From time to time I allow myself to freely associate and speculate. Consider this a highly speculative post written without any particular view on where it is going...
There are many different conceptualizations of the Singularity, the one I find most salient is, as described by Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future, defined by that moment at which an AI becomes recursively self improving. Shortly thereafter the intelligence of the AI(s) will begin to exponentially surpass the intelligence of Homo sapiens and it is impossible to predict what will ensue.
As others, exemplified by Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) , have pointed out, if we think in terms of the speed and cost of information processing, the history of our planet/universe/species has been punctuated by a series of discontinuities. For example, the beginning of the biosphere (emergence of life) on the planet can be thought of as a Singularity. Once life began its long march, nothing was ever the same again. In more human terms, the invention of Movable Type was a Singularity whereby the ability to process information expanded exponentially as, in an historical eye blink of time, the number of people able to read and process data went from a relative handful to several orders of magnitude larger. The internet has once again increased by an exponential level the number of people involved in processing data and, even more importantly, the number of connections available for data processing, which is probably on the order of N X 103 (assuming each person on the internet has connections to 1000 others, who have connections to 1000 other, a very conservative estimate; the information transmission will propagate as the cube of the number of people in the network. I welcome other estimates by anyone who has some expertise in information science.)
With each mini-Singularity there was a subsequent economic dislocation as suddenly archaic methods of adding value were swamped by the new economies of scale. Where once a book had to be painstakingly written by hand and were so rare and precious that only the wealthiest individuals and institutions could afford them, once the printing press was invented, the cost of the book became substantially reduced, making it possible for even those with modest wealth to accumulate tlibraries. With the advent of the internet the marginal cost of "printing" a book has descended to as near to free as to make the distinction invalid. As this mini-Singularity has overwhelmed those industries that were based on controlling the creation and distribution of printed material, their business models have begun to crumble. In fact, every industry that depends on disseminating information has found their business model failing. For the newspaper business, network news, the music industry, and a host of other industries, the economic Singularity has effectively already happened.
The next mini-Singularity is already in its nascent stages, as noted by Kevin Carson in his review of Cory Doctorow's Makers: [HT: John Robb]
The major themes I’ve written about here lately — the decline of traditional mass-production industry, the crisis of value and shift of production outside the cash nexus, the rise of micromanufacturing (see “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution“), the digital/network culture — are all central to Makers. And given my research and writing interests, it’s a foregone conclusion that any work of cyberpunk or other near-future sci fi is going to wind up marked and dogeared beyond belief. Just about anything I’ve read by Neal Stephenson or William Gibson has ended up that way, as did the machine shop material in the first volume of S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket series. So after just one reading, Doctorow’s book looks like it’s had the living shit beaten out of it. It’s that good.
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The story begins sometime in the second decade of this century. It’s set against the background of the kind of economic clusterfuck I’ve written about a lot recently (for example, “The End of Economic Growth“ at this blog, and my paper “The Decline and Fall of Sloanism” at Center for a Stateless Society).
Doctorow’s near-future scenario is the culmination of a long trend that began in the 1970s, with Japan’s development of cheap CNC machine tools scaled to the needs of the garage factory and job-shop. Since then we’ve seen progressively larger shares of total industrial production shifted from the old mass-production core to a periphery of flexible manufacturing networks like those of Emilia-Romagna and Shenzhen, and the growing shift of contract production to independent supplier networks. By 2000, a majority of transnational corporations’ industrial production took place not in their own facilities, but in the job-shops of Asia.
The rise of the micromanufacturing and Fab Lab movements in recent years has taken things an order of magnitude further in the same direction. According to Doug Rushkoff, the destructive effect of the desktop computer on the old information and culture industries resulted from the imploding cost of the means of production. As Yochai Benkler described it, in a few decades we went from conventional radio stations, music studios and printing presses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, to desktop publishing and podcasting operations that were two orders of magnitude cheaper. When the initial capital outlays for information and cultural production fall by a factor of a hundred, all the capital previously absorbed by those industries becomes superfluous.
We’re seeing the same thing now in the realm of physical production. We’re seeing the development of homebrew CNC cutting tables, routers and 3-D printers that can be built for a few hundred bucks. A Fab Lab with homebrew machine tools and RepRap — essentially a factory — can be built for $5000. The desktop manufacturing revolution is in the process of making the majority of investment capital superfluous, the same way the desktop computer revolution has destroyed the information and entertainment industries. If there’s an analogue of Moore’s Law for industrial hardware, you can stand it on its head and get a general rule: if capital outlays for micromanufacturing fall exponentially, then every so many years the amount of stuff that requires mass production industry to make will be reduced by half.
The review is long but well worth your time. The key graph is that as more and more actual stuff* is manufactured locally, in garages and warehouses of now defunct industries, the economic dislocation will be profound. Our current Recession/Depression, with lost jobs which will never come back, is a foretaste of the kinds of dislocation that abundance can create.
Read the entire review and keep in mind that the current, first generation, desk top fabricator can make simple plastic models, but not too far down the road are vdesk top printers (now in the laboratory) that can create printed circuits to order and fabricators that will be mini-machine shops able to work with metals, plastics, and composites. It is possible to imagine some of the attributes of an economy that is based on a growing percentage of economic activity taking place at the most local level, but the impact on the state and the largest corporate structures is not so easy to predict. Where will the state get its tax money when the marginal cost of new stuff is minimal?
A current TV commercial touts the fact that there are already >83,000 iPhone apps available. What happens when there are >83,000 iPhone iterations available? Right now, to make a knock-off cell phone costs pennies but requires a large investment of capital to set up the plant to make them; soon enough a smart teenager will be able to use his allowance money to buy a decent functioning fabricator(or more likely fabricators) and build his own customized cell phones for costs approaching free. If economies are based on managing scarcity, how will we manage abundance?
The future is getting closer by the minute and it is likely to be fascinating but the dislocations are going to create more than their share of vertigo.
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