Speaking of the Future with John Smart
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,
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
(
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,
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 "
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
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
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
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
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
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,
1970, where he described his "deep nostalgia for the future." One
of his lesser known works,
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
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
"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
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.
Capture, a first generation form of
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
Machines, 1999 for one excellent set of longer term scenarios. Read
B.J. Fogg’s
2002 for some nearer term ones. Today’s early modeling systems, like
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
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
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 (
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 (
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
(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