UPDATE: I've cross-posted this on futurehi.net where there is a larger discussion taking place. Please post your comments there. Also, I found a deeper manifesto by Lanier wherein he argues against "cybernetic totalism."
I went to a talk by Joel Garreau who just published the book Radical Evolution. The subtitle of the book is "The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means To Be Human." The talk and the book are about the radical changes to come amidst a world of limitless technology.
I normally avoid these talks because I have—so I've thought—internalized the interesting perspectives on where the Singularity will take us. Turns out I just only have two extremist views. There's Ray Kurzweil who, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, describes a "Heaven" scenario for mankind, wherein we upload our minds to machines and simulate a paradise of infinite beauty. Then there's Bill Joy who asks: In a world where a million people can make an atom bomb, how do we stop ourselves from self-annihilation? (cf: Why the future doesn't need us). We can call his the "Hell scenario."
Garreau introduces an alternative view titled the "Prevail Scenario," which he ascribes to Jaron Lanier.
The rest of this post is about the Prevail Scenario, pulling quotes from Chapter 6 of Garreau's book.
In both the Heaven and Hell Scenarios, the embedded assumption is that human destiny can be projected reliably if you apply enough logic, rationality and empiricism to the project.
This is referring to Moore's Law and its extrapolations which see chip speed and technological progress as following a smooth, exponential curve. It is practically an article of faith among technologists that the computing power of the brain will fit on a chip the size of a penny within a few decades. However, Kurzweil and Joy are obsessed with this piece of data, according to Lanier.
In The Prevail Scenario, by contrast, the embedded assumption is that even if a smooth curve does describe the future of technology, it is not likely to describe the real world of human fortune. The analogy is to the utter failure of the straight-line projections of Malthusians, who believed industrial development would lead to starvation, when in fact the problem turned out to be obesity.
Another Singularity-like exponential curve seems fishy upon a modest glance of history. One could say that there has been an exponential curve in warfare technology, starting with the invention of the phalanx by the Ancient Greeks moving on to guns during the Napoleonic Wars. After World War I, it seemed that warfare would come close to world annihilation. And a couple decades later, with the atom bomb dropping, fatalists would think that it was only a matter of years before nuclear winter would destroy humans. Sixty years later, we have prevailed. So while there has been an exponential development in warfare, a Singularity of human annihilation hasn't happened as would have been predicted.
The Prevail Scenario is essentially driven by a faith in human cussedness. It is based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve a curve.
The Prevail Scenario is actually not a single scenario, but a plurality of scenarios that see technology's impact on humanity not as an exponential curve that leads to a vertical line of progress, but rather as a spaghetti of outcomes that is as rich and unpredictable as human history has been.
Lanier espouses a particular instance of The Prevail Scenario which focuses on human connectedness. In this perspective, technology's best contribution is in bringing humans closer together. To him, it is "the quantity, quality, variety and complexity of ways in which humans can connect to each other" that constitute the relevant Curve.
Garreau also provides a list of "warning signs" why the Heaven and Hell Scenarios seem unlikely:
• Resistance to The Curves of change is actually having an effect worldwide.• Certain technologies that affect human development and enhancement are globally seen as worth slowing down or stopping, in the way that the use of nuclear weapons was effectively prevented for the second half of the 20th century.
• Technologies that were seen as inevitable turn out to take much longer to develop than anticipated. Predictions common in the early 21st century begin to sound as silly as those of the middle of the 20th century, such as the paperless office, hotels on Mars and self-cleaning houses.
• Researchers voluntarily stop working on topics they view as too dangerous.
• Researchers decline funding for certain topics that they view as too fraught with human peril, putting their ethics ahead of their promotions, tenure, graduate students and intellectual curiosity.
• Researchers decline funding from organizations they view as too laden with problems, such as corporations and the military.
• Computational power is no longer seen as achieving exponential growth because of the inability of software to keep up the pace of innovation.
• There is little correlation between any exponential change in technology and the development of human society.
To close, I'll end with a nice refutation of a nanotech "Hell Scenario:"
He [Lanier] completely believes that the moment nanobots are poised to eat humanity, for example, they will be felled by a Windows crash. “I’m serious about that—no joke,” he says.
A few notes about the talk itself:
The talk was held at the SAP forum in Palo Alto and put together by the Bay Area Future Salon. The audience was comprised of about fifty people, most above the age of thirty. The crowd was well-versed in futurism topics, such as Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. My guess is that Garreau took the time to speak here because this small group contains lighting rods for his kind of message. Garreau's book came out last month, so perhaps this is also part of some book tour. While the talk was simple, it had cogent details and an engaging narrative.
Ray Kurzweil says that the biggest challenge for society as we approach the Singularity will be defining what it means to be human.
Heh, yeah right. I really doubt that the semantics of the word "human" will really bother anybody. Derrida and his gang of deconstructionist obfuscators have already shown how easy it is to skewer words and have nobody blink their eye.
People will treat humans as humans in a "I know it when I see it" kind of fashion. And the fact of the matter is, people have had a broad spectrum of what they treat as human for the longest time. Our American founding fathers treated people who were born south of the equator inbetween the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean who also happened to have an evolutionarily beneficial, but darker, pigmentation in their skin, as not human; i.e. slaves.
I think the questions that will come up is how humans, when granted enlightened thinking by machines, will be able to stand on the crutches of traditional human illusions.
For example, Nietzsche announced "God is dead." But I don't think everybody got the memo.
But, in the Singularity, once everybody is given the computing power of a billion Pentiums, they will be able to digest all of the human knowledge in the timespan of a hic-cup, and then get Nietzsche's news. Okay, perhaps this is not a problem because there are many atheists out there who are doing fine without God--or are they? Many studies show that religious faith is highly correleated with happiness.
But what about other illusions, like time, existence, love, purpose.
How will we react when we have a true understanding that time doesn't really exist, and that cause and effect is just a trick of perception, will we cease to treat things the way we treat them? Will we fear death like we used to? Will death even matter?
I guess the answer to those questions is, "it depends on how internalized the knowledge becomes." If we are able to process and deal w/ knowledge in a cold fashion, maybe it won't bother us like it doesn't bother intellectuals now--or does it? I read some of Consciousness Explained from Daniel Dennet, and I had to put it aside because I was seriously starting to lose my mind.
Or another problem in the Singularity is when we have absolute power to control our own emotions. Would we just shut off all pain? Maybe you would say, "but I'll always retain free will, and so I wouldn't choose to shut off all pain." But what if you could shut off your care of free will? "But I wouldn't shut it off." But you would be so smart to know that after you have shut off your care for free will, you wouldn't have any regret, and therefore it is a rational choice. In other words, what is to stop us from ending up in stable equilibrium of being a vegetable in bliss? Would there be safegaurds against it?
I still fantasize a bit about the Singularity and all the cool things I'll be able to do while in it, but to be realistic, I'd say that the Singularity may very well be just one big death. I'm not talking about a physical death, but a pandemic death on every human-laden concept. Even death will die. Life probably won't mean anything to us. Even the notion of "us" and "meaning" will dissolve.
My biggest worry in the Singularity is total dissolution. But then I temper that worry with the trust that even worriment itself will be dissolved. Yipes!
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A prototypical blueprint for "Seed AI." A Seed AI is an artifically intelligent program that passes a threshold of intelligence required to improve its intelligence. Once the program is able to significantly improve itself, the sky's the limit.
Humans were "designed" by a process without design or foresight. Humans constitute only a tiny point in the space of possible minds. The study of AI is ultimately the study of minds in general, and there are several classes of advantage that a mind-in-general can have which human minds do not. Some of these advantages have already been touched on - the ability to add new sensory modalities, or the ability to carry out "boring" abstract processes using fast low-level computing elements rather than slow high-level deliberate intelligence. Other classes of advantage exist as well - for example: blending conscious and low-level thought; fine-grained self-observation; adding hardware to cognitive processes; deliberate learning; and more....
If you need to place a hard upper bound on the possible speed of a seed AI, the only answer is that there isn't one. If there's something you need to do before the rise of superintelligence, you need to do it before the first successful seed AI. The time period separating the two could be arbitrarily short. Not just "short" relative to the speed of human cultural improvement, or "instantaneous" relative to the speed of human evolution - it may even be "short" relative to the timescale of human thinking. There's that ten-million-to-one disparity in (current) hardware clock speeds. (Read the Full Article)
Eschaton is defined as the moment when the World ends. This word is derived from the Greek word eskhatos which means last.
For Christians, this is Rapture or the "Second Coming of Jesus." For a vivid description of Rapture, read this Darwin Award of a woman dying while attempting to experience Eschaton. Other religions also have some sort of Heaven-situation where we are suspended in an infinite afterlife.
Paranormal types also have their own Eschaton found in novelty theory and approaching concrescence, which describes a mystical and complicated conclusion to Life.
But if you are a naturalist, atheist, or agnostic type, how do you conceive the End? Well, the Sun will eventually engulf the Earth and the Universe will either dissipate or pull a reverse Big Bang ("The Big Crunch"). But is this a satisfying Eschaton?
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Since Universal Annihilation is unpleasant, naturalist types, like myself, turn to Eschaton as the Singularity--the moment of supreme human-intelligence. To grasp how this is possible, trace the evolution of the brain from weak cells in bacteria four billion years ago, to chordates 544 million years ago with nerve buds, to primates 65 million years ago with basic brains, to homo sapiens sapiens 130,000 years ago with an enlarged neocortex and folds in the brain, to modern humans with culture, computers and a group Internet mind. Then, if you extrapolate just a little further into the future, you encounter beings of unfathomable superiority. One of the potential consequences is that we become jacked into a Matrix that simulates heaven; all pains will be washed away and the possibilities of happiness will be astounding. Read more by the founder of this technological Singularity.
What you see, though, threading all three visions of Eschaton (religious, paranormal, and technological) is a natural human desire to ponder eskhatos.
Why is Eschaton necessary for us? Is this desire just an unintended result of taking our skill at comprehending cause-effect relationships to their limits? Is understanding eskhatos essential to how we define a sense of meaning in life? Or are we onto something in that we actually are headed for a special surprise ending?
I don't know. I find it interesting, though, how an atheist like myself ended up falling into the same primitive curiosity for Eschaton that religious types have.
ABOUT PHILOSOPHISTRY LATELY: working on a site redesign.
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We are impulses, rapidly firing off, so many times per second per second, that we lose a sense of the negative space: whatever it is in between those impulses. We have discrete decisions, discrete ideas, discrete actions dotting a timeline that is our life, but in between those dots is infinitely crisp emptiness.
Just stop, hold your breath, look at the clock and realize for a second, that nothing has to move. Motion is just an illusive blur between time steps. Progress is just an emotional heart beat, an experience of relative tipping of the scales. In other words, nothing matters.
Nothing. Matters. From the nothing, comes the matter. The nothingness is the matter. We have to make everything matter otherwise we lose hope.
However, I take a twisted pleasure fantasizing on the ultimate truth, that there is no matter. That what I observe before me are just chemical reactions creating a sensation of a sense of self and a sense of impending need.
I find it amusing sometimes, though, to see everything move with so much direction and purpose. I sit in restaurants or in school in awe of how forward facing our vectors are. I'm not crying for a "live in the moment" mantra here, but rather a look at how "living" we are. Or rather, look how any "verb" we are. We are a "doing" species, always with an A and a B. A forwards and a backwards. Even if you are going to "live for the moment," let's say, by enjoying that Snickers candybar you just bought, you participate in a process of self-satisfice.
And that's what we are trapped in, this huge process layered upon process of self-something.
But what about the backdrop, what about the space between the points. There is a static noise that doesn't move, that seeks no A to B. I sometimes skip a heart beat thinking, what if I were to fall in between the cracks. What if I just got derailed from all trajectory. If every neuron in my brain said, "okay, let's stop." I wouldn't just end, the universe as I perceive it would end.
This hopefully illustrates how fascinating it is that the brain is so constant. The brain must be some continuous loop that repetitively bites the same function. We wake up everyday and don't forget to go to school or work, right? We eat on time, we in general survive. But why? In general there is a track before us, and we kind of shift left and right for the hell of it: to get a better partner, to make more money, or to be happier perhaps. But ultimately it's the same track with the same startpoint and the same destination: birth and death.
I wonder how this awareness of the abyss will be resolved in the Singularity. If we are truly to end up as enlightened as we may be in the Singularity, then people will just pop themselves off realizing there is no need to go from A to B anymore. Well, the Singularity will probably be a handicapped enlightendness, where we are still the same constant loop, constantly striving for whatever.
Or maybe I'm just sick of studying for Finals Week.
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This JPEG captures and symbolizes how integrated we are with the machine. In the image, a throng of Japanese women are holding up picture-phones to the sky, digitizing a campaign speech.
This is the essence of technological amputation. Our eyes, which I expect were genetically 20/20 for most homo sapiens, is seen simultaneously extended and amputed in that picture. In each woman's palm is both a screen and a third eye. It's as if the bundle of nerves attached to their biological corneas is stretched a hundred times in length, tunneling through their arms and terminating in their Nokia 3600s. Even bits of their brains are extended into their picture-phones as memories of the event are stored for future retrieval.
Technological amputation is not a new phenomena, as we use satellite TV as a proxy for our ears, eyes, and mind. But seeing such a concentration of oridnary people intersperse a computerized device between them and an open-air event demonstrates human's broad, natural symbiosis with the machine.
Look at that picture again. What is the ratio of artifical to organic devices? They wear clothes, many of them wear contact lenses, and they sport hair styles created in shops that rely on electricity. Then factor in the content of their brains, which are largely instructed through technology transfer--reading books, watching TV, and surfing the Net. Don't forget the food that they eat: so much food is processed by chemicals and artifical selection that the sale of "organic foods" is now a novelty.
Humans have such a willingness to substitute silicon, metal, and plastic contraptions in place of their existing organic capacities. Our integration and co-dependence with the machine is the norm, not the exception. You get the picture, right?
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There was news today that I saw on MSNBC that stem cells have been extracted from human clones ////
Commentary follows...
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Now what this conjures up in my mind is a future with shops that sell living body parts. As you walk up to the counter of this fictional store, they'll say to you, "Sir, would you like a super-sized kidney with your meal?"
Now I was thinking, how would I react in this situation? What would I feel seeing these sacks of living tissue laid right in front of me. Well I guess you could compare how you would feel to how you've previously felt upon seeing a disremembered body parts. Unfortunately, or fortunately in this case, I've never seen a dismembered body part. There have been no hacked off arms or fingers in my life, thank you. However, I bet that every time you see a dismembered body part, you imagine the person who was once full, but has now been made piece-wise thanks to some unfortunate circumstances. In the case of the store, however, these bio-engineered body parts have been grown independently of an actual human being. Unlike the dismembered body part, you won't have referent to ponder. It won't be dismembered body parts on sale, but rather unmembered body parts. Nonetheless, the illusion will be the same for most people, and I think it will take a little getting used to seeing arms, kidneys, and ears floating around, unattached to any particular person, lying on a shelf.
And as I was reflecting on this thought-process, I was reminded of the character from Diablo II the Necromancer. This is the character that can cast a spell on bones from dead characters, and animate them into living warrior/companions.
And then I thought in our post-post-modern times, have all of these characters from Diablo II, including the Amazon, Necromancer, Barbarian, Sorceress, and Paladin, become redundant? We can already see now that the traits that distinguish these characters apart can be collapsed into one package human. Take the Amazon, for example, who is a female archer in the game. If you wanted to be her, you could easily get a transsexual operation. For those who can't afford the operation, they can don on the personality of the heteroflexible, a new word used to describe someone who is straight but can also "go both ways". You could apply the same thinking to the other characters as well. To replicate the Barbarian you just take muscle-enhancing protein shakes or Creatin. To become the Sorceress, a wielder of magic, just hang out at Burning Man for a while, and learn some cool tricks with fire and multi-colored fabric. To become a Paladin, just pop in some amoxicillin to cure your ailments or take stem cell injections. This is what we can do now. Fifty years ago, the above activities were either too expensive or too socially unacceptable to be feasible. So if you consider what the next fifty years will be like, so much flexibility and power will be rolled up into one human. What you will then have is that groups of characters who were once rich with variety will be dulled with weakness. All of these characters will just seem like weaker fragments of a single human. It would be as if you made a game with characters that were distinguished only by which body part they used, like a character that only used his legs, or one that only used his left arm.
Anyway, this whole process of thinking about science, imagining science fiction, as pondering the future of man, is founded on a common technique. First, you take any set of objects that belong under one concept. So in this example, the characters from Diablo are under one umbrella concept of "divergent-character-frameworks." And then with this set, you either explode or implode its member elements. So in this particular example, we imploded all of these character traits into one human being. Likewise, we could've exploded set, and conjured up a future where there will be a million character-types that are all as distinct as the Diablo characters. And so constantly dreaming about implosion and explosion is a fun and simple way to imagine where things will go.
Many say that if there was no death, then their life would have no meaning. There would be no rush and no "import" to their actions, as they could be undone or recuperated later.
Just as those who look at death as a deadline to make stuff happen, us Singularitarians have a different kind of deadline.
I believe in the Singularity, or some point in our future, like within the next 20 years, when technology will ramp up so fast that life will be like the Matrix or some other unimaginable techno-fantasy. After which point, we will live forever, but the ramifications of that will not be the same as if we were to live forever otherwise.
Personally, believing in a Singularity does reduce the meaning of things that I do. By knowing that march of technology is unceasing and inevitable, I don't get excited to become a scientist. I also don't get excited by building "big foundations" for posterity. Like if offered the opportunity to do what Ghandi did to India, I'd say screw it, that's so temporal.
To answer Peter's question, do I feel claustrophobic, then? Quite the opposite, more like I'm in the desert waiting for the party.
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What narratives haven't been explored?
In our search to kill boredom and quench our search for novelty, we have killed novelty
One day, we will narrow the whole thing down to a few basic metaphors, a few universal truths on a tablet
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I can't say we should willfully slow down
but I don't wholly reject the unabomber and the neo-luddites
Matrix:Revolutions, before it was edited for hollywood I'm sure had some sort of import on this issue
Maybe we can find some sort of beauty and solace in recursive revolutions
DNA created our brain
Google is a bigger brain
Blogs are just brains. And what are brains but filters from the many to the one with a semi-optimal method and algorithsm
memory expansion, rehashing, and distributing.
layers upon layers that continue to link back up to themself
so relating that back to the self
I've been on this self-improvement crusade, to be able to change myself, to become the specific ... dah
but you have to change, you have to grow, you can't willfully say, I don't want progress
in a way, we're designed to kill ourselves. Every step forward is another step back
we're killing the planet
but only as a way of feeding a newer planet
that of human society and virtualization.
so there is a revolutions of suicide ontop of suicide
but, they did throw in love in Matrix:Revolutions
and love is important, because it grips you irrationally, and is a pure hot emotion.
sure, it's a mixed bag, and it's not love itself that matters
but pure passion..
as much as we abstract ourselves away from our natural selves into the artifical simulacra
we shouldn't forget the orginal heart where all of that was motivated in the first place
but even by saying this in the first place, it's already doing this.
is there such thing as a willful irrationality?
eh, actually I'm sure there is
I don't have to think, to analyze, to progress.
I can stand back, throw myself into eddies with a total lack of reck.
nihilism? whoops, did somebody say that taboo word?
or maybe, whining about this stuff on a blog is the key to softening the blow... cuz after this, it's off to do my homework, eat, chat, and sleep
Another rought draft of an idea, too hot to hide,,,,,,,,,,,,
pick one... we are now part of the global, or rather universal consciousness and now you can have a global project to work on:
rationality--- can we improve the overal rationality of the world
breaking power laws--- how can we reap the benefits of networks without the defecits of power laws, such as the rich get richer
ending the inevitability of disease--- diseases on the INternet, in life, don't have to be an "inevitable" component of our universal existence
understanding the system--- research into the way in which the whole works
hedonism imperative--- does anybody who wants happiness get it?
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I'll leave this in draft form....
We are now operating on the big picture, not on the small picture. Instead of I'm hungry, lemme get food, it's a plan, we have our whole dietary picture.
Business has largley and still is a game or an art, there is no science to it, you can't predict whether people will buy your products nor antitpate what the interaction between you business and the economy will be... but with the brigtening up and closing of the earth, we have a better vision of everything, better maps, and can make better predictions, no longer can we just walk in the dark... marxism and the like are dead, like, what is the dialectic of dialectism, a straight line rather than a back-and-forth, which gives us more control, more control means shorter time periods to delivery.. means faster pace to singularity...?
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Acceleration of technology inspires more amputations of our existing functions in order to find better ones, which lead to more new appendages, which then accelerate technology further... more proof of the underlying mechanisms of Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.
Excerpted from Laws of New Media
The Extended Phenotype
In genetics, an organism’s phenotype is the outer manifestation of the tendencies inherent in the genetic material
The extended phenotype is the reach of genetic tendencies beyond the organism into the external world—e.g., a bird’s nest, a spider’s web, or the caddisfly larva’s stone house…
Media As Man’s Extended Phenotype
Media act as humanity’s extended phenotype by extending our sense, motor, and mental capacities
Reify: from the Latin res, thing: to treat an abstract concept as a concrete object or entity.
Evanescence: from the Latin evanescere: the tendency to vanish like vapor.
+ Thought and experience are evanescent
+ Media allow us to reify (and thereby capture) them for later consumption
Examples Of Extension
+ Writing extended speech over space and time
+ Arithmetic extends our capacity for measuring and balancing
+ Libraries extend our capacities for memory and recollection
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Excerpted from the Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media:
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!
Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as "autoamputation," and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions that indicate this self- amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of "wanting to jump out of my skin" or of "going out of my mind," being "driven batty" or "flipping my lid." And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play.
While it was no part of the intention of Jonas and Selye to provide an explanation of human invention and technology, they have given us a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of autoamputation. In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or "amputation" of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter- irritant to increased burdens, in turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numb ness or blocking of perception. This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man's image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.
Xcerpted from myself:
The pieces fit, kids... maybe 2012 isn't too optimistic of a date for the Singularity.
"Formerly, when one invented a new function, it was to further some practical purpose; today one invents them in order to make incorrect the reasoning of our fathers, and nothing more will ever be accomplished by these inventions." (poincare)
Maybe the Singularity or singularities in individual fields occur when developments become purely reflexive, i.e. serving no utility outside of itself. Where discussion is about soley previous discussions or about itself. A confab of the most meta-significance. You can already see this happening w/ regard to tech nerds, where a "nerd" is defined as someone who uses a telephone to talk about telephones.
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Let me tell you a little secret, if you don't already know: Some people think that what we are all doing is together building a mind. Said less often, but perhaps at least as interesting, is that -that- mind is building -our- minds. (Abyssal Mind)
If the global mind is a machine with the individual components or neurons being individuals, then the individual parts must be deterministic for an effective whole to emerge.
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Fortunately this is the case with humans, we are reactive and respond with tremendous structure. Given impetus or impulse X, there are fairly good probabilities that certain behaviors will result.
How do I know this? Take David Blaine's recent stunt for example. The knee-jerk reactions were obvious as were the throngs of fans drawing inspiration from the event. Maybe we all have free will individually, but to say that you (a male perhaps) won't pursue that girl by the counter, or won't defend your thesis when questioned, or won't eat at least one meal a day would be indicative of an ascetic personality, one that our "happiness engine" rejects with high frequency.
Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase (by way of Quantum Theology)
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When they say that the Singularity will be here on 2012 the knee-jerk reaction is... only 8 more years?!?!
It seems too soon, but then I keep coming across articles that give me pause.
Case in point: NTT has found a way to use humans as wireless ethernet cables. Basically, they were able to transfer data using special tiles that tap the electrical fields naturally generated by humans.
Stop and visualize that for a second.... all of my wireless devices buzzing to life as soon as I step into the room? Or how about being a WAP for some guy's laptop?? Maybe our imagination is inhibited with floaters that make us think the Singularity will happen when we extend our bodies with machines and become cyborgs. If it's the other way around, where machines extend themselves through us, the Singularity may happen a lot faster than we think.
// My personal basis for gauging the proximity of the Singularity is to look for signs that we may already be there: the end of pain, holodecks, man-machine blurring, infinite knowledge, the global mind, the end of time, etc..
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If the Singularity were already here or is almost upon us, surely we would experience at least parts of the irrelevance of time.
Indeed we do though in many of the following ways:
- day-to-day regularity of condition: for example, I was able to check the weather today on the Internet and choose what I wanted to wear in order to keep my external body temperature the same. Doing this consistently, or having the knowledge about areas like CA that have stable weather, would prevent my body from feeling temperature changes from hour to hour or day to day.
- stable jobs and the like: our ancestors gave great importance to time of day and time of year when it came to work, i.e. tilling the field. Now with workplaces where you come in late and at times sleep there, or possibly you telecommute, or with such efficient capitalism that gives stable jobs for 10 years on end (present time being the exception), doing things at specific time becomes irrelevant. Children are at least brought up with this by being in school (or at extracurriculars or doing homework) from 7:30am till later into the night from age 5 till age 24 (ppl are going to grad school in droves these days). Consistent forced schedules as well, such as the 9-to-5 also eliminate your dependence on timing... just punch in, do your thing, punch out, repeat.
- Life extension - standard age markers are disappearing. Someone who couldn't afford facial enhancements at age 20 can look age 16 when she is 30.
I think the emphasis is on how much of our lives stays unchanged. If time is the measure of distance between paradigm shifts, then ultra-routinization would eliminate time.
Philosophistry frequenteur Mr. Strange Loops takes a skeptical view (for archives, look at entry on 9/22/03) at my claims on an early triumph on discovering the signals indicative that the Singularity is upon us.
I agree, I am quite the optimist when it comes to the Singularity. One must be careful. It's uncertain whether the trip toward the singularity will be in our benefit or benefit other entites, like viruses, corporations, and universities. Actually, it's almost certain that the Singularity will be a greater-than-human affair. Nevertheless, I hope through Philosophistry and others we can try to at least shape the course to the Singularity that it benefits the individual first. I'm unsure whether this is moral or not, but dammit, I am human, I want to be happy, forget these other superstructures--I have no personal attachment to them. i.e. I wouldn't sacrifice my life just so a religion can persist better or a cruel economic system can self-perpetuate.
As for Lucid Dreaming, I was skeptical about it until I started reading accounts by people. The amount of resolution and control they have in these dreams is ridiculously inspiring. I'm still having trouble initiating lucid dreams, but I am getting closer.
When I doubt the speed about which the Singularity could be upon us, I look at the ways that miracle dream-scenarios emerge out of the mundane.
Here are three examples of things that would let us know we're close or in the Singularity:
(1) Holodecks (2) Everybody has all knowledge (3) Everybody is happy
Hell, I bet we're a third or a quarter of the way there on all three it's just not obvious...
(1) Holodecks - Lucid dreaming is becoming more popular. As we learn more about how the brain works, we will be able to eventually induce lucid dreams instantly, thus giving people those virtual freedom spaces to do whatever they want.
(2) Everybody knows everything - Google is an example of where it's there. You call me up and ask me a question, by the time the conversation is over, I'll already have the answer... eventually that time will come down to almost instaneous or at least as fast as normal human recall
(3) Everybody is happy - Positive Psychology is just now getting off the ground. What if the science of happiness becomes really specific and concise that we could create a formula or system to follow that would lead people to happiness with a high probability. Such a device would very easily spread due to the Internet, and thus we could achieve that. Religion is an inefficient pre-cursor, but it does show the inklings of a framework: do good things, be altruistic, be grateful, etc.., and look how quickly that had infected people. Plus there's hope about eden scenarios that have emerged from certain ancient civilaztions that wisely harnessed the power of psychotropic substances like mushrooms. So we could become enlightened ourselves in that matter... i.e. if scientists can properly synthesize a bliss drug that didn't destroy us, or wouldn't contradict our need for work (although machines are making work less and less of a necessity, and more of just an information recycling hamster-wheel thing).
Welcome to the Singularity kids. Step right up. Pick and choose your attire, for you are now going to be a model for how future generations will surf the Singularity.
I'm somewhat bothered by current look & feel.
I feel like am an infovorve. I just swallow information. I have papers I've printed from the Internet, stapled and scattered all over my table waiting to be read. I have URL shortcuts splattered across my desktop. Magazine pages open and sprawled over my chairs and bed area. A laundry list of ideas I want to chew on, from baudrillard to bertrand russell. At the same timee, we're approaching the 700th post on this blog. All the while I'm drowning in mp3 albums from my 33GB collection, all eclectic of course.
I need to relax. I need to read a webpage that has 10 different "related links" and not Shift-Click them all, i.e. open a new window for each of them. I need to slow down my reading, and chew up paragraphs, not blurbs. I need to enjoy the information, see the art.
My current method is like that of a conquest. I search, acquire a target, rip through the scroll button, and out comes an budding understanding of some sexy topic. Sexiness is what it is, and I think sex is a good analogy. Because, sex, unlike love, can be like chocolate or caffeine...not necessarily pure "addiction" but more like a recreational drug. Except on the Net, I'm high all the time.
The topics have to be sexy otherwise I won't even touch it. I used to be excited by things like evolutionary biology and tranhumanist progress. Now I have to find obscure ideas, and am slowly slipping into "Voodoo Schmoodoo" of the like found on Deoxy.
Just like there are recreational users of alcohol and marijuana, there are people who casually surf the net. Likewise, just as there are crackheads of psychotropic substances, there are the crackheads of information--me.
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interest of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only or principally their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths. - Bertrand Russell.
Impulse: boredom. This is oil on my floor that keeps me slipping back into my infovore tendancies.
Solution: super blogroll. I call what we have at the top lefthand skyscraper space by the girl-sketch a revolver. A double-barrel revolver. I stock up this boredom-killer with info-Pez. Essay vaults, art archives, humor hubs. Everyday I play Russian roulette with the revolver at least 30 times, and my mind and boredom get blown away.
Initially, this was exciting. I had found the gun powder that I could pepper my floor with so that the oil of boredom would harden and allow me to sit and breathe peacefully.
Instead, I have choked, and I am choking on this ever expanding law of accelerating returns. Every few days I trip over some undiscovered mountain of glorious new information.
STOP!
Is this the proper way to approach the Singularity. Is this what my genes are striving me to do, to become a super information recycler? Should we--can we--transcend our genetic imperative for human progress?
Fuck it. I am man, I am unscripted, I can chill, I don't have to conquer texts and conquer information.
This is a bad habit I've developed. I don't want to blame school or anything, but I've spent a lot of my life trying to "hold down" information. It's always been emphasized to acquire or wield an idea like it were a whipping stick to be used to either sensationalize or to attack.
Time to smell the roses I guess.
Edge - "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." ... Dennet, Kurzweil... all great Prociphers... I'm still bummed that they're charging students $100+ to attend the Accelerating Change Conference.
Pssyah, singularity, Transhumanism, that was SOOO last year.
HEY! Name-drop gloating time. I've met Jurvetson... this guy is like, the Singularity-entrepreneur incarnate. First he did his schtick at Stanford, completed in 2.5 years, like suma cum lade or something (I should've done that, damn). Then, he paid some dues at places like HP. But THEN, he dot-com boomed his way to mega-bucks with things like Hotmail, and sold many things before the crash. And then quickly thereafter, and now, they're into a ton of Nanotech. Anyway, he was the first VC I heard say anything remotely interesting... someone asked, "What happens when this accelerating change keeps going, and goes straight up." then he kind of blushed, was like, "well, we get into really wild theories... I don't want to get into it" he paused, gaugingthe anxiety of the crowd, and then proceeded anyways, and sputtered off, in like 1 minute all of Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns ideas, Transhumanism thinking, transcendence, etc... and people were just silent. He looked kind of embarrassed, but I was like cheering inside when I heard this...
Then, Tim O'Reilly founder of the the animal books... his deal was that when he went to college, he took a Medieval Studies major because he liked it, and then for money, he started writing technical how-tos on things. He was good, and he eventually started getting serious, publishing, and now he is a legend among the geeks.... he seems to hold up the "do what you love" philosophy as his schtick, which I admire... he is also the pointman for singularity stuff that may happen in the OSS world... him and possibly this guy, Dave Winer... but we'll see, he's having a little conflict in the blogging world, fighting for his version of RSS and what other ppl think RSS should be...
And finally, John R. Koza co-founder of the concept of Genetic Programming. He taught a Stanford class that I attended and I have a paper that I got published with other classmates. Genetic programming is basically having programs compete with each, then mate, and reproduce, in a fashion similar to natural selection, in order to find the best program... it's technologically very simple--it's based on LISP which has tree-like programming structure, like +(-(x,y),z) would be (x-y) + z.... and you can then devise programs just based on trees, and then have the Genetic Programming take branches from competing programs, merge them together, and create supposedly better children... it sounds cool, and what makes it cooler is that with computers, you can simulate large populations in a few seconds... anyway, the concept is amazing... I don't know whether Koza is a procipher or just a guy that invented a cool tool, although he has his foot in many different fields which makes him Buckminster Fuller-like in his embrace of diversity in intellect.
There's a MSNBC article summarizing the major strides that the gay community has made recently in America: the first gay Episcopalian bishop was elected yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws a month ago, and it seems likely that at least civil unions between same-sex couples will obtain some recognition.
If this is a genuine, permanent paradigm shift, then these events are big from a social evolution standpoint. Let's consider the opposite: homophobic societies. Obviously they exist to promote reproduction so that these societies can persist; societies that carry anti-gay, pro-reproduction memes tend to survive.
So, when a society comes out of the closet, what does it mean? It could mean that that society is on its decline. Michael Savage apparently agrees, slamming gays as "sodomites"--which would be a reference to Sodom and Gamora of Babylon, a civilization that crumbled possibly because of too much Hedonism and sodomy.
Now, I'm no crack-pot religionist, but is this wholly untrue? It would be too hard to prove or disprove. But the ultimate question is: does social population growth matter? Have societies withered away simply because they stopped having babies? I can't think of many that jump to my mind. But Europe may be in danger of having this happen to her.
But, there could be something unique about our time period where the society construct is losing its weight and therefore its monopoly on memes. Globalization breaks down the walls between societies so that could be one possible source to look at.
Also, this could be a prelude to the Singularity. Gays, self-involved Hedonists, and those who participate in unmarriage could all foreshadow a future where we don't need coitus to generate better information processors (children) in order to help the species persist.
I haven't heard a good counter-argument to the notion that homosexuality could lead to the declining population of a country.
However, I think homosexual acceptance is an inevitable result of societies that sponsor freedom and the rapid exchange of ideas. A closed society can easily shut down homosexuality without too much resistance from its citizens if the citizens are kept in the dark about homosexuality's acceptance elsewhere or if the standard for freedom is low there.
-- well, maybe not shut "homosexuality down" but still force people to have sex with the opposite sex, even if it is not their orientation.
So from another perspective, this could be a test for societies that know how to actively encourage population growth. Traditional methods for curbing the gay tide are losing their steam. Religious arguments are becoming mute as there is a wealth of other sources of information than your local parish (and if they support a Gay bishop, there goes Church's force in keeping the gayman down. Open scientific debate and the free movement of education has also shown that there is nothing physically dangerous about being homosexuality except the increased possibility of getting AIDS if you don't use protection. And also, urban legends and myths your parents used to feed you, have also lost their weight due to the free exchange of information.
What's my personal stance? I'm a firm believer in the Singularity's imminent arrival, so I don't care too much about population decline, as the consequences won't be felt.
If the Singularity doesn't happen though, would totalitarian societies be more favored then, by forcing certain ideas on its people? Or can a society allow freedom to float freely while managing to enforce policies that ensure its survival?
Which leads to another issue I will get to later: The importance of freedom and its relationship to survival.
Posthuman Possibilities [betterhumans.com]
POSTHUMAN POSSIBILITIES:
- There will be multiple organism types that we will wear and fork into // maybe like fashion? Who will pick what, and why?
- Types include: silicon, steel, and microbes integrated with current body system; wave patterns inside computers; robots canvassing the frontiers of space (like Bender in Futurama)
- May test/break our capacity for change // so far it has been breaking many, possibly incarnation into the Prozac Nation
- Traditional biological evolution will end and directed technological evolution will begin (kurzweil)
By Pentti Malaska...
- Bio-orgs: 'protein-coded bio-organisms whose earthly infrastructure is their "natural" surrounding.'
- Cyborgs: 'cybernetic organisms' bio-mech hybrids
- Silorgs: 'silicon organisms--coding artificial DNA onto silicon compounds with ammonium as a solvent and intended basically for living in outer space.'
- Symborgs: 'symbolic organism' - avatars in the Internet
- Quantum Global Brain: Union of symborgs into giant Internet brain
By Wildman... (borg means bionic organism)
- Orgoborgs: us + hybrids
- GEborgs: genetically engineered
- Technoborgs: insect-like exo-skeletan
- 12% of population already cyborgs with "electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses and artificial skin."
INTERESTING LINKS:
Alvin Toffler - talks in article how there's a 4th wave on the way (with the 3rd being that from apes to man)
Karel Capek - "The word "robot" was created in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek in his book RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). "
MY QUESTION:
- What how will our understanding of free will change in th 4th wave? If me and my dad decide to pick organism type A that thinks with parallel processors and moves back and forth between integration with other organisms of type A while as my mom and brother pick Type B which is an organism that does little else than spectate and enjoy life, and then once in those types, our decision-making mentality paradigm shifts, what will become of our normal conceptions of choice. i.e. right now, human choice is easy to understand... single node deliberates over mounds of evidence and comes up with a decision. The Type A organism's decisions will be based on democracy of others in Type A while also not returning with single decisions, but with a multiplicity of decisions. Type B organisms would make no decisions, but remain chained to constantly loving life, from which they could opt out, but by assuming Type B, they've chosen to reduce their desire for change. And then, the question is, was there something inherent about our family that made us choose to pick these certain Types that then changed our notion of choice. And if choosing change were a process that occured frequently, would there be certain local maximum equilibriums where one could get stuck? And which ones would you want to get stuck into? And by want does that mean want now, or want for later, or will want later?
... read the article, it has good quotes, summary of good one-liners points:
- biology not equal to destiny, more a tendancy
- ever more important than to create is to not destroy
- Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, Minsky says, but they'll be our children
// more of my comments
... and there's the classic attempts to come up with robot laws, like Assimov's laws, that will keep robots supposedly at bay... heh, yeah right... look @ the AI drones floating over bagdhad, they've already broken the robot rules....
... instead we should come up with robotic or AI or transhumanist principles that will we can all worship so that we can collectively insure that the singularity isn't the point where we destroy ourselves but rather the point where we enter the Heaven that we were all sold on when we were kids and believed in Santa Claus....
... see, I ultimately believe in the Law of Accelerating Returns ... so as time increases, intelligence must increase exponentially, and eventually approach an infinite-like level of intelligence... however, that doesn't necessarily mean it will happen to earth... Earth could very well be another Darwinian experiment in survivable planets and we're one of many trials being conducted across space... which planet survives will continue, reproduce, and propogate and will inherit the universe... please, I want it to be us, not them... whoever they are.
... and finally I conclude this long post with a page from Futurama Comics Issue #13.
How will the magic be preserved when we pass thorugh the Singularity? A tremendous lot of human survival depends on magical interpretations of things... the magic of love, the magic of compassion, the magic of consicousness, the magic of free will, democracy, intelligence, good, etc. All of these things hold weights a birth, and are very difficult to unearth. i.e. try being celibate.
Anyways, the magic has been fairly well conserved by Darwinism as those that see through the magic and then lose faith in certain mechanisms probably died off or fade away. i.e. If a son woke up one day and said, "hmm, this family construct is arbitrary and unecessary, and so is life, I'm just going to walk out and do my own thing" he would eventually die.
I think the natural adaption after instincts became meme-suspectibility which allowed the mind to be flexibly controlled by those around us.
But what happens when the Singularity comes by and we all become a lot smarter than meme-enforcement. What happens when everybody becomes enlightened, but not in a happy "yes, I see the light, let's go!" kind of way but in a "man, everything is gray because there is no magic" way. Will we just have an ever-increasing rise in suicide, with 50% of people just randomly plopping off because they decide to stroll down certain thought experiments and decide "hey, there's nothing for me here, good bye."
I doubt there's anything we can do about it. We're rapidly become the densest concentration of intelligence in a self-aware system.
If people start dying randomly, I won't shed too many tears, but if we do end up in a situation where our concentrated intelligence is so vast that everybody has access to the big red button, then it could pose a problem.
I've read in a few places that one of the possible reasons we haven't encountered intelligent life is because after they become smart enough, they eventually destroy themselves. Remember, this was a real danger during the 50s Nuclear Era, but it looks like we survived the first test. Continuing on the strain of the previous post, it could be because we're just dumb enough to collude on nuclear non-proliferation OR as in certain extreme cases of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the consequences of defect-defect are so terrible that people become risk-adverse to defecting PERIOD.
It would be nice if we could prove that other alien smart civilations just got too smart that they destroyed themselves, or at least speculate that.... this would help us then figure out what to do about ourselves... <- although, continuing on the previous post, it is irrational to care about whether we survive or not, which is a product of too much smarts, which if we already have too many people who are too smart to give a shit, then we may just very well be screwed.
Is a dumb president our only hope then?
In the standard normal curve of people, there are outliers and exceptions. In many cases the exceptional are those that are born with some natural quality that makes them stand out from the norm. Upon being distanced from everybody else, they get used to being extraordinary and develop deeper into uniqueness.
Recently--like this past century--a new kind of exceptional class was born: the average hero. These are born with all features so boringly "normal." Upon crashing into the still water of society, they make no ripple, and subsequently invent ways to compensate. This explains the phenomenon of how easy it is to discover hidden talents and interests in the not-ugly people of large cities. (those in small town lack the social pressure to gain attention).
Now, with the Singularity and all, I would like to define a new kind of exceptional person. A super-exceptional person would be one who was symed with qualities that are two standard deviations above the norm. This person would be beautiful, interesting enough, physically fit, emotionally stable, etc. If this person, despite all of that, could spontaneously develop a desire to become unique and to stand out, that would be truly exceptional. This would help break the "misfit" look that has now become commonplace in the "sophisticated" circles of youth.
Killing Banality(TM), the new fragrance from the 21st Century.
Things are more likely to be produced and less likely to be deleted. You throw something onto the Internet and Google, and it leaves a trail that just never seems to die. Read an article once, painted a nice image of changing e-mail addresses. He imagined that still, at his old e-mail address, for a long time at least, he would continue to receive e-mail there. It would of course bounce, but by the fact that e-mail would be still sent to it would acknowledge the presence of a ghost. Ghost in the Shell.
So think: exponential hard drive capacity expansion, human hesitation to erase, that stupid dialog box when you delete. Further proof that we're merrily marching along to the Singularity.
Did an open mic for the first time today at Galokas in San Diego. I dressed in all black, had my hair combed ultra normal, and did a few twisted things that I doubt anybody noticed. Nontheless, it was really fun. I was hella nervous before, and going up there to stand and deliver was not what I expected. I expected to just be nervous and wanting to dish out what I said, but instead, it turned into something powerful. After I said, "Man is just" I paused in silence for a good five seconds--eternity in spoken word--and then, bam, bam, bam, like the daggers of thought I intended to lob, I delivered. The applause I got was comparable to the others, which was comforting.
I had criticisms of all the other spoken word artists, but in quickly sharing it with others, I find that it's just not popular to share such a high bar for art. I always believed in Nietzsche's conception of the Superman, and I wished others would try to make their art rise beyond the mundane. See, already, you are hearing the negative vibes: pessimism, cynicism, arrogance, and just plain bitterness. Why? Why? This is why I don't like revealing my personal thoughts or relating my personal experiences at times. The Truth, or at least my Truth hurts. So when people ask me questions, I try to only tell the part of the Truth that doesn't ruin the conversation into a wrestling match. The match usually ends with me losing and the winner being somebody who just stands over me and says, "See, you can't say X". Don't get me wrong, I enjoy everything. The ceremony of spoken word that processed before me was dope. It was funny, entertaining, and clever. But I must be honest when I emphasize how much I desire improvement and higher forms of art.
Hmm, something is wrong here.... I feel it's a waste, self-indulgent, and plain boring, to talk about my "standards" of art though. I think the compromise I can make with my socially "arrogant" attitudes and my desire to be a generally nice guy, is to be silent and prove my ideas through example. What you say says nothing. Action is what counts. And yet, with friends, especially close friends, I think speaking your mind is still a strong imperative.
I spent the time there with Chaz and Elaine. Elaine had heard of the place and helped me get the link on the left ("Urban San Diego"). It was really nice having friends with me. You can have all the theories in the world, but when you sit down after speaking and a friend gives you a handshake, it feels good. Plus, NOW, there's a whole world of San Diego culture to conquer! (dah!... maybe I should just go screw it, this is my blog, my space, let the arrogance flow like spit)
Here is the poem that I spoke:
"The Gay Funeral"
By Philip Dhingra
Man is just
An informaton processor
When we follow our passions to make love
and subsequently have sex
We are merely exchanging and merging blueprints
To create more information-processors
Who
Through the course of their life
Will struggle to exist
And repeat
what you started.
Now
That is not what life is ALL about?
At least for non uber-hormonal college students.
There is
ART
There is
science
and there is
war
As I take quiet walks
--a rare task these days--
I am always surprised by how
unaware we are of the superstructures
mushrooming around us
From drugs
such as TV
religion
courtship
shrooms
and real mushroom clouds over Bahgdad
The question then emerges
Who
Rules this earth?
Nietzsche once said,
"God is dead.
And we have killed him"
I revise and say,
"Man is dead.
And we have killed him"
Man first died when he chose to speak
When he chose to love
When he chose to submit his activities
To a greater good.
We are gathered here today
For another kind of greater good.
A pow-pow of the most
meta
significance
And we are also here to mourn
the impending death of man
But this will be a death
with little bloodshed
And as the movie The Hours
showed us
Death can be a gift
unto the living
But
What will live on?
Who will live on?
The struggle for existence continues.
I'm in no hurry though
I want to enjoy the Singularity
one precious bit
at a time.
###
What is the Singularity?
You are so much smarter, enlightened, and cultured now than I bet you would have been without the progressive arc of the last 10 years. I have friends who were just clueless teenagers at one point and are now talking about things like, "finding their passion" or "living the good life." How did they get so advanced so quickly? All I can really say is network effects. I read a book, I send an e-mail, somebody gets a phone call, a suggestion is made to watch a cool indie film, an inspiration is produced, another thought is generated, somebody writes an idea down, a web page gets made, hits are produced, fame is created, encouragement is reached, desire is created, work is produced, freedom is reached.
Think, with the Internet and things today, you can now truly shine on your crazy diamonds. Your resume speaks shit compared to what a Google search on your name shows. What happened to Yahoo!, the great corporation Yahoo! Google is stomping on them. What happened to 20th century existentialism and continental philosophy? Transhumanism has superceded it in importance in a heart beat.
With every 24-hour cycle of sunlight, the Internet activity peaks, the electrical usage activity surges, and innovations are created, disseminated, applied in a geometric multiplicity of brobdingnagian proportions.
Sure, digital divide, blah blah You are only aware of the digital divide now because you read about it somewhere, probably on the Internet or on your cable news channel.
Remember when Neo in the Matrix put his finger into the baroque mirror and pulled it out with some chrome-like goop. Remember when he was engulfed into the mirror and the camera went through a tunnel lined with the same chrome-like goop. Remember the sound during the transit? It was like a high-pitched scream interlaced with synthesizations. That is how I feel now. That is what's happening now. That is the singularity.
UPDATE: According to Buck Fudda RE: the sound referenced above: "they put his scream through an enharmonic filter with progressively deeper and deeper envelope, while simultaneously resynthesizing it with a granular synth of some sort (Kyma?), adding more space between the granules with each sample. The filter makes it sound progressively more like a bell...by adding the weird harmonics that are produced inside a bell." I'm sure somebody somewhere out there knows what the heck all of that means.
There's always the question, "At one point, something must have come from nothing" and I have the similar concern that the singularity--the one at the big-bang, not the one in 2020--must have a source. I was thinking that maybe the only thing that can come from nothing is mathematics, abstract tautologies or ideas. These are the only things that occupy no physical space. Like what if there was a book that contained the story of the entire world and or a conceptual computer program that provided the inital conditions and rules for the big bang, and through cellular automata, if executed, would produce us. Would these things have to be executed in order for them to exist?
In convo with A**** today, concluded: everybody is working or relating to the singularity in some way. Some are architecting it, like venture capitalists. Some are architecting it "actively" such as Kurzweil. Others are passively helping it, voters, soldiers, anybody. And others, well, are just buying it! Yes, my cousin is the Singularity(TM) consumer style. He's got the bluetooth ear piece (un)connected to a $300 semi-G3 cell phone. Got the pad in La Jolla with plasma screen, dot-com in his basement with roommate, computer equipment and people doing his bidding everywhere, the latest and greatest in fashion. This guy is on the bleeding edge of the toys of singularity.
Contrast my relationship, which is more an appreciation and expression of the singularity. I look, I process, I disseminate. That's what I've always been good at, that's why I could have won "most outspoken" in High School if I wasn't so busy dot-comming and being politically correct.
What's your relationship to the Singularity? Are you actively engaged, passively contributing, or actively disengaging, thereby only helping to promulgate it?
UPDATE: A**** is my 1-year younger cousin who smells bad. Oh, and he wanted his IM name here, A****D00 so that he can share his body odor with bitches and ho's that fall in love with his relationship with the Singularity(TM).
