My Scattered Thoughts On The Singularity

My Scattered Thoughts on the Singularity
By Sally Morem
On the question of competition versus cooperation: It is almost never a case of either/or. Every single economic act involves elements of both. If you form a business, you must get cooperation from vendors, employees, and customers to make a go of it. Even wars involve elements of intense competition and cooperation. The much more interesting question is whether accelerating technology will stimulate new forms of wholly voluntary forms of cooperation or merely retain one of the many systems of enforced, hierarchical cooperation we humans have developed throughout history. I believe, as we get closer and closer to the technological singularity, accelerating tech is already permitting far more decentralization to grow and spread in America and throughout the world. On the question of human nature: We certainly do have a human nature. It involves human limitations in every dimension of our lives. We can only learn a certain amount of knowledge at a certain rate. We can only know a certain number of people over a certain period of time. We can only go to a certain amount of meetings before our calendar fills. We can only go so long without eating, drinking, sleeping, breathing. We are severely restricted in our range of livable environments. Our emotional range is limited to what our biological inheritance has left to us. Lots of other limits impinge upon us. Perhaps upcoming body and brain augments and eventually mind-uploading will radically change some or all of these limits, but these haven't occurred yet. One could argue that our technology has already permitted us to overcome earlier limits (flying, living in cold climates, driving, etc.) but these advances have revealed a much more severe set of limits. I believe all of these biological limits and more lie at the core of every single tradition and institution we humans have implemented over the ages. And I believe every single religious and political movement that urged upon us various utopias made exactly the same mistake in overlooking or dismissing these limitations. They all crashed and burned on the reefs and sandbars of human nature. On the biological versus machine controversy: Sounds like someone is not taking accelerating tech and its implications very seriously. What if accelerating tech makes it impossible to tell the difference between biological brains that had been improved and computers that had been
improved? Exactly what would be uploaded from what and why would anyone care enough to start a jihad over the question? On the question of socialism and who is actually doing the work: I don't believe socialism has ever worked well because it rewards non-work and punishes workers and inventors. The people who actually envision new tech and create it are the ones who must be rewarded in order for them to keep doing what they have been doing. But, the article by Phil Bowermaster discusses an ever-more important problem: the fact that accelerating tech itself is doing more and more of the work that people used to do. If you have any accounting experience, you know about "running the numbers," calculating spreadsheets line by line, and then recalculating by introducing some changes in the numbers. Accountants used to do all of this tedious work BY HAND. Its now all automated by spreadsheet software. We all know about how specialized robots are doing more and more of the physical work people used to do. And with everything being computerized in the past few years in areas that only people used to handle, white collar work is now on the decline. But that's just the beginning. All forms of blue-collar work may end as soon as next decade as robots and printers and replicators take over every aspect of manufacturing. The few remaining jobs requiring high intellectual imputs will be encroached upon again and again. This is why I stated at the beginning of this thread (on the Internet) that there is NO economic or political solution to this problem because the problem is not caused by economic or political factors. You may gripe about greedy capitalists I have certainly griped about government officials who believe they can run a multi-trillion-dollar economy from the center (absolutely laughable). But the core problem is that our technology is getting better than us humans in EVERY field--or soon will be. Since the problem is technological, my proposed solution is technological. Push 3-D printing tech hard, nanotech harder, bring about a true tech revolution by putting those two together in the form of Star Trek replicators. Let everyone replicate their replicators, create CAD programs for everything they could ever dream of making, and swap them on-line. Eventually, every human would own his or her own means of production, governments would be reduced to their natural function of policing and defense, health care would be run by our cell repair machines, education would be run by families and friends, most of it occurring online, money would disappear since its function would disappear, and so would labor unions and corporations. You are all Singulatarians and can add to this model of technological revolution. On corporate culture: Remember, there is no such thing as "corporate culture" as such. There are millions of corporations and millions of cultures. There are also as many different economic situations in corporations. Some doing quite well and paying their employees
well. Others doing not so well and not paying their employees well. And then there are others, high tech firms that are able to scale up so efficiently that they can now do with a few employees what old-time corporations couldn't do without having thousands doing it. I heard of one such high tech corporation with 13 (count 'em, 13) employees being sold for a billion dollars!!!! This sort of thing will happen more and more as automation does more work and much better work than people who may have once done that work. Or, the work may be so new that very few people have ever done it--the machines have done it for the (say) 5 years that particular process has existed. At some point (perhaps later this decade) there will be no correlation whatsoever between the amount of human labor and measured levels of economic productivity. On the question of consensus: The tricky part of consensus in science and anywhere else is its loose relationship with two different spectrums: certainty to uncertainty and accuracy to inaccuracy. These may well not coincide, as in a scientific "fact" that is later shown by experiment and observation to be false. Plus, in science, where a certain level of disinterestedness is supposed to exist, there are unacceptable levels of self-promotion, faddish enthusiasms, "sucking up" to the funders, and sometimes even deliberate falsification of data. Ask if the "fact" that consensus has formed around is long established, been shown to be likely true by a variety of tests and experiments, and has little in the way of political interest involved in being proved or disproved. Unfortunately for climate science, it fails all of these tests. Climate science needs time and many more angles of experimentation and observation, not strictly weather-related, but from sciences tangent to climate. It needs data from astronomy, geology, even biology. It also needs theorists who know something of the long, hard work of building very broad-based theory (as in physics or biological evolution) and aren't so quick to jump the gun. In short, the science is too damned young to warrant the ardent trust its proponents have in its pronouncements. The tech that is being developed now may lead to huge scientific breakthroughs on our understanding of weather and climate. I expect this to happen as we deploy millions (billions?) of sensors in every conceivable environment and use our exponentially growing computer capabilities to correlate the massive amounts of resulting data. In fact, if we dont get that breakthrough by sometime in the 2020s, Ill be VERY surprised. Thats it. Those are my thoughts on an array of political and scientific subjects, and how accelerating technology may drastically change the discussion on each one.

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