Since the first homo sapiens sharpened a stick and set a fire, the tension between our ability to build and our ability to destroy has ratcheted ever upward. For millenia, people have looked for a Messiah and feared the Apocalypse; some merge the two into a desire for the Apocalypse as a way, or a sign, of the impending triumph of Paradise on Earth. Others take grim pleasure in imagining the triumph of a final dystopia. Many wonder if, since August 6, 1945, we have finally achieved the ability to cause the Apocalypse without the need or hope of divine intervention.
In the April, 2000 issue of Wired magazine, Bill Joy offered his assessment of the most likely emerging existential threats facing humanity.
Why the future doesn't need us.
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
The article remains pertinent though the people concerned about the technological Singularity have refined some of his concerns. At the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the point of view is that the Singularity will occur when our computers "wake up." This can lead to either the Terminator dystopia when the machines realize they do not need us or the Utopian outcome where our "offspring" are tightly enough integrated with us as to value our continued existence and augmentation. Most likely the actual outcome, should it come to pass, will surprise, which is why it is a Singularity.
Mark Beam at beaming imagines the Social Singularity as an emergent phenomenon arising from the increasing complexity of the on-line world: [HT: Warren "Bones" Bonesteel]
This concept of a community constantly reinterpreting how it should act in the world in synch with a constantly evolving shared horizon is an important one.
This is consistent with research on termites by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s that suggests, by analogy and reflection, a connection in the way cooperative networks of people operate: that the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining of a nest (i.e. the planet) was dependent upon stimulation provided by the nest, as opposed to an inherent knowledge of nest building on the individual termite’s part.”
Like a termites nest, the collective action that emerges within the network is strongly influenced and inspired by the activities of what other members are doing and the overall shape of the network.
Ben Goertzel, describing the processes involved in On Becoming a Neuron imagines the emerging social singularity as being more similar to becoming an intelligent self-aware neuron in the global brain:
... the process of doing computer science research is so different now than it was a decade or two ago, due to the ready availability and easy findability of so many research ideas, algorithms, code snippets etc. produced by other people.
Does this mean that I’m no longer an individual? It’s certainly different than if I were sitting on a mountain for 10 years with my eagle and my lion like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
But yet I don’t feel like I’ve lost my distinctiveness and become somehow homogenized –
the way I interface with the synergetic network of machines and people is unique in complexly patterned ways, and constitutes my individuality.Just as a neuron in the brain does not particularly manifest its individuality any less than a neuron floating by itself in a solution. In fact, the neuron in the brain may manifest its
individuality more greatly, due to having a richer, more complex variety of stimuli to which it may respond individually.None of these observations are at all surprising from a Global Brain theory perspective. But, they’re significant as real-time, subjectively-perceived and objectively-observed inklings of the accelerating emergence of a more and more powerful and coordinated Global Brain, of which we are parts.
Paradigm shifts are coming at an accelerating pace and such shifts are always experienced with a combination of fear and hope. Those of us who are comfortable with cutting edge (or close to cutting edge) technology approach the coming Singularity with more hope than fear, but we are probably outliers. Our technological civilization has become so complex and interdependent that modern man can no longer survive without it and, in point of fact, a rather substantial proportion of the world's population would not survive a significant technological crash, whether caused by the failure of our energy supplies, runaway nanotechnology, or hostile sentient computers.
When Thomas Malthus proposed his principle of population, he was correct in his assessment that population will inevitably outpace the food supply but only once technology was removed from the equation; from Wikipedia:
Malthus largely developed his views in reaction to the optimistic opinions of his father and his associates, notably Rousseau. Malthus's essay was also in response to the views of the Marquis de Condorcet. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, Malthus made the famous prediction that population would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in food per person. (Case & Fair, 1999: 790).
“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."
The world's population has expanded incredibly rapidly in the last century and it is only our technology that has enabled us to so far exceed the nutritional demands of the burgeoning human population. Today the greater threat to health is from over-eating rather than malnutrition, and the malnutrition that exists is almost all caused by political conflicts. I suppose a neo-Malthusian creed would amount to "Singularity or Bust!"
We will remain transfixed by disasters, mini-apocalypses that appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies and offer us the deep and guilty relief that we are not the victims, and will continually find new disaster scenarios with which to scare young children and vulnerable adults. The more fanciful and global the disaster, the more it is able to offer a way to avoid more immediate and real dangers.
Which is more likely to introduce paradigm shifts that will affect each of us in the next decade:
1) Global Warming;
2) An Iranian nuclear bomb;
3) Pakistan descending into chaos;
5) Or, everyone's favorite address for the Apocalypse, the Middle-East and its next meltdown post-Annapolis?
Perhaps, if our species' past performance is at all predictive, we should join in with REM:
Its the end of the world as we know it,
Its the end of the world as we know it,
Its the end of the world as we know it,
And I feel fine....
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