What would you call people who pay $25,000 for a nine-week course of study with a collection of Silicon Valley optimists? “Singularly Stupid”? That may explain the name for the new Singularity University (SF Chronicle article).
The idea of the singularity is that technology, especially in the form of artifically intelligent robots, will solve all of our problems and technological advance will speed up exponentially starting roughly around the year 2030.
So far technology innovation hasn’t outstripped Malthusian human population growth. We can grow more food more efficiently, but the number of human mouths to feed has grown just about as fast, so that we struggle to feed everyone. A lot of what we’ve done over the past few hundred years has come at the cost of using up the Earth, e.g., clearing forest for farmland or digging up coal and oil and lighting it on fire, taking all of the Cod out of the North Atlantic. Far from freeing us from cleaning the house, Artificial Intelligence thus far has failed to live up to promises made by professors seeking research funding in 1960 (that reminds me I need to do laundry!).
Given the track record of tech as a mixed blessing and as a slower agent for change than predicted, do young people need to prepare for 2030? Can they prepare by listening to Ray Kurzweil, or anyone else born in 1948? Should they fork over $25,000 for nine weeks or simply watch old Jetsons episodes?
Maybe I will kick off the comments section with a realistic tech innovation that would change the world in a positive way. My pick: A better battery (cheaper, lighter, higher power density). That would enable the use of renewable energy in every kind of portable application, e.g., cars and airplanes, and also make it much more practical to use wind and solar generation.
[Special offer: If you come to Boston this summer and pay me $25,000, I will spend 9 weeks telling you all of the places that a better battery could be used, starting with my Super Walkman design that can play 2300 cassette tapes before requiring a recharge.]
I was like, 6 years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair in 1965. Each exhibit explicitly promised me a personal air scooter. So? Where is my air scooter?
Agreed. The singularity is wildly speculative and more suited for the likes of science fiction than serious study. However, I do think that a biological singularity is technically feasible if not for moral and ethical restraints. All we have to do is figure out what genetic factors influence cognitive abilities or just clone a shit load of really smart people.
“We can grow more food more efficiently, but the number of human mouths to feed has grown just about as fast, so that we struggle to feed everyone. ”
Not at all. We have more than enough food to feed everyone. The problem is not food production, it is distribution. Most famines are caused by authoritarian governments and wars. They don’t happen in countries with free trade and well-functioning agriculture.
The appeal of the singularity story is not just that it will “solve all our problems” but also that it will allow us to live forever by downloading our consciousness into computer minds and robot bodies. So if you’re wealthy enough, $25K might be reasonable to indulge in a fantasy camp where you get to imagine you’re immortal.
Talk should be cheap – results are what people should pay for.
The tough thing to change is human behavior and expectations rather than the requried technology!
The number of human mouths to feed has *not* grown just about as fast as our ability to feed them. Starvation has dramatically declined, and in much of the world it’s been declining even in absolute numbers as well as percentage of population. Lately, diet activists have started worrying as much or more about obesity than starvation. Like so:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/more-fat-people-in-world-than-there-are-starving-study-finds/2006/08/14/1155407741532.html
For the bigger picture, browse the interactive charts at gapminder.org – they’ve got a nice one on childhood malnutrition…
I’d like to believe in the singularity theory, but I wish robotics had made a significant leap in the last few decades. If so, we would have seen the service industry shrink and labor shift into more productive roles (like open-source software). Why do we need to deal with waiters and tips when most of their work could be done by a robot?
How would the magical battery work? O_O
I figure that a good first step would be to build batteries into things that don’t normally contain batteries… e.g. an electric bike whose frame is a big battery, cloth fibers that are essentially batteries. Dangerous, yes; but would increase available power greatly.
Phil,
On your battery wishlist (cheaper, lighter, more power density) please add “doesn’t wear out”. The electronics in most gadgets can go for half a decade or more, but the batteries rarely last a year or two of heavy use.
If the batteries have a really long service life, you can take “cheaper” off your wishlist and still get something very useful.
Perhaps you should endow the “Greenspun Electric Helicopter Prize.” Electrically power one of your Robinson R22’s for, say, a 50 mile trip at reasonable altitude, recharge in an hour or less, and fly home.
An innovation like that would have far more benefits to the world than the X-Prize.
Hi Philip,
The idea of the singularity is that we’ll figure out how to make intelligent machines and that once they get smart enough, they’ll be able to design better versions of themselves, thereby rapidly accelerating the rate of their evolution.
That’s it.
All other aspects of the singularity, such as “will this be good for humanity?” are tangential to the main concept, and hotly debated amongst those who believe that the singularity will occur.
I’ve been to the Singularity Summit (http://www.singularitysummit.com/) two years in a row now, and both events were very interesting.
Cheers,
Graham
p.s. Your blog is great, I read it almost every day 🙂
Isn’t this correlated to knowedge doubling every some years? Even if AI doesn’t take off as predicted, the time it takes knowledge being doubled drops continuously.
Yiannis: What kind of knowledge? I know how to sell Pez dispensers on eBay. Is that a significant addition to human knowledge on top of Maxwell’s Equations? In the 19th Century we learned how to make railroads, telephones, machine guns, an electrified world, and automobiles. In the 20th Century we learned how to make computers, Internet, atomic bombs, nuclear power plants (though not economically, apparently), airplanes, and helicopters. We also made huge strides in figuring out genetics and molecular biology and in making medicines. How does that knowledge compare to what we developed in the 19th Century? Or what Newton developed in the Plague Years?
I suppose, there will be increase in noise also.
But, doesn’t more people being exposed to more knowledge increase potential in exposing new rare ideas?
Maybe technology wasn’t ready until now (i.e. Large Hadron Collider) to go beyond Newton.
The singularity theory naively assumes that all we need to make progress is intelligence. What are they missing? We also need goodness, something humankind – on it’s own – is short on.
“The idea of the singularity is that we’ll figure out how to make intelligent machines and that once they get smart enough, they’ll be able to design better versions of themselves, thereby rapidly accelerating the rate of their evolution.”
Hello!….What about judgement day. Hasn’t anybody watched the Terminator?
Phil,
The self-described singularitarians are not as optimistic as you ignorantly assume. I’ve spent time with them and gone to their conferences, and most of them are smart people with a stance more accurately described as concerned, rather than optimistic.
I’ve found they reject the ideas you ascribe to them about technology solving all problems. Especially with this last conference where they raised the price and thereby weeded out some of the people who essentially walked in off the Internet (as opposed to people who have been seriously thinking about this stuff), the people I had lunch with were all agreeing they were glad the naive singularity-as-panacea cheerleaders were largely absent.
Mark: I apologize for my ignorance. I forgot to move all of my savings into T-Bills in December 2007 and consequently find myself short of the $25,000 necessary to prepare myself for the challenge of the Singularity. Perhaps I can take Jimbo’s suggestion and add Terminator to my Netflix queue.
Phil,
The courses are not to “prepare for the Singularity”. The courses are to prepare students to be effective innovators and problem solvers in a world experimenting accelerating change. Trend studies and multidisciplinarity are important in successful innovation. This is what the course is about.
These are the faculty and advisors:
http://singularity-university.org/academics/faculty-advisors/
As it has been mentioned before, the concept of the Singularity does not involve that “artificially intelligent robots [will] solve all our problems”. Accelerating change suggests there is a point in the future after which it will be remarkably hard to predict things. There is both promise and peril.
Wikipedia will do a better job than me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Why do you think it is unlikely that we sustain superexponential increases in price-performance of information technologies or that these trends are meaningful and transformative?
Also, is AI not already a large part of the economy?
Thanks.
Laura: Thanks for the extra information about the program.
Is AI a large part of the economy? It depends what you mean by AI. Herbert Simon, many folks’ choice for the greatest AI researcher of all time, said “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do.” That was in 1965. If you back off from Simon’s goal to Hasbro’s Butterscotch, the robot pony who turns her head when people are talking in the room, then AI is indeed a large part of the economy.
“We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.”
Bruce Sterling’s lecture on Singularity boosters, technological progress, and human nature :
http://fora.tv/2004/06/11/Bruce_Sterling
is a rebuttal of the touts.
Malthusian population models have been largely disproven. Population growth in developed societies drops dramatically – no hockey stick here. Move along.
Given the singularity’s reliance on artificial intelligence, which has always been “just 20-30 years out”, I’ll remain skeptical of that hockey stick, too…
kb
My favorite snarky quote from the whole singularity debate:
“If computers are to become smart enough to design their own successors, initiating a process that will lead to God-like omniscience after a number of ever-swifter passages from one generation of computers to the next, someone is going to have to write the software that gets the process going, and humans have given absolutely no evidence of being able to write such software.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/lanier.html