The Singularity is Near: Difference between revisions

{{fullanat|br|The Singularity is Near|Ray Kurzweil}}

Julian Jaynes rounds out his wonderful {{bookreview|The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind}} with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for “the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause”.

But not Raymond Kurzweil. This author seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the [[Apocalypse|apocalyptic]], in those aspects where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often. One thing you could not accuse Ray Kurzweil of is a lack of pluck; but there’s a fine line between bravado and foolhardiness. Kurzweil drives a truck over it.

His approach to evolution is a good example. He talks often, and modishly, of the algorithmic nature of evolution, but then makes observations not quite out of the playbook, such as: “the key to an evolutionary algorithm ... is defining the problem. ... in biological evolution the overall problem has always been to survive” and “evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity”.

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:

“By the end of this decade [i.e., by 2010] computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing”

*[[utopia]]

*[[apocalypse]]

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