The Singularity is Near: Difference between revisions

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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