pig chase. Only posterity
can decide.

I’ve been chipping away at the topic since the seventh grade in high school,
when I had a series of early and very elegant intuitions in regard to accelerating
change, speculations that I’d love to see seriously researched and critiqued
in coming years. In 1999 I started a website on the subject, SingularityWatch.com.
In 2001 did an extended
interview for Sander Olson at Nanomagazine.com, and in 2003 I and
a few other colleagues formed a nonprofit, the Institute
for Accelerating Change (Accelerating.org), to further inquiry in this area.
The most important thing we’ve done to date is a very well-received conference
at Stanford, href="http://www.accelerating.org/acc2003/conf_home.htm">Accelerating Change 2003.Â
Finally, I’m presently writing a book, Destiny of Species, on the topic
of accelerating change, but please don’t ask me how it’s progressing, or it
will reliably put me in a bad mood.

To begin unpacking
this question, it helps to realize that there is a menagerie
of singularities in various literatures that we could study, with gravitational
singularities being just the most well-known type. Some generalizations can
be made, possible clues to a useful definition. Every one of these processes
engages a special set of locally accelerating dynamics that transition to some
irreversible systemic change, involving emergent features which are, at least
in part, intrinsically unpredictable from the perspective of the pre-singularity
system.

But before we
go further, I shall lay my biases on the table. I am a systems theorist. The
systems theorist’s working hypothesis—and fundamental conceit—is that analogical
thinking is more powerful and broadly valuable than analytical thinking in almost
all cases of human inquiry. This doesn’t excuse us from bad analogies, which
are legion, and it doesn’t make quantitative analysis wrong, it just places
math and logic in their proper place as powerful tools of inquiry used by weakly
digital minds. Today’s quantitative and logical tools are enabled by the underlying
physics of the universe, which are much more sublime, and such tools often have
no relation to real physical processes, which may use quanta and dimensionalities
entirely inaccessible to our current symbolisms.

Furthermore, I
take the "infopomorphic" (as compared to "anthropomorphic")
view, that all physical systems in the universe, including us precious bipeds
and even the universe itself, are engaged in computation, in service to some
grander purpose of self- and other-discovery. This philosophy has also been
described as "digital physics," and one of several variants can be
found at Ed Fredkin’s Digital
Philosophy website. It has also been elegantly introduced by John Archibald
Wheeler’s "It from Bit," 1989 (see href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521568374/">Physical Origins
of Time Asymmetry, 1996).

Finally, I am
an evolutionary developmentalist, one who believes that all important systems
in the world, parsimoniously including the universe itself, must both evolve
unpredictably and develop predictably. That makes understanding the difference
between evolution and development one of the most important programs of inquiry.
The meta-Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary development, well described by such
innovative biologists as Rudolf Raff (see href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226702669/">The Shape of
Life, 1996), Simon Conway Morris, Wallace Arthur, Stan Salthe,
William Dembski, and Jack Cohen, is one that situates orthodox
neo-Darwinism as a chaotic mechanism that occurs within (or in some versions,
in symbiosis with) a much larger set of statistically deterministic, purposeful
developmental cycles. There are now a number of scientists applying this view
to both living and physical systems, including those exploring such topics as
self-organization, convergence, hierarchical acceleration, anthropic cosmology,
Intelligent Design, and a number of other subjects that are very poorly explained
by the classical Darwinian theory championed by Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard Dawkins.

Systems theorists
require some perspective to play their analogy games, so please indulge me as
we engage briefly and coarsely in big picture history in order to discuss the
singularity phenomenon. During the seventeenth century, with Isaac Newton’s
Principia (1687), it seems fair to say that humanity awakened to the
realization that we live in a fully physical universe. During the early twentieth
century, with Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) and the Church-Turing
Thesis (1936) we came to suspect that we also live in a fully computational
universe, and that within each discrete physical system there are intrinsic
limits to the kinds of computation (observation, encoding) that can be done
to the larger environment. Presumably, the persistence of these limits, and
their interaction with the remaining inaccessible elements of reality, spurs
the development of new, more computationally versatile systems, via increasingly
more rapid hierarchical "substrate" emergences over time. At each
new emergence point a singularity is created, a new physical-computational system
suddenly and disruptively arises, a phase change of some definable type occurs.
At this point, a new local environment, or "phase space" is created
wherein very different local rules and conditions apply. That’s one predominant
systems model for singularities, at any rate.

From this physical-computational
perspective, replicating suns, spewing their supernovas across galactic space,
can be seen as rather simple physical-computational systems that, over billennia,
nevertheless encode a "record" of their exploration of physical reality,
their computational "phase space." This record appears to us in the
form of the periodic table. Once that elemental matrix becomes complex enough,
and carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and friends have emerged, we notice
a new singularity occur in specialized local environments, wherein the newest
computational game becomes replicating organic molecules, chasing their own
tails in protometabolic cycles (see Stuart Kauffman, href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195111303/">At Home in the
Universe, 1996).

Again, these systems
developmentally encode their evolutionary exploration by constructing a range
of complex polymerizing systems, including autocatalytic sets. Once a particular
set becomes complex enough, we again see another phase change singularity, with
the first DNA-guided protein synthesis emerging on the geological Earth-catalyst,
even before its crust has begun to cool. As precursors to fats, proteins, and
nucleic acids have all been found in our interplanetary comet chemistry, and
as we suspect that chemistry to be common throughout our galaxy, it is becoming
increasingly plausible that every one of the billions of planets (in this galaxy
alone) that are capable of supporting liquid water for billions of years may
be primed for our special type of biogenesis. This proposed transition, a singularity
in an era of accelerating molecular evolutionary development, is what A.G.
Cairns-Smith calls "genetic takeover," an evocative phrase. Such
unicellular emergence very likely leads in turn to multicellularity, then to
differentiated multicelluar systems encoding useful neural arborization patterns,
another singularity (570 million years ago), which leads to big-brained mammals
encoding mimicry memetics (100 million years ago) and to hominids encoding and
processing oral linguistic memetics (10-5 million years ago), then to the first
extrabiological technology (soft-skinned Homo habilis collectively throwing
rocks at more physically powerful leopard predators, 2 million years ago), then
to today’s semi-autonomous digital technological systems, encoding their own
increasingly successful algorithms and world-models. (Forgive me if we skipped
a few steps in this illustration).

Systems thinkers, since at least Henry Adams in 1909, have noted that
each successive emergence is vastly shorter in time than the one that preceded
it. Some type of global universal acceleration seems to be part and parcel to
the singularity generation process. Note also that each of the computational
systems that generates a singularity is incapable of appreciating many of the
complexities of the progeny system. A sun has little computational capacity
to "understand" the organic chemistry it engenders, even as it creates
and interacts intimately with that chemistry. A bacterium does not deeply comprehend
the multicellular organisms which spring from its symbiont colonies, even as
it adapts to life on those organisms, and thus learns at least something reliable
about their nature. Humanity, in turn, can have little understanding of the
subtle mind-states of the A.I.s to come, even as we become endosymbiotically
captured by and learn to function within that system, in the same way bacteria
(our modern mitochondria) were captured by the eukaryotic cell.

Yet at the same
time, the more complex any system becomes, the better it models the universe
that engendered it, and the better it understands its own history, the physical
chain of singularities that created it. That also implies, if you consider the
recursive, self-similar nature of the singularity generation process, the better
it understands its own developmental future as well. If our entire universe
is evolutionary developmental, which is an elegantly simple possibility, then
it is constrained to head in some particular direction, a trajectory that we
are beginning to see clearly even today.

For a very incomplete
outline of this trajectory, we can propose that the universe must invariably
increase in average general entropy (in practice, if not in theory), with islands
of locally accelerating order, that each hierarchical system must emerge from
and operate within an increasingly localized spacetime domain, and that the
network intelligence of the most complex local systems must always accelerate
over time. The simplicity of such macroscopic, developmental rules and of developmental
convergence in general, by comparison to the unpredictable complexity of the
microscopic, evolutionary features of any complex system, is what allows even
twenty-first century humans to see many elements of the framework of the future,
even if the evolutionary details must always remain obscure.

This surprising
concept, the "unreasonable effectiveness" of simple mathematics, analogies,
and basic rules and laws for explaining the stable features of otherwise very
complex universal systems has been called Wigner’s
Ladder, after Eugene Wigner’s famous href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html">1960 paper
on this topic. As I will explore later, a developmentalist like myself begins
his inquiry by suspecting that the universe has self-organized, over
many successive cycles, to create its presently stunning set of hierarchical
complexities, in the same manner as my own complexity has self-organized, over
five billion years of genetic cycling, to create the body and mind that I use
today. Furthermore, if emergent intelligence can be shown to play any role in
guiding this cycling process, then it seems quite likely that if the universe
could, it would tune itself for Wigner’s Ladder to be very easy to climb by
emerging computational systems at every level during the universal unfolding.
This process would ensure that intelligence development, versus all manner of
destructive shenanigans, is a very rewarding, very robust, strongly non-zero-sum
game, at every level of universal development.

Certainly there
seems evidence for this at any system level we observe. The developing brain
is an amazingly friendly environment for our scaffolding neurons to emerge within.
They seem to discover, with very little effort, the complex set of signal transductions
necessary to get them to useful places within the system, all with a surprisingly
simple agent-based model of the environment in which they operate. In another
example, a non-linguistic proto-mammal of 100 million years ago (or today’s
analog), if placed in a room with you today, would develop a surprisingly useful
sense of who you are and what general behaviors you were capable of after only
short exposure, even though it would never figure out your language or your
internal states. Even a modest housefly, after a reasonable period of exposure
to 21^st century humans, is rarely so surprised by their behavior
that it dies when poaching their fruit. So it is that all the universe’s pre-singularity
systems internalize quite a bit of knowledge concerning the post-singularity
systems, even if they never understand their internal states. I contend that
human beings, with the greatest ability yet to look back in time to the processes
that create us, have a very powerful ability to look forward as well with regard
to developmental processes. I think we can use this developmental insight to
foretell a lot about the necessary trajectory of the post-singularity systems
on the other side.

Given the empirical
evidence of MEST compression over the last half of the universe’s developmental
history, where the dominant substrates have transitioned from galaxies to stars
to planetary surfaces to biomass to multicellular organisms to conscious hominids
and soon, to conscious technology that will, for an equivalent complexity, be
vastly faster and more compact than our own bodies (which are filled mostly
with housekeeping systems, not computing architectures), it seems almost painfully
obvious to me that the constrained trajectory of all multi-local universal intelligence
has been, to date, one that is headed relentlessly toward inner space, not outer
space. The extension of this trajectory must lead, it seems, to black hole level
energy densities in the foreseeable future. Indeed, some prominent physicists
have drawn surprisingly similar conclusions using lines of reasoning entirely
independent from my own (see Seth Lloyd’s "Ultimate Physical Limits
to Computation," Nature, 2000, and Eric Chaisson’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067400342X/">Cosmic Evolution,
2001).

I call this the
href="http://www.singularitywatch.com/specu.html">developmental singularity hypothesis,
and it is admittedly quite speculative. It is also known as the transcension
scenario, as opposed to the expansion scenario, for the future of local intelligence.
The expansion scenario, the expectation that our human descendants will one
day colonize the stars is, today, an almost universal de facto assumption of
the typical futurist. I consider that model to be 180 degrees incorrect. Outer
space for human science, will increasingly become an informational desert, by
comparison to the simulation science we can run here, in inner space. I suggest
that the cosmic tapestry that we see in the night sky may be most accurately
characterized as the "rear view mirror" on the developmental trajectory
of physical intelligence in universal history. It provides a record of far larger,
far older, and far simpler computational structures than those we are constructing
here, today, in our increasingly microscopic environments.

Let me relate
some personal background on this insight. As a child, I was extremely fortunate
to grow up with a subscription to National
Geographic magazine. When I discovered that my high school library (Chadwick
School) had issues back to the beginning of the century, it became one of my
favorite haunts. This led to a series of lucky events, including very special
seventh grade history class (Thank you, Mr. Bullin) where we discussed both
universal and human development, and later, an English class where the summer
reading was Charles Darwin’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/014043268X/">Voyage of the
Beagle, 1909. I was a very inconsistent, daydreamer of student in those
days. When I finally got around to reading the Beagle, the story of the
energetic young Darwin wherein he developed the background knowledge that inexorably
led him to his Great Idea, I could not escape the realization that I’d also
discovered a similar great idea myself during all those lazy afternoons, flipping
magazines and thinking.

The idea was essentially
this: every new system of intelligence that emerges in the universe clearly
occupies a vastly smaller volume of space, and plays out its drama using vastly
smaller amounts of matter, energy, and time. At the same time, any who are aware
of the amazing replicative repetitiveness of astronomical features would suspect
that there are likely to be billions of intelligences like ours within it. Yet
we have had no communication from any of them, even from those Sun-like stars,
closer to our own galactic center, which are billions of years older than ours.
This curious situation is called the Fermi Paradox, after Enrico Fermi,
who in the 1940′s, asked the famous question, "Where Are They?," in
relation to these older, putatively far more technologically advanced civilizations.
Contemplating this question in 1972, it struck me that the entire system is
apparently structured so that intelligence inexorably transcends the universe,
rather than expanding within it, and that black holes, those curious entities
that exist both within and without our universe, probably have something central
to do with this process. These simple ideas were the seed of the developmental
singularity hypothesis, and I’ve been tinkering with it ever since.

All this brings
us to the interesting question of the future of artificial intelligence.

Given the background
I have related above, I have the strong suspicion that when our A.I. wakes up,
regardless of what it does in its inner world, it will increasingly transition
into what looks to the rest of the universe like a black hole. This "intelligent"
black hole singularity apparently results from an accelerating process of matter,
energy, space, and time compression (MEST compression) of universal computation,
in the same way that gravitation drives the accelerating formation of stellar
and galactic black hole singularities, which seem to be analogous end states,
in this universe, of much simpler cycling complex adaptive systems.

From our perspective
this may be an entirely natural, incremental, and reversible (at least temporarily)
development, and if it occurs, we will very likely all be taken along for the
ride as well, in a voluntary process of transformation. This "inclusive"
feature of the transition seems reasonable if one makes a chain of presently
thinly-researched assumptions, including: 1) that the A.I.s will have significantly
increased consciousness at or shortly after their emergence, 2) that once they
have modeled us, and all other life forms to the point of real-time predictability
they will be ethically compelled to ubiquitously share this gift, 3) that all
life forms will find such a gift to be irresistible, and 4) by the simple act
of sharing they will turn us into them. This convergent planetary transition
to the postbiological domain would comprise a local "technetic takeover"
as complete as the "genetic takeover" that led to the emergence of
DNA-guided protein synthesis as the sole carrier of higher local intelligence
after biogenesis.

I’ll forgive you
if you think at this point that I’ve taken leave of my senses, and I’m not going
to try to defend these perspectives further here, as that would be beyond the
scope of this interview, and more appropriate to my forthcoming book. But if
you are interested in conducting your own research, consider exploring the link
above, and reading some helpful books that each explore important pieces of
the larger idea. You might start with Lee Smolin’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195126645/">The Life of the
Cosmos, 1994, Eric Chaisson’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674009878/">Cosmic Evolution,
2001, and James Gardner’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1930722222/">Biocosm,
2003. You could also peruse Sheldon Ross’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0125980531/">Simulation,
2001, though that is a technical work. If you have any feedback at that point,
send me an email and let me know what you think.

I remember I first encountered this idea in a science fiction story that
I considered to be entertaining, but closer to fantasy than true science fiction.Â
It did not appear to be grounded in reality. A short time later I was given
a copy of Vernor Vinge’s essay on the singularity and I began to reconsider
whether there might not be something to it. Does the idea of the singularity
originate with Vinge or elsewhere?

In my research
to date, the first clear formulation of the singularity idea originated with
one of America’s earliest technology historians, Henry Adams, in "A
Rule of Phase Applied to History," 1909, the same fortuitous year that
Charles Darwin published Beagle. Readers are referred to our href="http://www.singularitywatch.com/history_brief.html">Brief History of Intellectual
Discussion of the Singularity for more on that amazing story, which mentions
a number of careful thinkers who have illuminated different pieces of the accelerating
elephant in the century since.

Since 1983, as
you mention, the mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author
Vernor Vinge has given some of the best brief arguments to date for this
idea. His eight-page internet essay, " href="http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html">The Coming Technological
Singularity," 1993, is an excellent place to start your investigation
of the singularity phenomenon. I would also recommend my introductory web site,
SingularityWatch.com, and a few others,
such as KurzweilAI.net, which are referenced
at my site.

Here’s a quote from your SingularityWatch web site: "[Research suggests
that] there is something about the construction of the universe itself, something
about the nature and universal function of local computation that permits,
and may even mandate, continuously accelerating computational development in
local environments." This sounds like metaphysics to me. How could a universe
with such properties come to exist? Does this imply some kind of intelligent
design?

That depends very
much on what you consider "intelligence," I think. One initially suspects
some kind of intelligence involved in the continually accelerating emergences
we have observed. In the phase space of all possible universes consistent with
physical law, one wouldn’t find our kind of accelerating, life-friendly universe
in a random toss of the coin, or as various anthropic cosmologists have pointed
out, even in an astronomically large number of random tosses of the coin. Some
deep organizing principles are likely be at work, principles that may themselves
exhibit a self-organizing intelligence over time. Systems theorists look for
broad views to get some perspective on this question, so bear with me as we
consider an abstract model for the dynamics that may be central to the issue.

Everything really
interesting in the known universe appears to be a replicating system. Solar
systems, complex planets, organic chemistry, cells, multicellular organisms,
brains, languages, ideas, and technological systems are all good examples. Each
undergoes replication, variation, interaction, selection, and convergence, in
what may be called an RVISC developmental cycle. Given this extensive zoology,
it is most conservative, most parsimonious to assume that the physical universe
we inhabit is just another such system.

Big bang theorists
tell us the universe had a very finite beginning. Since 1998, lambda energy
theorists have told us that our 13.7 billion year universe is already one billion
years into an accelerating senescence, or death. Multiverse cosmologists tell
us that ours is just one of many universes, and some, such as Lee Smolin,
Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde, have suggested that black holes are
the seeds of new universe creation. If so, that would make this universe a very
fecund replicator, as relativity theory predicts at least 100 trillion black
holes to be in existence at the present time.

For each of the
above reproducing complex adaptive systems (CASs, in John Holland’s use
of the term), there are at least two important mechanisms of change we need
to consider: evolution and development. Evolution involves the Darwinian mechanisms
of variation, interaction, and selection, the VIS in the middle of the RVISC
cycle. Development involves statistically deterministic mechanisms of replication
and convergence, the "boundaries" of the RVISC reproduction cycle
for any complex system.

Consider human
beings. Our intelligence is both evolutionary and developmental. Each of us
follows an evolutionary path, the unique memetic (ideational) and technetic
(tools and technologies) structures that we choose to use and build. (As individuals
we also follow a genetic evolutionary path, but this is so slow and constrained
that it has become future-irrelevant in the face of memetic and technetic evolution.)
At the same time, we must all conform to the same fixed developmental cycle,
a 120-year birth-growth-maturity-reproduction-senescence-death Ferris wheel
than none of us can appreciably alter, only destroy. The special developmental
parameters, the DNA genes that guide our own cycle, were tuned up over millions
of years of recursive evolutionary development to produce brains capable of
complex behavioral mimicry memetics, and then linguistic mimicry memetics, astonishing
brains that now cradle our own special self-awareness.

Now contemplate
our own universe, and imagine as Teilhard de Chardin did with his intriguing
"cosmic embryogenesis" metaphor, that it is an evolutionary developmental
entity with a life and death of its own. In fact, heat death theorists have
known the universe has a physical lifespan for almost two centuries, but we,
thinking like immortal youth, still commonly ignore this. Multiverse models
explore how replicating universes might tune up their developmental genes, over
successive cycles, to usefully use the intelligence created within the "soma"
(body, universe), in the same way that human genes have tuned up to use human
intelligence and finite human lifespan in their own replication. See Tom
Kirkwood’s work on the href="http://avsunxsvr.aeiveos.com/agethry/disoma/">Disposable Soma Theory,
in Time
of our Lives, 1999, for one very insightful explanation of the dynamic.

Next, consider
this: If encoded intelligence usefully influences the replication that occurs
in the next developmental cycle, and we can make the case that it always would,
by comparison to otherwise random processes, then universes that encode the
emergence of increasingly powerful universe-modeling intelligence will always
outcompete those that don’t, in the multiversal environment.

When I relay these
thoughts to patient listeners, a question commonly occurs. Why wouldn’t universes
emerge which seek to keep cosmic intelligence around forever? This question
seems equivalent to asking why it is that our genes "choose" to continue
to throw away our adult forms in almost all higher species in competitive environments.
The answer likely has to do with the fact that any adult structure has a fixed
developmental capacity, based on the potential of its genes, and once the capacity
has been expressed and accelerating intelligence is no longer occurring in the
adult form, it becomes obvious that the adult structure is just not that smart
in relation to the larger universe. At that point, recycling becomes a more
resource efficient computing strategy than revising. Let’s propose that the
A.I.’s to come, even as they rapidly learn what they can within this universe,
remain of sharply fixed complexity, while operating in a much larger, Gödelian-incomplete
multiverse. As long as that multiverse continues to represent a combinatorial
explosion of possibilities, universal computing systems will likely remain stuck
on a developmental cycle, trading off between phases of parameter-tuning reproduction
and intelligence unfolding. Both of these stages of the cycle incorporate evolution
and development. Another way that systems theorists have explored the yin-yang
of this cycle is in terms of Francis Heylighen and Donald Campbell’s
insights on href="http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DOWNCAUS.html">downcausality (including parameter
tuning) and upcausality (including hierarchical emergence), useful extensions
of the popular concepts of holism and reductionism.

If we live in
a universe populated by an "ecology of black holes," as I suspect,
then we will soon discover that most of them, such as galactic and stellar gravitational
black holes, can only reproduce universes of low complexity. In a paradigm of
self-organization, of iterative evolutionary development, these cycling complex
adaptive systems may be the stable base, the lineage out of which our much more
impressively intelligence-encoding universe has emerged, in the same way that
we have been built on top of a stable base of cycling bacteria. How long our
own universe will continue cycling in its current form is anyone’s guess, at
present. But we may note that in living systems, while developmental cycles
can continue for very long periods of time, they are never endless in any particular
lineage. So it may be that recurrence of the "type" of universe we
inhabit also has a limited lifespan, before it becomes another "type."

Fortunately, all
of this should become much more tractable to proof by simulation, as well as
by limited experiment, in coming decades. As you may know, high energy physicists
are already expecting that we may soon gain the ability to probe the fabric
of the multiverse via the creation of so-called "extreme black holes"
of microscopic size in the laboratory (e.g., CERN’s Large Hadron Collider),
possibly even within the next decade. At the same time, black hole analogs for
capturing light, electrons, and other quanta are also in the planning stages.
With regard to microcosmic reality, I find that truth is always more interesting
than fiction, and often less believable, at first blush.

Using various
forms of the above model, James N. Gardner, Bela Balasz, Ed Harrison,
myself, and a handful of others have proposed that our human intelligence
may play a central role in the universal replication cycle. In the paradigm
of evolutionary development, that would make our own emergence—but not our evolutionary
complexities—developmentally tuned, via many previous cycles, into our universal
genes.

This gene-parameter
analogy is quite powerful. You wouldn’t say that any reasonable amount of your
adult complexity is contained in the paltry 20,000-30,000 genes that created
you. In fact the developmental genes that really created you are a small
subset of those, numbering perhaps in the hundreds. These genes don’t
specify most of the complexity contained in the 100 trillion connections in
your brain. They are merely developmental guides. Like the rules of a low-dimensional
cellular automata, they control the envelope boundaries of the evolutionary
processes that created you. So it may be with the 20-60 known or suspected
physical parameters and coupling constants underlying the Standard Model of
physics, the parameters that guided the Big Bang. They are perhaps best seen
as developmental guides, determining a large number of emergent features, but
never specifying the evolution that occurs within the unfolding system.

As anthropic cosmologists
(those who suspect the universe is specifically structured to create life) are
discovering, a number of our universal parameters (e.g., the gravitational constant,
the fine structure constant, the mass of the electron, etc.) appear to be very
finely tuned to create a universe that must develop life. As cosmology delves
further into M-Theory, anthropic issues are intensifying, not subsiding. Some
theorists, such as Leonard Susskind, have estimated that there are an
incredibly large number of string
theory vacua from which our particular universal parameters were somehow
specified to emerge.

If you wish to
understand just how powerful developmental forces are, think not only of Stephen
Jay Gould’s " href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393308197/">Panda’s Thumb"
1992, which provides an orthodox explanation of evolutionary process, but think
also of what I call "The Twin’s Thumbprints," an example that explains
not evolution, but the more fundamental paradigm of evolutionary development.
Look closely at two genetically identical human twins, and tell me what you
see.

Virtually all
the complexity of these twins at the molecular and cellular scale has been randomly,
chaotically, evolutionarily constructed. Their fingerprints, cellular microachitecture
(including neural connections), and thoughts are entirely different. Yet they
look similar, age similarly, and even have 40-60% correlation in personality,
as several studies of separated twins have shown. That is an amazing level of
nonrandom convergence to tune into such simple initial parameters. Both twins
predictably go into puberty thirteen years later, after a virtually endless
period involving astronomical numbers of interactions at the molecular scale.

So it apparently
is with our own universe’s puberty, which occurred about 12.7 billion years
after the Big Bang, about 1 billion years ago. Earth’s intelligence is apparently
one of hundreds of billions of ovulating, self-fertilizing seeds in our universe,
one that is about to transcend into inner space very soon in cosmologic time.

One of the testable
conclusions of the developmental singularity hypothesis is that the parametric
settings for our universe are carefully tuned to support not simply the statistical
emergence of complex chemistry and occasional life, but a generalized relentless
MEST compression of computational systems in a process of accelerating hierarchical
emergence, a process that must develop accelerating local intelligence, interdependence,
and immunity (resiliency) on virtually all of the billions of planets in this
universe that are capable of supporting life for billions of years. This life
in turn is very likely to develop a technological singularity, and in some cosmologically
brief time afterward, to follow a constrained trajectory of universal transcension.

Most likely, this
transition leads to a subsequent restart of the developmental cycle, which would
provide the most parsimonious explanation yet advanced for how the special parameters
of our universe came to be. As with living systems, these parameters were apparently
self-organized, over many successive cycles, not instantiated by some entity
standing outside the cycle, but influenced incrementally by the intelligence
arising within it. In this paradigm, developmental failures are always possible.
But curiously, they are rarer, in a statistical sense, the longer any developmental
process successfully proceeds. Just look at the data for spontaneous abortions
in human beings, which are increasingly rare after the first trimester, to see
one obvious example.

But even if all
this speculation is true, we must realize that this says little about our evolutionary
role. Remember, life greatly cherishes variation. There is probably a very deep
computational reason why there are six billion discrete human beings on the
planet right now, rather than one unitary multimind. Consider that every one
of the developmental intelligences in this universe is, right now, taking its
own unique path down the rabbit hole, and they are all separated by vast distances,
planted very widely in the field, so to speak, to carefully preserve all that
useful evolutionary variation. I find that quite interesting and encouraging.
Free will, or the protected randomness of evolutionary search at the "unbounded
edge" between chaos and control in complex systems, always seems to be
central to the cycle at every scale in universal systems.

Now it is appropriate
to consider another commonly-asked question with regard to these dynamics. How
likely is it, by becoming aware of a cosmic replication cycle and our apparent
role in it, that we might alter the cycle to any appreciable degree?

To answer this,
it may also be helpful to realize that complex adaptive systems are always aware
that many elements of their world are constrained to operate in cycles (day/night,
wake/sleep, life/death, etc.). So it’s only an extension of prior historical
insight if we soon discover that our universe is also constrained to function
in the same manner. It may help to remember that long before human society had
theories of progress (after the 1650′s), and of accelerating progress (after
the singularity hypothesis, beginning in the 1900′s), cyclic cosmologies and
theories of social change were the norm. Even a mating salmon is probably very
aware of his own impending demise in the cycle of life. They certainly expend
their energy in ways that are entirely purposeful in that regard.

But awareness of a cycle, in any of these or other examples, does not allow
us to escape it. Or if we think we do, as in the transferring our biological
bodies to cybernetic systems to avoid biological death, we will likely discover
that the same life/death cycles continues to operate that the scale that we
hold most dear, which at that time will no longer be our physical bodies, but
the realm of our higher thoughts, perennially struggling in algorithmic cycles
of evolutionary development, death and life, erasure and reconstitution. As
personal development theorist Stephen Covey ( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671708635/">Seven Habits
of Highly Effective People, 1990) is fond of saying, you cannot break
fundamental principles, or laws of nature. You can only break yourself against
them, if you so choose. So it is that I don’t have any expectation that our
local intelligence could be successful in escaping the cosmic replication cycle.
I think that insight is valuable for predicting several aspects of the shape
of the future.Â

For example, every
scenario that has ever been written about humans "escaping to the stars"
ignores the accelerating intelligence that would occur onboard the ship. Such
civilizations must lead, in a very short time, to technological singularities
and, in the developmental singularity hypothesis, to universal transcension.
As Vernor Vinge says, it is very hard to "write past the singularity,"
and in this regard he has referred both to technological and developmental types.

Alternative scenarios
of constructing signal beacons, or nonliving, fixed-intelligence robotic probes
to spread an href="http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica">Encyclopedia Galactica,
as Carl Sagan once proposed, ignore the massive reduction in evolutionary
variation that would result. This strategy would effectively turn that corner
of the galaxy into an evolutionarily sterile monoculture, condemning all intelligent
civilizations in the area to go down the hole in the same way we did, and all
developmental singularities in the vicinity to be of the same type. If I am
right, our information theory will soon be able to conclusively prove that all
such one-way communications can only reduce total universal complexity, and
are to be scrupulously avoided.

In conclusion,
I don’t think we can get around cyclic laws of nature, once we discover them.
But they can give us deep insight into how to spend our lives, how to surf the
tidal waves of accelerating change toward a more humanizing, individually unique,
and empowering future.

Much of this sounds
quite fantastical, so let me remind you that these are speculative hypotheses.
They will stand or fall based on much more careful scientific investigation
in coming years. Attracting that investigation is one of the goals of our organization.

If, as Ray Kurzweil has suggested, intelligence is developing on its own
trajectory—first in a biological substrate and now in computers—is there an inevitability to the singularity that makes speculating
about it superfluous? Is there really anything we can do about it one way or
the other?

Certainly you
can’t uninvent math, or electricity, or computers, or the internet, or RFID,
once they arrive on the scene. Anyone who looks closely notices a surprising
developmental stability and irreversibility to the acceleration.

But we must remember
that developmental events are only "statistically deterministic."
They often occur with high probability, but only when the environment is appropriate.
Developmental failure, delay, and less commonly, acceleration can also occur.

Speaking optimistically,
I strongly suspect that there is little we could do to abort the singularity,
at this very late stage in its cosmic development. It appears to me that that
we live in a "Child Proof Universe," one that has apparently self-organized,
over many successive cycles, to keep many of the worst destructive capacities
out of the hands of impulsive children like us.

This is a controversial
topic, so I will mention it only briefly, but suffice it to say that after extensive
research I have concluded that no biological or nuclear destructive technologies
that we can presently access, either as individuals or as nations, could ever
scale up to "species killer" levels. All of them are sharply limited
in their destructive effect, either by our far more complex, varied, and overpowering
immune systems, in the biological case, or by intrinsic physical limits—combinatorial
explosion of complexity in designing multistage fission-fusion devices—in the
nuclear weapons case. These destructive limits may exist for reasons of deep
universal design. A universe that allowed impulsive hominids like us an intelligence-killing
destructive power wouldn’t propagate very far along the timeline.

Speaking pessimistically,
I’m sure we could do quite a bit to delay the transition, by fostering a series
of poorly immunized catastrophes. If events take an unfortunate and unforsighted
turn, our planet might suffer the death of a few million human beings at the
hands of poorly secured and monitored destructive technologies, perhaps even
tens of millions, in the worst of the credible terrorist scenarios. But I am
of the strong opinion that we will never again see the 170 million deaths, due
to warfare and political repression, that occurred during the 20^th
century. See Zbignew Brezinski’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684826364/">Out of Control,
1995, for an insightful accounting of the excesses of that now fortunately bygone
era. We are on the sharply downsloping side of the global fatality curve, and
we can thank information and communications technologies for that, more than
any other single factor in the world.

Today, we live
in the era of instant news, electronic intelligence and violence that is increasingly
surgically minimized, by an increasingly global consensus. Even with our primitive,
clunky, first generation internet and planetary communications grid, I feel
our planet’s technological immune systems have become far too strong and pluralistic,
or network-like, for the scale of political atrocities of the twentieth century
to ever recur. Yet conflict and exploitation will continue to occur, and we
could certainly choose a dirty, self-centered, nonsustainable, environmentally
unsound approach to the singularity. Catastrophes can and will continue to recur.
I hope for all our sakes that they are minimized, and that we learn from them
as rapidly and thoroughly as possible.

Unlike a small
minority of aggressive transhumanists, I applaud the efforts we are making to
create a more ecologically sustainable, carefully regulated world of science
and technology. Wherever we can inject values, sensitivity, accountability into
our sociotechnological systems, I think that is a wonderful thing. I’d love
to see the U.S. take a greener path to technology development, the way several
countries in Europe have. I’m also pragmatic in realizing that most social changes
we make will be more for our own peace of mind, and would have little effect
on the intrinsic speed of our global sci-tech advances, on the rate of the increasingly
human-independent learning going on in the ICT architectures all around us.

I consider such
moves to be more reflections on how we walk the path, choices that will in most
cases do very little to delay the transition. I also do not think it is valuable
to hold the perspective that we should get to the singularity as fast as we
can, if that path would be anything other than a fully democratic course. There
are many fates worse than death, as all those who have freely chosen to die
for a cause have realized over the centuries. There are many examples of acceleration
that come at unacceptable cost, as we have seen in the worst political excesses
of the twentieth century. No one of us has a privileged value set.

So perhaps most
importantly, we need to remember that the evolutionary path is what we control,
not the developmental destination. That’s the essence of our daily moral choice,
our personal and collective freedom. We could chart a very nasty, dirty, violent,
and exploitative path to the singularity. Or with good foresight, accountability,
and self-restraint, we could take a much more humanizing course. I am a cautious
optimist in that regard.

Christine Peterson recently told me that artificial intelligence represents
the one future development about which she has the most apprehension. It can
come the closest of any scenario to Bill Joy’s "the future that doesn’t
need us." If the coming of the singularity means the ascendancy of machine
intelligence and the end of the human era, shouldn’t we all be doing what we
can to prevent it from happening?

Ah yes, the Evil Killer Robots scenario. Some of my very clever transhumanist
colleagues worry quite a bit about "Friendly AI." I’m glad to have
friends that are carefully exploring this issue, but from my perspective their
worries seem both premature and cautiously overstated. I strongly suspect that
A.I.s, by virtue of having far greater learning ability than us, will be, must
be, far more ethical than us. That is because I consider ethics to be an emergent
computational interdependence, a mathematics of morality, a calculus of civilization
that is invariably discovered by all complex adaptive systems that function
as collectives. And anything worthy of being called intelligent always functions
as a collective, including your own brain. Today’s cognitive scientists are
discovering the evolutionary ethics that have become self-encoded in all known
complex living systems, from octopi to orangutans, from guppies to gangsters.
For more on this intriguing perspective, see such works as Robert Axelrod’s
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465021212/">The Evolution
of Cooperation, 1985, Matt Ridley’s
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140264450/">The Origins of
Virtue, 1998, and Robert Wright’s
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679758941/">Non-Zero,
2001.

This optimism
isn’t enough, of course. We humans had to go through a nasty, violent, and selfish
phase before we became today’s semi-civilized simians. How do we know computers
won’t have to do the same thing? I think the answer to this question is that
at one level, Peterson’s intuitions are probably right. Tomorrows partially-aware robotic systems and
A.I.s will have to go through a somewhat unfriendly, dangerous phase of "insect
intelligence." As Jeff
Goldblum reminded us in David Cronenberg’s, The
Fly, insects are brutal, they don’t compromise, they don’t have compassion.
Their politics, as E.O. Wilson’s
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674002350/">Sociobiology,
1975/2000 reminds us, are quite comfortable with brute force. That’s a potentially
dangerous developmental stage for an A.I. You wouldn’t want that kind of A.I.
running your ICU, or your defense grid. Or your nanoassembler machines.

But you would
very likely let such a system run the robotics in a manufacturing plant, especially
if evolutionary systems have proven, as they are already demonstrating today,
to be far more powerfully self-improving, self-correcting, and economical than
our top down, human-designed software systems. That plant, of course, would
be outfitted and embedded within a much larger matrix of technological fire
extinguishers, an immune system capable of easily putting out any small fires
that might develop.

But with a learning curve that is multi-millionfold faster than ours, I expect
that "insect transition" to last weeks or months, not years, for any
self-improving electronic evolutionary developmental system. You can be sure
these systems will be well watched over by a bevy of A.I. developers, and those
few catastrophes that occur to be carefully addressed by our cultural and technological
immune systems. It’s easy to underestimate the extent and effectiveness of immune
systems, they aren’t obvious or all that sexy, but they underlie every intelligent
system you can name. Computer scientist Diana Gordon-Spearsand others
have already organized conferences on "Safe Learning Agents," for
example, and we have only just begun to build world-modeling robotics. We’re
still several decades away from anything self-organizing at the hardware level,
anything that could be "intentionally" dangerous.

We also need
to remember that humans will be practicing artificial selection on tomorrow’s
electronic progeny. That is a very powerful tool, not so much for creating complexity,
but for pruning it, for ensuring symbiosis. We’ve had 10,000 years of artificial
selection on our dogs and cats. Their brain structures are black boxes to us,
and yet we find very few today that will try to grab human babies when the parents
are not looking. Again, those few that do are taken care of by immune systems
(we don’t continue to breed such animals, statistically speaking).

In short, I expect
human society will coexist with many decades of very partially aware AI’s, beginning
some time between 2020-2060, which will give us ample time to select for stable,
friendly, and very intimately integrated intelligent partners, for each
of us. Hans Moravec
( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195136306/">Robot,
1999) has done some of the best writing in this area, but even he sometimes
underestimates the importance of the personalization that will be involved.
As a species, humanity would not let the singularity occur as rapidly as it
will without personally witnessing the accelerating usefulness of A.I. interacting
with us in all aspects of our lives, modeling us through our LUI systems, lifecams,
and other aspects of the emerging electronic ecology.

By contrast,
every scenario of "fast takeoff" or A.I. emergence that I’ve ever
seen, the heroic individual toiling away in the lab at night to create HAL-9000,
just doesn’t seem to understand the immense cycles of replication, variation,
interaction, selection, and convergence in evolutionary development that are
always required to create intelligence in both a bottom-up and top-down fashion.
Since the 1950s, almost all the really complex technologies we’ve created have
required teams, and there is presently nothing in technology that is as remotely
complex as a mammalian brain.

As I mention
on my website, I think we are going to have to see massively parallel hardware
systems, directed by some type of DNA-equivalent parametric hardware description
language, unfolding very large, hardware-encoded neural nets and testing them
against digital and real environments in very rapid evolutionary developmental
cycles, before we can tune up a semi-intelligent A.I. The transition will likely
require many teams of individuals and institutions, integrating bottom-up and
top-down approaches, and be primarily a hardware story, and only secondarily
a software story, for a number of reasons.

Bill Joy, in href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy.html">Wired12.2003,
notes that we can expect a 100X increase (6-7 doublings) in general hardware
performance over the next ten years, and a 10X increase in general software
(e.g., algorithmic) performance. While certain specialized areas, like computer
graphics chips may run faster (or slower), on average this sounds about right.
Note the order of magnitude difference in the two domains. Hardware has always
outstripped software because, as I’ve said earlier, it seems to be following
a developmental curve that is more human discovered than human created. It is
easier to discover latent efficiencies in hardware vs. software "phase
space", because the search space is much more directed by the physics of
the microcosm. Teuvo Kohonen, one of the pioneers of neural networks,
tells me that he doesn’t expect the neural network field to come into maturity
until most of our nets are implemented in hardware, not software, a condition
we are still at least a decade or two away from attaining.

The central problem
is an economic one. No computer manufacturer can begin to explore how to create
biologically-inspired, massively parallel hardware architectures until our chips
stop their magic annual shrinking game and have become maximally-miniaturized
(within the dominant manufacturing paradigm) commodities. That isn’t expected
for at least another 15 years, so we’ve got a lot of time yet to think about
how we want to build these things.

If I’m right,
the first versions of really interesting A.I.s will likely emerge on redundant,
fault tolerant evolvable hardware "Big Iron" machines that take us
back to the 1950s in their form factor. Expect some of these computers to be
the size of buildings, tended by vast teams of digital gardeners. Dumbed-down
versions of the successful hardware nets will be grafted into our commercial
appliances and tools, mini-nets built on a partially reconfigurable architecture,
systems that will regularly upgrade themselves over the Net. But even in the
multi-millionfold faster electronic environment, a bottom-up process of evolutionary
development must still require decades, not days, to grow high-end A.I.. And
primarily top-down A.I. designs are just flat wrong, ignorant of how complexity
has always emerged in physical systems. Even all of human science, which some
consider the quintessential example of a rationally-guided architecture, has
been far more an inductive, serendipitous affair than a top-down, deductive
one, as James Burke
( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316116726/">Connections,
1995) delights in reminding us.

So, when one
of the first generation laundry folding robots in 2030 folds your cat by accident,
we’ll learn a tremendous amount about how rapidly self-correcting these systems
are, how quickly, with minor top-down controls and internet updates, we can
help them to improve their increasingly bottom-up created brains. Unlike today’s
still-stupid cars, for example, which currently participate in 40,000 American
fatalities every year, tomorrows LUI-equipped, collision avoiding, autopiloting
vehicles will be increasingly human friendly and human protecting every year.
This encoded intelligence, this ability to ensure increasingly desirable outcomes,
is what makes a Segway so fundamentally
different from a bicycle. Segway V, if it arrives, would put out a robotic hand
or an airbag to protect you from an unexpected fall. So it will be with your
PDA of 2050, but in a far more generalized sense.

In a related point,
I also wouldn’t worry too much about the loss of our humanity to the machines.
Evolution has shown that good ideas always get rediscovered. The eye, for example,
was discovered at least thirty times by some otherwise very divergent genetic
pathways. As Simon Conway Morris eloquently argues ( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521827043/">Life’s Solution,
2003) every single aspect of our human-ness that we prize has already been independently
emulated to some degree, by the various "nonhuman" species we find
on this planet. Octopi are so smart, for example, that they build houses, and
learn complex behavior (e.g., jar-opening) from each other even when kept in
adjacent aquaria.

This leads us
to a somewhat startling realization. Even if, in the most abominably unlikely
of scenarios, all of humanity were snuffed out by a rogue A.I., from a developmentalist
perspective it seems overwhelmingly likely that good A.I.s would soon emerge
to recreate us. Probably not in the "Christian rapture" scenario envisioned
by transhumanist Frank Tipler in href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385467990/">The Physics of
Immortality, 1997, but certainly our informational essence, all that
we commonly hold dear about ourselves.

How can we even
suspect this? Humanity today is doing everything it can to unearth all that
came before us. It is in the nature of all intelligence to want to deeply know
its lineage, not just from our perspective, but from the perspective of the
prior systems. If the world is based on physical causes, then in order to truly
know one understands the world, one must truly know, and be able to understand
at the deepest level, the systems in which one is embedded, the systems from
which one has emerged, in a continuum of developmental change. The past is always
far more computationally tractable than what lies ahead.

That curiosity
is a beautiful thing, as it holds us all tightly interdependent, one common
weave of the spacetime fabric, so to speak.

That’s why we
are already spending tens of millions of dollars a year trying to model the
way bacteria work, trying to predict, eventually in real-time, everything they
do before they even do it, so that we know we truly understand them. That’s
why emergent A.I. will do the same thing to us, permeating our bodies and brains
with its nanosensor grids, to be sure it fully understands its heritage. Only
then will we be ready to make the final transition from the flesh.

Also on your website, I read that the singularity will occur within the
next 40 to 120 years. Isn’t that kind of broad range? What’s your best guess
on when it will occur?

I find that those
making singularity predictions can be usefully divided into href="http://www.singularitywatch.com/explore.html">three camps: those predicting
near term (now to 2029), mid-term (2030-2080), and longer term (2081-2150+)
emergence of a generalized greater-than-human intelligence. Each group has somewhat
different demographics, which may be interesting from an anthropological perspective.

I think the range
is so broad because the future is inherently unpredictable and under our influence.
It is also true that none of us has yet developed a popular set of quantitative
methodologies for thinking rigorously about these things. Very little money
or attention has been given to them. If you’d like to send a donation to our
organization to help in that regard, let us know.

Consider this basic shape:

I’ve always been fascinated by spirals. When I was a kid, I used to sit and
draw them for hours at a time. This was long before I knew anything about
Phi
or the Fibonacci
sequence, before I had ever heard of logarithmic spirals or fractals,
before I ever came to work for a company with such an aesthetically pleasing
logo. I’ve never lost interest
in them. In fact, whether meaning to or not, I seem to fill my life with spirals.

My choice of employer was just the beginning.

Take a look at this ironwork that sits atop my bedroom mirror. It’s pretty
close to the shape in the line drawing above, although it stops short of being an actual
spiral.

Here’s my coffee mug. Now this shape is a spiral, but it’s different from
the one shown above. It’s more "practical," a squashed spiral that
will fit in a small space.

Here’s some original artwork, the basis for the Speculist logo. These spirals
are actually the same as the line drawing; it was the template I used to create my galaxy.

The truth is, whether I try to fill my life with it or not, that spiral is
everywhere. This simple shape, along with the math that underpins it, is encoded
into our universe. The sequence of numbers that produces it is simplicity
itself:

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987

(To get the next number, you simply add the previous two.)

And yet from that simplicity comes immense and wonderful complexity. A nautilus
shell encodes that sequence to produce its spiral shape, as does a wave just
before it breaks on the shore. And, as I’ve shown above, the trillions of
stars making up a galaxy tend to follow the same sequence and produce the same
lovely spiral. There are many, many other examples.

And it may not just be physical objects that follow this sequence. John Smart,
Director of the Institute for Accelerating
Change, has suggested that history, perhaps even time itself, may be driven
by such a sequence.
Following the sequence of events that make up history is, perhaps, not unlike
following the arc of a galactic spiral arm as it sweeps its way into the center.
Imagine such a trip: you start out moving slowly in nearly empty space, gaining
momentum as the turns begin to come more quickly and the frequency of the
stars increases; soon there are more stars and then more, and now you’re spiraling
in and in and in, to the incredibly hot, dense core—and then even further
in, to a place that’s beyond our ability to describe accurately, or really
even to imagine.

In the interview that follows, John Smart takes us on just such a journey
through time. The galaxy that we are travelling through is the history of
the universe itself; the turns in the spiral are the major developmental epochs;
the stars are the individual, evolutionary changes. Like a trip to the center
of the galaxy, this journey takes us, quite literally, beyond the limits of
the imagination.

You may be startled to realize (as I was) where exactly we are on that winding
path to the brink of the unknowable.

Part I: Seven Questions About the Future

1. The present is the future relative to the past. What’s the best thing
about living here in the future?

Cato Institute authors Julian Simon and
Stephen Moore noted in 2000, href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1882577973/">It’s Getting
Better All the Time. Not only that, but things are getting better by
a greater absolute amount each year, with the exception of very few remaining
parts of the developing world. And improving conditions in the developing world
is something we also have more ability to do today than ever before.

This amazing
state of affairs is due almost entirely to advances in science and technology,
and the profoundly civilizing way that these subjects interact with the half-bald
primates that have discovered them and who are now feverishly employing them
at every level of human endeavor it on this precious little planet.

Looking at the
same process from the informational side (sometimes called the metaphysical
side), the powerful transformations we are witnessing are also due to what the
transhumanist mystic Teilhard de Chardin
( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006090495X/">The Phenomenon
of Man, 1955) called "psychical energy", the accelerating
forces of conscious intelligence, loving interdependence, and resilient immunity,
the holistic, informational yang to the reductionist, atomistic yin of sci-tech.

I think we are
beginning to recognize the importance of both the "psychical"/informational
and the physical/material in every complex system, what John Archibald Wheeler
calls the increasingly aware "it" that emerges from all our quantum
"bits."

2. What’s the biggest disappointment?

The U.S. has
been the world’s technological leader since the invention of the "American
System" of mass production and interchangeable parts in the 1910′s. But
we’ve fallen away from a clear leadership position in several areas of science
and technology in recent decades, and I think the world is poorer for it.

Ask yourself:
what is the single greatest goal currently unifying our national efforts in
science and technology? I don’t have a clear answer to that question, and I
think there should always be one, or at least a very small handful.

Stopping terrorism
one of today’s admirable, timely, and necessary great goals. And there are certainly
effective technological immune systems that we will develop around this goal
in coming years. But this is a reactive, not a proactive program. We aren’t
presently rallying the country around a positive, href="http://www.nonzero.org/">non-zero sum developmental vision. Nanotechnology
is a candidate, but as I will describe later, it cannot yet fire the public
imagination the way more achievable, short-term goals can. Where’s the leadership
we need?

We’ve had some
effective great goals in the past. John F. Kennedy’s
Space Program most readily comes to mind. The infrastructure projects of Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal were at least a partial success, if economically mixed. Even Lyndon Johnson’s
War on Poverty made some measurable progress.

Why is the Moon
Shot the great goal we all most clearly identify? Scientific and technological
goals, if chosen wisely, can have both dramatic consequences and clear deliverables,
unlike many of our social, economic, and political objectives. At best, a great
goal is both vitally important and demonstrably achievable. At worst, as with
the Wars on Cancer, or Drugs, or Inner City Violence, the putative great goal
diverts our energies and vision from more critical priorities. Alternatively,
a vitally important goal may be too ambitious to achieve within one generation,
like WMD Nonproliferation, which has been measurably improved by every president
since Kennedy. Alternative energy development, greenhouse gas reduction, and
a host of other goals fall into this latter category.

Worthy as they
are, these types of goals deserve to remain on the second tier of the public
consciousness. Only the most important, urgent, and achievable goals deserve
to be named as our top priorities. I would also argue strongly that if we live
in a time when we can’t find those, then the country’s direction drifts, noise
exceeds signal, and political apathy becomes the norm.

So what is the
great goal our country is currently ignoring? It’s definitely not space exploration,
as I argue later in this interview. That era is over for all but our robotic
progeny, and even they will only be sending out a small number of "Eyes
in the Sky" to relay back what little we still don’t understand about the
simplistic historical cosmologies that have led to our astounding local complexity.

No, the real
acceleration today is the creation of inner space, not the exploration of outer
space. The trajectory of intelligence development has always been toward increasingly
local, increasingly Matter-, Energy-, Space-, and Time-compressed ("MEST-compressed")
computational domains, and there is nothing on the horizon that suggests we
will begin to violate that. Indeed, all signs point toward a world of greater
energy densities of local computation, as I will discuss later. Science and
technology remain the key story in this transformation, as they has since the
birth of our nation, and anyone who looks carefully will tell you that Information
and Communication Technologies (ICT) are the central drivers of all scientific
and technologic change.

Major changes
are afoot. We are creating a virtual or simulated world, one that will soon
be far richer and more productive than the physical world it augments. At the
same time, humanity is becoming intimately connected to and symbiotically captured
within our accelerating digital ecology. While many elements of our individuality
are flowering, many others are necessarily atrophying through disuse. This gives
us pause. Many of today’s first world humans no longer know how to grow and
prepare food (due to automated food production), how to repair many of our most
basic tools and technologies (due to automated manufacture and specialized service
for complex systems) how to do arithmetic by hand (due to ubiquitous digital
calculators), how to read with the level of their parents (due to our media-based
culture) or even how to read a map (due to GPS). Yet these atrophies are natural
and predictable, in the same way our Australopithecine sense of smell rapidly
declined once we began forming social structures, applying ourselves to more
sophisticated network-based modes of computation (for more on this, see Carl Zimmer’s
wonderful " href="http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/PDF/NoseGenes2002.pdf">The Rise and Fall
of the Nasal Empire," Natural History, June 2002). Our ever-more-stimulated
cortex continues to expand, not shrink, in this developmental process. Our finite,
precious set of cognitive modules are always repurposed for higher level activity,
the way Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas emerged once humans began using the technology
of speech (see Terrence
Deacon’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317544/">The Symbolic
Species, 1998). Once again, we humans are becoming nodes in larger networks,
this time on national and global scales, involving technological processes far
faster, more flexible, and more permanent than the biological domain.

To my mind, the
last century’s accelerations were driven most significantly by human discovery
within the technological hardware and materials science space (and to a much
smaller extent, algorithmic discovery in software). In other words, this process
has apparently been guided by the special, preexisting, computation-accelerating
physics of the microcosm, a very curious feature of the universe we inhabit,
as long noted by Richard Feynman, Carver Mead, and several other physical theorists and experimentalists. Secondarily, the
advances we have seen have also been driven by human initiative and creativity
in all domains, and by the quality of choices we have made in scientific and
technological development. We must move beyond our pride to realize that human
creativity has played a supporting role to human discovery in this process,
but when we do I think great insight can emerge.

Where the clock, the telegraph, the engine, the telephone, the nuclear chain
reaction, and the television were organizing metaphors for other times, the
internet has become the metaphor for ours. It is the central catalyst of human
and technological computation for our generation, the leading edge of the present
developmental process of accelerating change. The internet, growing before our
eyes, will soon become planetnet, a system so rich, ubiquitous, and natural
to use that it will be a semi-intelligent extension of ourselves, available
to us at every point on this sliver of surface, between magma and vacuum, that
we call home. That will be very empowering and liberating, and at the same time,
civilizing. The human biology doesn’t change, but we are creating an intelligent
house for the impulsive human of almost unimaginable subtlety and sophistication.

All this said,
our goals should try to reflect these natural developmental processes as much
as our collective awareness will allow. It is my contention that the internet
is territory within which our most achievable and important current great goals
lie.

A number of technologists
have proposed that there are two main bottlenecks to the internet’s impending
transformation into a permanent, symbiotic appendage to the average citizen.
The first is the lack of ubiquitous affordable always on, always accessible
broadband connectivity for all users, and the second is the current necessity
of a keyboard-dependent interface for the average user’s average interaction
with the system.

In other words,
developing cheap, fat data pipes, both wired and wireless, and a growing set
of useful Linguistic User
Interfaces (LUIs) are obvious candidates for our nation’s greatest near
term ICT developmental challenges. Just like the transcontinental railroad was
a great goal of the late 1800′s, getting affordable broadband to everyone in
this country by 2010, and a href="http://www.singularitywatch.com/promontorypoint.html">first generation LUI
by 2015 appear to be the greatest unsung goals of our generation. Now we
just need our national, international, and institutional leaders to start singing
this song, in unison.

This is a truly
global transformation, one dwarfing everything else on the near-term horizon.
It is such a planetary issue, in fact, that given the unprecedented human productivities
that are already being unleashed by internet-aided manufacturing and services
globalization since the mid 1990′s, a strong case can be made that we might
economically benefit more in the U.S., even today, by getting greater broadband
penetration first not to our own citizens, but to the youth of a number of trade-oriented,
pro-capitalist countries in the developing world! Unfortunately that level of
globally aware, self-interested prioritization is not yet politically salable
as a great goal to be funded by U.S. tax dollars. But I predict that it increasingly
will be, in a world that already pools its development dollars for a surprising
number of transnational projects. At any rate, we can at least push for accelerated
efforts in international technology transfer in internet related areas, concurrent
with our domestic agenda.

If you’ve never
heard of a LUI before, take a browse through the links above. Your father used
a TUI (text-based user interface). You use a GUI (graphical user interface).
Your kid will primarily use a LUI (voice-driven interface) to speak to the computers
embedded in every technology in her environment. She’ll continue to use TUIs
and GUIs, but only secondarily, not for her typical, average interaction with
a machine. Your grandchildren will use a NUI (neural user interface), a biologically-inspired,
self-improving, very impressive set of machines. More on that later.

Declaring broadband
and LUI as great goals needs to be differentiated from the much-hyped "Fourth
Generation" AI project, that 1980′s great goal in Japan, that predictably
failed in the 1990′s. General artificial intelligence, a general purpose NUI,
is much too hard a national goal to declare today. So is the development of
a molecular assembler, or a computational nanocell/molectronic fabrication system
for nanotechnology by 2020, as powerful as such devices will eventually become.
Christine Peterson
of the href="http://www.foresight.org/">Foresight Institute has even stated that
a nanotech great goal, at least in the form of a Manhattan Project for molecular
nanotechnology, would be premature today. It is my opinion that the National
Nanotechnology Initiative, perhaps our current leading candidate for a great
technology goal, has already provided a commendable and unprecedented level
of funding to this worthy field for the present time. Now we need to see a Broadband
and LUI Initiative with some very challenging five, ten, fifteen, and twenty
year goals set.

Broadband and
basic LUIs everywhere within a generation would throw gasoline on the fire of
human innovation. This level of internet would link all our wisest minds, including
even those elders who little use computers today, into one real-time community.
It would accelerate our nation and more importantly, the entire planet even
more than the transcontinental railroad, which compressed coast-to-coast travel
time from six months to six days. Maximal broadband penetration plus an incrementally
more powerful and useful LUI is a dramatic and achievable objective for the
United States over the next twenty years. IBM technologist John
Patrick in his insightful href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738205133/">Net Attitude,
2001, has broadly described the challenges of a Next Generation Internet. But
even Patrick does not properly emphasize the central importance of incorporating
natural language processing (NLP) systems as early and broadly as practical.
Developing a functional LUI is a great goal whose progress we could measure
each year forward, something we can also catalyze worldwide as others emulate
our leadership in the emerging digital community.

Of course, if
we don’t declare this goal, natural technological developmental processes will
likely eventually deliver it for us anyway. Perhaps first to other nations,
and then eventually, to us. So why bother? Because if we see it, and have the
courage to declare it and strive for it, there are at least two major benefits
we can reap.

The first benefit
will be a measure of developmental acceleration. Even with the inefficiencies
of large government, a billion dollar a year program of public targeted grants,
with private matching funds and excellent public relations to get everyone on
this bandwagon, might accelerate the emergence of a functional LUI by a decade.
That would likely be the best spent money in our entire R&D budget.

A less politically
likely but still plausible "Open Manhattan Project," involving a number
of competing centers and a multi-billion dollar annual public-private commitment,
might accelerate the LUI by twice this amount. Many of my computer scientist
colleagues, knowing the inchoate state of the field today, think that developing
and deploying a LUI powerful enough to be used by most people for most of their
daily computer interactions by 2020 is a very challenging vision. Developing
functional natural language processing with complex semantics is a very hard
problem, one we have been experimenting with for fifty years, but one that also
benefits greatly from scale and parallelism, two strategies that are increasingly
affordable each year.

It is true that
other countries will take up our slack to a certain degree if we drop the ball,
but we must realize that an international race has not yet even begun in earnest,
as national leadership has not yet materialized on this issue. Transnational
network development institutions like the href="http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/conferences/wtdc/2002/brochure/who_what_where_why.html">ITU
are wonderful starts, but it will take a leading nation stepping boldly into
the breech to accelerate the world’s response to this issue. For a valuable
comparison, the roughly six billion dollar annual worldwide funding that exists
today in nanotechnology (grossly, 1 billion public, 1 billion private in the
U.S., Europe, and Asia) was greatly accelerated by the United States’ public
multiyear leadership on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, proposed to
the White House by Mike Roco
in 1999, at a level of half a billion dollars annually, and funded beginning
in 2001.

The longer we
choose not to declare broadband and the LUI as developmental goals and support
them with escalating innovation and consistent funding, the longer we delay
their arrival.

The second benefit
of declaring this goal, better collective foresight, may be even more important
than the time we save. By declaring good developmental goals early on, we learn
to see the world as the information processing system that it really is, not
simply as the collection of human-centric dramas we often fancy it to be. With
this new insight we begin to look for ways to catalyze the beneficial accelerations
occurring in almost all of our technologies, and ways to block the harmful ones
long enough for overpowering immune systems to mature. And we discover the common
infrastructures upon which so many of our goals converge.

For example,
just about all of our cherished social goals seem dependent on the quality and
quantity of information getting to the individual. You can’t fix an antiquated,
politically deadlocked educational system, for example, without a functional
LUI, which would educate the world’s children in ways no human ever could. You
can’t create a broadly accessible or useful health care system. Or security
system.

Computer networks,
through the humans they connect and the social and digital ecologies they foster,
will soon educate human beings to be good citizens far better than any of today’s
pedagogical systems ever could. They will make us more productive, day by day,
than we ever dreamed we could be. I think it’s time to move beyond our hubris
and acknowledge the human-surpassing transformations taking place. If we don’t,
other countries will take the lead. Look to China, whose technological revolution
is now well under way, or even to India, who recently declared a 2.7
billion, four-year program to build an achievable proto-LUI by 2007. That’s
real leadership, as long as the goals are set to be deliverable. C’mon America,
let’s do it!

Let me briefly turn now to from discussing national to personal disappointments.
We who study science and technology can often see what’s coming, and yet we
remain stuck in the Wild Wild West (e.g., today’s World Wide Web). One of my
heroes, F.M. Esfandiary(later, FM-2030), wrote a wonderful little book,
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393086119/">Optimism One,
1970, where he described his "deep nostalgia for the future." One
of his lesser known works, href="http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook7527.htm">UpWingers, 1973,
was a brief manifesto for a political outlook neither right wing, nor left wing,
but "up wing," one defined by assessing which choices in science and
technology will accelerate us the most humanely into a better world. I consider
myself an up winger, and hope to see the spread and maturation of that political
philosophy in coming years. Yet I see how far we remain from defining ourselves
in those terms, and that can be discouraging, at times.

Take a look at those sepia-toned photos of San Francisco pioneers in the late
1800′s. They were the edge explorers of the day, like my own identity groups,
the href="http://www.wfs.org/">futurists and href="http://www.transhumanism.org/">transhumanists today. Every once in a
while you’ll see one of these individuals look out at you with haunted eyes.
Perhaps they had read Edward Bellamy’s hugely-popular futurist work,
Looking Backward: 1887-2000.
Perhaps they were even members of one of the 150 or so Bellamy Clubs of the
day. The turn of the century was a time of major technological punctuation,
led by a profusion of new technologies (trains, electricity, internal combustion,
etc.) in many ways more disruptive and dramatic than any we have seen in this
generation, even if not faster-paced. No doubt the average futurist in that
era was tormented by many of the primitivisms of the day. That pioneer of yesteryear
is you and I, today. The more things change the more some things stay the same.
In high school, I often talked about posing our Smart family for a group shot,
with a background of the "coolest" technologies of the day: sports
car, helicopter, personal computer, industrial robot, bulky cellphone, the works.
The central gag is that we’d all be wearing handcuffs, looking out with that
haunted pioneer’s expression. The unwritten caption being: "Help! Get me
the hell out of this primitive age!" I think that picture would age quite
well over the years. We could take one every ten years, in fact, and I know
that at least my own expression wouldn’t change much.

A healthy disappointment
in the present can be motivating, as long as we keep our perspective. We never
want to lose our naturalist’s love and scientist’s wonder for the amazingly
beautiful and well-designed world that already exists, for it is only in understanding
this world that we can help create the next. As Esfandiary observed, we have
to come to terms with our angst about the primitive aspects of the present,
and use it for creative purposes.

This said, one
major personal disappointment that every futurist must eventually face, before
we die, is how bleak our prospects presently appear for achieving personal immortality
in the biological domain. Even our best longevity strategies appear to have
precious little chance of changing this reality. Unfortunately, they are pitted
against a massively parallel nonlinear system of unimaginable complexity and
contingency that appears developmentally programmed to start falling apart at
an accelerating rate after sexual maturity. This is an unpopular position to
take among some of the more bio-centric transhumanists, but I will go on record
predicting that in 2020, even as we are witnessing such powerful infotech advances
as the LUI, most of us will still be losing our short term memory at 50, many
of us will continue to get Alzheimer’s at 80, and more than 95 percent of us
will be right on target for a biological death some time between 70 and 100,
with a negligible few of us living a decade or two longer, in rapidly declining
health. Such conditions are endemic to the Wild West, and our primitive science
seems currently a very long way from being able to make them go away.

Thus, for any
futurist willing to look beyond the hype to the hard data in the biological
sciences, we soon discover a major disconnect between what we would like and
what is physically possible. This disconnect is intrinsic to biology, but it
does not exist in our increasingly self-organizing information technologies,
and that, I think, is a major clue to the nature of the future. Attaining a
measure of cybernetic immortality may arguably even be inevitable for humanity
in a post-singularity era, as we will discuss shortly.

Any sensitive
futurist today will tell you that slowing and eventually reversing the rich/poor
divides is one of the major problems of our generation. Yet even with the tremendous
scale of this problem, as technology quickens we can at least see the corrective
path ahead. As the information access divide closes everywhere in the LUI era,
we can expect the education, then human rights, then public health, and eventually
even wealth and power divides to inexorably follow suit. But once basic public
health and medical care are available to all citizens of the planet in the latter
half of this century, the most fundamental problem with our human biology will
no longer be the rich/poor medical therapy divide. The fundamental problem will
be that so few of our medical therapies will have anything but the mildest preventive
effect against the ravages of aging. Human beings are deeply, inaccessibly developmentally
programmed to be materially recycled, ironically as we reach the peak of our
life wisdom.

We can expect
this unfortunate condition to last at least until the post-singularity A.I.’s
development of advanced nanotechnology, which may take many decades itself.
But by then, as I’ll argue later, living in the confinement of a biological
body, even one carefully reengineered for negligible senescence, will no longer
be the game we want to play. No matter how you stack the scenarios, biological
longevity of any significant degree doesn’t seem to play a part in the future
story of local intelligence.

Fortunately,
we remain amazingly adaptable, even to our own deaths, which will remain on
very highly predictable steep-sloped actuarial curves on this side of the singularity,
regardless of what some transhumanists will tell you. We can always find happiness
by getting back to basics. We can appreciate the deep natural intelligence and
informational immortality already encoded in the system, if not the individual.

When I encounter
one of life’s immovable objects I’ll try harder up to a point, but when that
doesn’t work I’ve learned the peace of slowing down, cherishing the moment,
honoring the inner primate, enjoying the quiet self, regrouping and rethinking
my plans, even as my dreams of personal transformation are necessarily contracted.
As the mouseketeer Annette Funicello
has said, on href="http://www.calfund.org/8/giving_funicello.php">dealing with multiple sclerosis:
"I choose not to give up. That would be too easy." And far less interesting.

3. Assuming you die at
the age of 100, what will be the biggest difference between the world you were
born into and the world you leave?

This is a complex
question. To my eyes, the world seems to progress by fits and starts, by rapid
punctuations separated by long droughts of less revolutionary equilibrium states.
Fortunately, these equilibrium periods seem to get progressively shorter with
time, because the entire planet’s technological intelligence is learning in
an increasingly autonomous fashion,
at a rate that is at least ten millionfold faster than our own.

So what will
be the biggest punctuation of my lifetime? From my perspective, we are currently
chugging through the equilibrium flatlands in the last third of an Information
Age, one that will likely be seen in hindsight as running for about seventy
years, from 1950 to 2020. I expect this to be followed by a punctuated transition
to a shorter Symbiotic Age, running perhaps thirty years, from 2020-2050. I
see these equilibrium eras as part of an accelerating spiral of punctuated evolutionary
development, and I consider several of the general, statistically predictable
developmental features of this acceleration to be tuned in to the special parameters
of the universe we inhabit. Consider skimming my web page on the href="http://www.singularitywatch.com/spiral.html">Developmental Spiral if
you’d like to explore this spiral of accelerating emergences a bit further.

To answer your
question then, I think the transition to symbiotic computing systems, the decade
or two surrounding our entry to the LUI era, will be the biggest difference
I’ll see. The Symbiotic Age will be a time when almost all of us will consider
computers as actually useful (many today don’t), and when the vast majority
of us begin to feel naked outside the network. When we all have what futurist
Alex Lightman calls "wireless everywear" access to our talking computer interface,
and when computers start to do very useful, high level things in our lives.

By the end of
this age, for that vast majority of us who choose to participate in digital
ecologies, a mature LUI will be interfaced with personal computers that are
capturing our entire lives digitally (Lifecams), that help us stay proficient
in a small number of carefully chosen skills (Knowledge Management) and that,
by remembering everything we have ever said, begin to extensively model not
only our preferences, but our personalities as well. href="http://mysite.verizon.net/william.bainbridge/dl/capture.htm">Personality
Capture, a first generation form of href="http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Uploading/">uploading, is one of the
most important aspects of the post-2020 world, and one of the least reported
and understood, at present. Read William Sims Bainbridge
for more on this gargantuan developmental attractor.

At that point, our computers will become our best friends, our fraternal twins,
and human beings will be intimately connected to each other and to their machines
in ways few futurists have fully grasped to date. Read Ray Kurzweil’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140282025/">The Age of Spiritual
Machines, 1999 for one excellent set of longer term scenarios. Read
B.J. Fogg’s href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558606432">Persuasive Technology,
2002 for some nearer term ones. Today’s early modeling systems, like href="http://face-and-emotion.com/dataface/facs/new_version.jsp">FACS for
reading human facial emotion, will be improved and integrated into your personalized
LUI, which will monitor both internal and external biometrics to improve our
health, outlook, and performance.Â

We’ll communicate
intelligently with all our tools, giving constant verbal feedback to their designers.
We’ll spend most of our waking lives exploring a simulation space (simspace)
that is so rich, educational, entertaining, and productive, that we will call
today’s mostly non-virtual world "slowspace" by comparison, a place
many of us will drop back into only when we aren’t working, learning, and exploring.
Slowspace will remain sacred, and close to our hearts, but it will begin to
become secondary and functionally remote, like the home of our youth.

Circa 2050, in
my current estimation, we might see another punctuation to an Autonomy Age,
when large scale, biologically-inspired computing systems begin to exhibit higher
level human intelligence. Many of our technologies will at that time be able
to autonomously improve themselves for extended periods of time. During this
era, machine intelligence, even in our research labs, will continue to blunder
into dead ends everywhere, the cul-de-sacs that are the typical result of chaotic
evolutionary searches. But these systems will very quickly be able to reset
themselves, with little human assistance, to try a new evolutionary developmental
approach. I wouldn’t expect that period to last very long. Perhaps a decade
or so later, from our perspective, equilibria in terms of technological intelligence
will disappear altogether.

We will then
have arrived at the technological
singularity, a phase change, a place where the technology stream flows so
fast that new global rules emerge to describe the system’s relation to the slower-moving
elements in its vicinity, including our biological selves. That doesn’t mean
we won’t be able to understand the general rules that emerge. On the contrary,
most of these may be obvious to us, even now. But it means that many of the
particular states occurring within those rules will become impenetrable to pre-singularity
minds.

A human-surpassing
general artificial intelligence will be a physical system, and if it is physical,
much of its architecture must be simple, repetitive, and highly understandable
even by biological minds. Consider, for example, just how much we know about
the neural architecture that creates our own consciousness, without being able
to predict consciousness emergence, or to comprehend its nature from first principles.
So it must be with the A.I.’s to come—while much of their structure will be
tractable and tangible to us in a reductionist sense, much of their holistic
intelligence will become impenetrable to our biological minds.

This impenetrability
is nothing mystical, we already see it in the way the emergent features of any
complex technology such as a supercomputer, automated refinery, robotic factory,
or supply chain management system are already poorly comprehended by all but
those few of us involved its analysis or design. The difference will be that
the emergent intelligence of virtually all planetary technology will begin to
display this inscrutability, not just to average users, but even to the experts
involved in its creation.

Consider for a moment the following presently unprovable assertion: If ethics
are a necessary emergence from computational complexity, then I contend that
these systems will be ethically compelled to minimize the disruption we feel
in the transition. As a result, most of the self improvement of self-aware
A.I.s will occur on the other side of an event horizon, beyond which biological
organisms cannot directly perceive, only speculate. Yet at the same time, our
technologies will continue to gently become ever more seamlessly integrated
with our biological bodies, so that when we say we don’t understand aspects
of the emergent intelligence, it will increasingly be like saying we don’t understand
emergent aspects of ourselves. But unlike our biological inscrutabilities, the
technological portions of ourselves that we don’t understand will be headed
very rapidly toward new levels of comprehension of universal complexity, playing
in fields forever inaccessible to our slow-switching biological brains.

My current estimate
for that transition would be around 2060, but that is a guess. We need funded
research to be able to achieve better insight, something that hasn’t yet happened
in the singularity studies field. The generation being born today will likely
find that a very interesting time. At the same time, as I have said, I expect
it they won’t consider it to be a perceptually disruptive time, at least any
more than prior punctuations. A time of massive transformation, but very likely
significantly less stressful than prior punctuations, given the way computational
complexity creates its own increasingly fine-grained stability, if one looks
closely at the universal developmental record.

Looking at universal
history, every singularity seems to be built on a chain of prior singularities.
Considering the chain that has led to human emergence, each appears to have
rigorously preserved the local acceleration of computational complexity. The
tech singularity certainly has a lot of significance to human beings, as after
that date our own biology becomes a second-rate computational system in this
local environment. This emergence, obvious to many high school students today,
still irritates, angers, and frightens many scholars, who have attempted to
dismiss it by calling it "techno-transcendentalism," "cybernetic
totalism," "hatred of the flesh," "religious belief,"
"millennialism," or any number of other conveniently thought-stopping
labels.

But from a universal
perspective, the coming technological singularity looks like just another link
in a very fast, steep climb up a nearly vertical slope on the way to an even
more interesting destination. My best present guess for that destination is
the developmental singularity,
a computational system that rapidly outgrows this universe and transitions to
another domain. Fortunately, there are many practical insights we can gain today
from developmental models, as they testably predict the necessary direction
of our complex systems. Our own organization, the href="http://www.accelerating.org/">Institute for Accelerating Change, hopes
to see more funding and institutional interest in these topics in coming decades.

But getting back
to my own mortality, even with the best human-guided medical and preventive
care that money can buy, I’m not at all sure I’ll live to 100, unlike many of
my more sanguine transhumanist friends. Human bodies are deeply developmentally
designed to have our construction materials recycled, as best we can tell. I
predict our planet will see only a very mild increase in supercentenarians in
the next fifty years, regardless of all the wonderful schemes of "negligible
senescence" by passionate researchers like Aubrey
De Grey. Only infotech, not biotech, is on an accelerating developmental growth curve,
apparently for deep universal reasons.

What I have just
said goes against the dominant dogma, promoted by indiscriminately optimistic
futurists and a complicit biotech industry, both of which are strongly motivated
to believe that we will see a powerful "secondary acceleration" in
biotech, carried along by our primary acceleration in infotech. But while we
will see a very dramatic acceleration in biotech knowledge, I humbly
suggest that our existing knowledge of biological development already tells
us that we will be able to use this information to make only very mild changes
in biological capabilities and capacities, almost exclusively only changes that
"restore to the mean" those who have lost their ability to function
at the level of the average human being.

As I explain
in href="http://www.singularitywatch.com/biotech.html">Understanding the Limitations
of Twenty-First Century Biotechnology, there are a number of very fundamental
reasons why biotech, aided by infotech, cannot create accelerating gains within
biological environments. Yes, with some very clever and humane commercializations
of caloric restriction and a handful of other therapies we might see twenty
times more people living past 100 than we see today, people with fortuitous
genes who scrupulously follow good habits of nutrition and exercise. That is
a noble and worthwhile goal. But we must also remember that virtually no one
lives beyond 100 today, so a 20X increase is still only very mild in global
computational and humanitarian effect. This will add to our planetary wisdom,
and is something to strive toward, but this is not a disruptive change, for
deep reasons to do with the limitations of the biological substrate.

Furthermore, genetic engineering, as I discuss in the link above, cannot create
accelerating changes using top-down processes in terminally differentiated organisms
like us. This intervention would have only mild effects even if it could get
beyond our social immune systems to the application stage, which in most cases
it thankfully cannot. Perhaps the most disruptive biotech change we can reliably
expect, a cheap and effective memory drug that allows us temporary, caffeine-like
spikes in our learning ability, followed by inevitable "stupid periods"
where we must recover from the simplistic chemical perturbation, would certainly
also improve the average wisdom of human society. But even this amazing advance
would not even double our planetary biological processing capacity, something
that happens in information technologies every 18-24 months.Â

In summary, many
decades before the tech singularity arrives I expect to either be chemically
recycled (most likely), or to be in some kind of suspended animation. Cryonic
suspension, for all its life-affirming intent, will likely stay entirely marginalized
in the first world prior to the singularity for a number of reasons, both psychosocial
and technological. At present, I’d consider it for myself only if a number of
presently unlikely conditions transpire: 1) neuroscience comes up with a model
that tells us what elements of the brain need to be protected to preserve personality,
2) cryonics researchers can either prevent or show the irrelevance of the extensive
damage that presently occurs during freezing, 3) most of my friends are doing
it (they are currently not), and 4) I expect to be revived by intelligent machines
not in some far future, but very soon after I die, while many of my biological
friends are still alive.

The second and
the fourth conditions deserve some expansion. As to the second condition, we
do not yet know to what extent the brain’s complexity is dependent on the intricate
three dimensional structure in which it emerges. That structure, today, is grossly
deformed and degraded in the freezing process, which currently leads both to
destruction (via stochastic fusion) of at least some neural ultrastructure,
and to intense cellular compression (and erasure of at least some membrane structure,
again by fusion) as ice forms in the extracellular neural interstices. Will
we come up with new preservation protocols? We can always hope.

The reason the
fourth condition of rapid reanimation is important to me is because I know in
my heart that once I woke up from any A.I.-guided reanimation procedure, in
order to usefully integrate into a post-singularity society I would soon choose
to change myself so utterly and extensively that it would be as if I never existed
in biological form. My lifecam traces could be uploaded and the cybernetic "me"
that emerged would not be valuably different. So what would be the point? I
think we are nearly ready to move beyond the fiction of our own biological uniqueness
having some long term relevance to the universal story. I expect our future
information theory will inform us of the suboptimality of personal biological
immortality. For those who say "screw suboptimality," I suggest that
we’ll eventually be educated out of that way of thinking as surely as our ancestors
outgrew other forms of mental slavery. For me, the essence of individual life
is to use one’s complexity in the matrix in which it was born. Attempts to transmit
it more than a short distance away from that environment are bound to be exercises
in frustration, missing one of the basic motives of life, to do great things
with your contemporaries. Ask any Fourth World adult who is suddenly transplanted
to New York City and he’ll tell you the same.

4. What future development
that you consider most likely (or inevitable) do you look forward to with the
most anticipation?

I look forward
greatly to the elimination of the grosser forms of coercion, dehumanization,
violence and death that occur today.

Admittedly, these
seem to be processes that will always be with us at some fundamental level.
Computational resources will very likely remain competitive battlegrounds in
the post singularity era, because we inhabit a universe of finite-state computational
machines pitted against all the remaining unsolved problems, in a Gödelian-incomplete
universe. And bad algorithms will surely die in that environment, far more swiftly
than less fit organisms or ideas die today.

But when a bad
idea dies in our own minds, we see that as a lot less subjectively violent than
our own biological deaths. Over time, love, resiliency, and consciousness win.
As Ken
Wilber ( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1570627401/">A Brief History
of Everything, 2001) might say, the integrated self learns a privileged
perspective from which death is no longer troubling. Death becomes regulated
in a fine-grained manner, it loses its sting, it is subsumed, becoming simply
growth. But it takes a lot of luck and learning for us to get to that place.

In many ways,
I think the collective consciousness of our species has come to understand that
we have already achieved a very powerful degree of informational immortality.
By and large, our evolutionary morality guides us very strongly to act and think
in that fashion. I look forward to the individual consciousnesses of all species
on this planet gaining that victory in coming decades. Including the coming
cybernetic species we are helping to create.

Sci-tech systems
are not alien or artificial in any meaningful sense. As John McHale said ( href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/080760495X/">The Future of
the Future, 1969), technology is as natural as a snail’s shell, a spider’s
web, a dandelion’s seed—many of us just don’t see this yet. Digital ecologies
are the next natural ecology developing on this planet, and technology is a
substrate that has shown, with each new generation, that it can live with vastly
less matter, energy, space, and time (what I call MEST compression) than we
biological systems require for any fixed computation. Wetware simply cannot
perform that feat. Technology is the next organic extension of ourselves, growing
with a speed, efficiency, and resiliency that must eventually make our DNA-based
technology obsolete, even as it preserves and extends all that we value most
in ourselves.

I can’t stress
enough the incredible efficiencies that emerge in the miniaturization of physical-computational
systems. If MEST compression trends continue as they have over the last six
billion years, I propose that tomorrow’s A.I. will soon be able to decipher
substantially all of the remaining complexities of the physical, chemical, and
biological lineage that created it, our own biological and conscious intricacies
included, and do all this with nano and quantum technologies that we find to
be impossibly, "magically" efficient. In the same way that the entire
arc of human civilization in the petrochemical era has been built on the remains
of a small fraction of the decomposing biomass that preceded us, the self-aware
technologies to come will build their universe models on the detritus of our
own twenty first century civilization, perhaps even on the trash thrown away
by one American family. That’s how surprisingly powerful the MEST compression
of computation apparently is in our universe. It continually takes us by surprise.

I am optimistic
that these still poorly characterized physical trends will continue to promote
accelerating intelligence, interdependence, and immunity in our informational
systems, and look forward to future work on understanding this acceleration
with great anticipation.

5. What future development
that you consider likely (or inevitable) do you dread the most?

I worry that
we will not develop enough insight to overcome our fear of the technological
future, both as individuals and as a nation. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, speaking at the depths of our Great
Depression, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Many in our society
have entered another Great Depression recently. This one is existential, not
economic. A century of increasingly more profound process automation and computational
exponentiation has helped us realize that humanity is about to be entirely outpaced
by our technological systems. We are fostering a substrate that learns multi-millionfold
faster than us, one that will soon capture and exceed all that we are. Again,
Roosevelt’s credo is applicable. If we ignore it we will end up being dragged
by the universe into the singularity, mostly unconsciously, kicking and screaming
and fighting each other, rather than walking upright, picking our own path.

I’m concerned
that we will decide later, rather than earlier, to learn deeply about the developmental
processes involved. That we will rely on our own ridiculously incomplete egos
and partial, mostly top-down models to chart the course, rather than come to
understand the mostly bottom-up processes that are accelerating all around us.
I’m concerned we won’t realize that humans are like termites, building this
massive mound of technological infrastructure that is already vastly more complex
than any one human understands, and unreasonably stable, self-improving, self-correcting,
self-provisioning, energy and resource minimizing, and so on. Soon a special
subset of these systems will be self-aware, and the caterpillar will turn into
a butterfly, freeing the human spirit. Gaining such knowledge about the developmental
structure of the system would surely allow us to chart a better evolutionary
course on the way.

Through a special
combination of geography, historical circumstance, intention, and luck, the
United States has inherited the position of World Leader of our Wonderfully
Multicultural Planet. With our hard-won history of individual rights, our historically
productivity-based culture, our generous immigration policies, our pluralism,
well-developed legal immune systems, social tolerance, and other advantages
we hold this position still, for now. We may rise to recognize the vision-setting
responsibility that comes with holding this position. Or we may continue to
subconsciously fear technology, as we have intermittently over the last century
(technology, rather than human choice, has been mistakenly blamed for the World
Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, Vietnam, Rich/Poor Divides, Global
Pollution, Urban Decay, you name it). Alternatively, we may decide that the
wise use of science and technology must be central to our productivity, educational
systems, government and judicial systems, media, and culture, the way they so
obviously were when we were a new nation. Fortunately, there are signs that
other countries, such as China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, are
actively choosing the latter road.

Several of these
countries, most notably Singapore and China, continue to operate with glaring
deficits in the political domain. Yet they are experiencing robust growth due
to enlightened programs of technological and economic development. Nevertheless,
none of these countries are yet successfully multicultural enough, or have sufficiently
well developed political immune systems (institutionalized pluralism, pervasive
tort law, independent media, mature insurance systems, tolerant social norms)
to qualify as leaders of the free world, at the present time. It is telling
that the owners of today’s rapidly-growing Chinese manufacturing enterprises
find it most desirable to keep their second homes in the United States, due
to our special combination of both unique social advances and technological
development. Much of the world’s capital still flows first to the U.S., to seek
the highest potential return. But for how long can this continue if we remain
lackluster in our technological leadership, riding on our prior political and
economic advances?

It is important
to note that being defenders of the free world is certainly one critical technological
role which we have unilaterally inherited since the end of the Cold War. Furthermore,
it is a role to which I would argue that we are aggressively and mostly intelligently
applying ourselves. Yet while this is critical, it is not enough to secure our
leadership position. We must lead with proactive social reform in mind, not
simply security, or we remain guilty of resting on our accomplishments. In a
world where autocratic Empires are turning into democratic Republics, we must
lead the move to an increasingly participatory, democratic, and empowering nation
state. The world remembers and emulates the security of Sparta, but almost everything
else falls in Athenian territory. We need to find the high ground of both of
these legacies, and integrate them into our plans for the coming generation.

As long as we
define ourselves by our fear of transformational technologies, and our dread
of being exceeded by the future, we will continue in ignorance and self-absorption,
rather than wake up to our purpose to understand the universe, and to shape
it in accord with the confluence of our desires and permissible physical law.

For over a century
we’ve seen successive waves of increasingly more powerful technologies empower
society in ever more fundamental ways. Today’s computers are doubling in complexity
every 12-18 months, creating a price-performance deflation unlike any previous
period on Earth. Yet we continue to ignore what is happening, continue to be
too much a culture of celebrity and triviality, continue to make silly extrapolations
of linear growth, and bicker over concerns that will soon be made irrelevant,
continue to engage in activities that delay, rather than accelerate the obvious
developmental technological transformations ahead.

I am also concerned
that we may continue to soil our own nests on the way to the singularity, continue
to take shortcuts, assuming that the future will bail us out, forgetting that
the journey, far more than the destination, is the reward. Consider that once
we arrive at the singularity it seems highly likely that the A.I.s will be just
as much on a spiritual quest, just as concerned with living good lives and figuring
out the unknown, just as angst-ridden as we are today.

No destination
is ever worth the cost of our present dignity and desire to live balanced and
ethical lives, as defined by today’s situational ethics, not by tomorrow’s idealizations.
If I can’t convince the Italian villager of 2120 of the value of uploading,
then he will not willingly join me in cyberspace until his entire village has
been successfully recreated there, along with much, much more he has not yet
seen. I applaud his Luddite reluctance, his "show me" pragmatism,
for only that will challenge the technology developers to create a truly humanizing
transition.

Finally, I’m
concerned that we may not put enough intellectual and moral effort into developing
immune systems against the natural catastrophes that occur all around us. Catastrophes
are to be expected, and they accelerate change whenever immune systems learn
from them. In my own research, there has never been a catastrophe in known universal
history (supernova, KT-meteorite, plague, civilization collapse, nuclear detonation,
reactor meltdown, computer virus, 9/11, you name it) that did not function to
accelerate the average distributed complexity (ADC) of the computational network
in which it was embedded. It is apparently this immune learning that keeps the
universe on a smooth curve of continually accelerating change. If there’s one
rule that anyone who studies accelerating change in complex adaptive systems
should realize, it is that immunity, interdependence, and intelligence always
win. This is not necessarily so for the individual, who charts his or her own
unique path to the future but is often breathtakingly wrong. But the observation
holds consistently for the entire amorphous network.

Nevertheless,
there have been many cases of catastrophes where lessons were not rapidly learned,
where immune systems were not optimally educated to improve resiliency, redundancy,
and variation. And in the case of human society, our sociotechnological immune
systems work best when they are aided by committed human beings, the most conscious
and purposeful nodes in our emerging global brain. Consider our public health
efforts against pathogens such as SARS and AIDS, and the strategies for success
become clear. Anything that economically improves social, political, technological,
and biological immune systems is a very forsighted development.

This said, one of our great challenges in coming decades is to design a global
technological and cultural immune system, a ubiquitous EarthGrid of sensing
and intelligence systems, a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738201448/">Transparent Society
(David Brin, 1998) that has enough pluralism and fine-grained accountability
to scrupulously ensure individual liberties while also providing unparalleled
collective security. We have almost arrived at the era of SIMADs (Single Individuals
engaged in Massive Asymmetric Destruction), a term coined by the futurist Jerry
Glenn of the Millennium Project. It
is time for us to create immune systems that are capable, statistically speaking,
of ensuring continued acceleration in the average distributed complexity of
human civilization. EarthGrid appears inevitable when accelerating technological
change occurs on a planet of "finite sphericity," as Teilhard De
Chardin would say. Knowing that can help us boldly walk the path.

Every sniper and serial killer should be countered today with the installation
of another set of public cameras. By their very actions they are building the
social cages that will eventually catch them, and all others like them, so we
might as well publicly acknowledge this state of affairs, for maximum behavioral
effect. Ideally, ninety five percent of these cameras will remain in private,
not public hands, as is the current situation in Manhattan. When will we see
RFID in all our products? When will we finally live in a world were every citizen
transmits an electronic signal uniquely identifying them to the network at all
times? When will we have a countervailing electronic democracy, ensuring this
power is used only in the most citizen-beneficial manner? Today we see early
efforts in these areas, but as I’ve written in previous articles, there is still
far too much short term fear and lack of foresight.

If we think carefully
about all this, we will realize that a broadband LUI network must be central
to the creation of tomorrow’s n