There is an idea frequently referred to as Technological Singularity. Simply put, the concept is that pace of technological progress has been accelerating throughout human history; going a little faster all the time. Eventually the theory goes; technology will be progressing so fast we’ll break though the barrier of humanity itself, cultural light speed. The term singularity (a black hole) is used because like in astronomy, by definition you cannot see what is on the other side of a singularity. Nothing that passes though it can ever escape to tell those left behind what’s on the other side.
I can buy into that, and you can draw neat graphs that even let you pick dates, but several questions remain.
I propose the following answers, increasing ability to aggregated intelligence and the concept of objective reality.
The increasing ability to aggregate intelligence refers to how it is increasingly easy to learn things. Human minds haven’t gotten smarter but we’ve always finding new ways to pack in ever more complex ideas.
I believe this process is at its base a cycle; one human comes up with a metaphor and the next human improves it to their own ends, repeat forever.
Throughout its history humankind has generated knowledge this way and utilized any new technological innovations that resulted as it did so. The innovation of writing sped up the process considerably. With writing humans began to make documents and by 3500BC invented the library as a place to keep them.
But early on the process had not yet picked up a lot of speed. It actually took till around 1850AD for enough technology to be developed for a there to be enough written knowledge to require serious attempts at systems for organizing it all. The first documentation systems for libraries began to evolve.
I suspect it is no coincidence that around this era of history things started really moving. Libraries allow people to contribute to the knowledge making process much more efficiently. With libraries humans waste a lot less time reinventing the wheel and as such can spend more time strapping wings to wheels and making a plane. With libraries it took less then 66 years to go from the Wright Brothers (1903) to the Moon landing (1969). Libraries where also involved in the vast civil rights changes that took place during this time in the West, but that’s another essay.
Libraries offer a massive improvement to the process of knowledge generation but they have issues with scale. The more knowledge we generate, the less places we have to put it and the harder it becomes to figure out a way to sort everything. Luckily around the time of the moon landings another development took place that would largely drive the history of technology until this day, digital electronics.
Digital electronics enable some hugely significant things. They largely removes the connection between the physical world and the realm of knowledge. Having a physical manifestation of knowledge, say a book, largely allows one to ignore that the knowledge and the book are not the same thing. Books are objects but knowledge is subjective. More on this shortly.
Digital electronics lead to the Internet, which lead to the Web. The Web is certainly a lot more powerful tool then a building full of paper but still isn’t the best for generating knowledge. The process is too wonky and non-standard.
In January 2001 the Wikipedia popped up trying to do a little better. By January 2007 it contained 5.3 million articles in dozens of languages. One website created in less then 6 years likely embodying more aggregated knowledge then existed on all of Earth 150 years ago.
Imagine where this is going to be in another 150 years. This brings us to the aforementioned barrier.
This process of improving metaphors, of making better knowledge; it is clearly accelerating. The rate of acceleration itself is accelerating and such growth does suggest an approaching wall or singularity. What will happen then? There will be a profound shift in how we commonly think. The objective perspective will finally be relegated to the dust bin of history with other used up flat Earth metaphors.
The idea of the objective perspective is that objects exist in a universal physical world that can be understood universally by humans. Truth with a capital T exists from this perspective, something that is absolutely true for everyone. In this perspective there is a single God’s-eye view of the universe and importantly, we can get a peek.
Opposed to this is the subjective perspective. It holds that objects can only be understood in the mind, humans can never know anything universally as we are ourselves part of the universe. It would be like trying to document taking apart a camera with the camera itself. It’s not that the cameradoesn ’t exist, it’s that it can never understand this existence from any perspective other then its own. Our minds are like the camera, worrying about what absolutely exists is pointless, we can never know.
An objectivist asks, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
A subjectivist hears, “If you don’t know if a tree fell in the forest, did it fall?” and asks, “Why do you want me to believe your so called tree has fallen? Who are you and why should I trust you?”
Much of the time this debate seems like pointless hair splitting. If I get smacked in the head it hardly matters if the smack exists in my mind or universally, I still get smacked.
It gets interesting once you start trying to define what a smack is. What is the difference between a smack and a punch? Is an English smack the same as a French claquez ? If something smacks of the truth, is that same concept and how are the two related? I can slap you some skin or I can slap you upside the head. Just what is a slap objectively? You’re never going to know, but until lately it generally didn’t change things too much if you believed you did.
Subjectively you know what a slap is. Likely your concept is very similar to that of other people with similar cultural backgrounds, and that’s why until recently this whole business wasn’t frequently seen as a problem. As long as one persons definitions are pretty close to another’s, the differences won’t really come up when they work together to make knowledge.
But with our technology we can now work with people from vastly differing cultures trivially, and in doing so the flaws in objectivism become much more counterproductive and dangerous. An objective perspective causes one to do things like argue that a dictionary defines a word rather then attempts to document its use. It wants everything to be able to be placed in hierarchies. It sees the world in black and white and won’t listen to anyone trying to change what it sees as black or white. To an objectivist the means justify the ends because an objectivist believes there is an objective end. It’s the feedback loop that causes holy wars and makes genocide and terrorism seem like good ideas. Given the other technology we’ve been inventing lately being able to do what it does (make lots of dead people), it’d be great if we’d all stop ever thinking that way.
Luckily, with humans working together in systems like the Wikipedia there is far less tendency to try and think objectively. Participation in a crowd generated knowledge process is inherently subjective. If you didn’t care about the perspectives of others, you wouldn’t be there in the first place. The whole point of the endeavor requires a belief that by aggregating perspectives together knowledge can be made that is more useful then any single member could generate. The crowd forms an aggregated intelligence, self aware and smarter then any its member humans.
Which leads us back to the technological singularity. One of the things often affiliated with the idea is strong artificial intelligence. Perhaps if we get good enough at disassembling minds we might be able to make a new one. But aggregated intelligences can perform all the tricks of a strong artificial intelligence anyway. The ghost isn’t in the machine, it’s parceled off human minds but the results are the same. You get a self aware, reproducing intelligence that is faster and smarter then any human contributing to it.
On the other side of the singularity the gap between our minds and these aggregated intelligences will be blurred out of existence. Image the Wikipedia 150 years on, able to write a PhD thesis essentially instantly. Imagine your cell phone 150 years on. It’ll make accessing this future Wikipedia like breathing. A large part of yourself, perhaps the majority, won’t be inside the meat on the end of your neck anymore. From a subjective perspective this has always been the case but on the other side of the singularity it’ll be impossible trick oneself into thinking otherwise.
Education becomes a matter of comparison. There’s no truth, just the common ground between our different versions of our concepts. By understanding the common ground between concepts people learn things. We’ll make kids read a lot and then write about how the various things relate. Or paint, do music, whatever. Language is in for a major overhaul.
Better still, the whole God issue is put to bed. Does God exist? From a subjective viewpoint the answer is, “Yes!” The idea of God exists. I am writing about it and if you and I share enough common perspective you ‘know what I’m talking about’. There can be no question the idea of God exists as an idea in our heads; just like everything else. Can it make someone win the football game? Sure, if I’m prone to believing such things. God in an idea and ideas are the most powerful things in humankind. Is there a big man in the clouds counting the number of times I curse? Inside some peoples heads there is. Objectively? Who cares? You can never know anything objectively.
Why are we here? To make knowledge, to make improve metaphors, to resist entropy. We are the absolute best things in the known universe at it, we should keep it up and see what happens.
What I suspect happens is we get really good at aggregating intelligence and build machines out of cleverer and clever stuff until the concept of what is human is nothing like we know it today. Lab made lumps of meat that do the same tricks as the lumps in our heads will become involved. The ideas found in Quantum mechanics will become heavily involved. We’ll transcend time. We’ll become intelligence(s) living at a speed and in a space imperceptible to our 2007 era minds. Perhaps that’s where all the aliens went, I know it’s where I want to go.