The Singularity is Near: Difference between revisions

{{review|The Singularity is Near|Ray Kurzweil|R2RURQH49KZ8DH| 15 June 2009|The Apocalypse is nigh}}

The “evolutionary process” from woodblock printing to the Gutenberg press, to lithography, to hot-metal typing, to photo-typesetting, to the ink jet printer (thanks, Wikipedia!) involves what Kurzweil would call “paradigm shifts” but which a biologist might call extinctions; each new technology arrives, supplements and obliterates the existing ones, not just by doing the same job more effectively, but – and this is critical – by opening up new vistas and possibilities altogether that weren’t even conceived of in the earlier technology – sometimes even at the cost of a certain flexibility inherent in the older technology.  

That is, development is constantly forking off in un-envisaged, unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.

It is what I call “[[perspective chauvinism]]” to judge former technologies by the terms of prevailing orthodoxy. Judged by such an arbitrary standard older technologies will, by degrees, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless. This process of judging former technologies by subsequently imposed criteria is, in my view, the source of many of Ray Kurzweil’s inevitably impressive charts of exponential progress.  But it isn’t that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn’t change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true – but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution – we got from Stephenson’s rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent century or so the train’s evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the “S” curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They aren’t exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of “S” curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single “parabola of best fit” has heavy resonances of the planetary “epicycle”, a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit “misbehaving” data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model.

And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil’s breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just four years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet:

On the other hand I could find scant reference to “cloud computing” or equivalent phenomena like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project which spawned schemes like SETI@home in Kurzweil’s book. Now here is a rapidly evolving technological phenotype, for sure: hooking up thousands of serially processing computers into a massive parallel network, giving processing power way beyond any technology currently envisioned. It may be that this adaptation means we simply don’t need to incur the mental challenge of molecular transistors and so on, since there must, at some point, be an absolute limit to miniaturisation, as we approach it the marginal utility of developing the necessary technology will swan dive just as the marginal cost ascends to the heavens; whereas the parallel network involves none of those limitations. You can always hook up yet another computer, and everyone will increase performance.

I suppose it’s easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we’re only six months from the new decade (I wrote this in 2009; as I edit it nine years later, still on a PC, we’re no closer, but who would have guessed at the explosion of smart phones?), but the point is that the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions (until, that is, the results are in!), being as path-dependent as it is.