ShrinkWrapped

The Social Singularity

In response to my post yesterday a reader sent me a link to a highly thought-provoking article, Social Singularity, which presented a very optimistic view of the currently evolving discontinuity known as the internet.  Warren "Bones" Bonesteel, an author and researcher, Sgt USMC 1976-1983, approaches the internet aspect of the technological singularity from a very different place than I do, but his article is instructive:

Currently there are more than one billion people on the internet. Some scholars and researchers claim that the next five years will see at least another one billion people join us. That latter number does not take into account internet capable iPods and cell phones, etc., which are projected to become even more available and ubiquitous over the next few years. In America alone, there are currently two hundred and eleven million people on the internet. More than seventy percent of them get some or all of their news and info from the WWW. The People are now beginning to flex their new-found muscles and take over the aggregation and implementation of memes and narratives that have traditionally been handled by other institutions. [Emphasis mine-SW]

...

The media, our cultural and social institutions, the powerbrokers and politicians no longer control the memes and narratives of our society. The changes that we are going to see will be deep and profound. I have had a very positive feeling about the future since I - finally - understood what I was seeing. What is happening won't end in Xanadu or Utopia, but, in time, it should result in much better scenarios than we presently face as a world culture and society.

One point one billion People around the world are on the internet, with another one billion people projected to join them in less than five years. For our traditional information and educational Gatekeepers and for traditional bureaucrats, politicians and power mongers, this is fearsome news, indeed. For the rest of us, this is empowerment of a type and kind never before seen or imagined. This is true Democracy.

His conclusions are worth considering:

The Singularity & the 12th Imam: Part V

In Part I of this series, I laid out the thesis that disruptive technologies tend to increase people's anxieties and insecurities and that often this leads to magical wishes for deliverance, from religion or political ideology especially; in the current times, this is expressed overtly by the Persian Shia belief in the Apocalyptic return of the 12th Imam.

In Part II, I suggested that Iran's rulers have a limited time frame in which to either increase their Oil revenues by conquest or control of the markets (facilitated in either case by their acquisition of nuclear weapons) or lose control of their country; I put a 5 year horizon on the current status quo.

In Part III, I suggested that the Civilized world, under the impact of our own reactions to the disruptive effects of our rapidly evolving technology, is poorly equipped to recognize the dangers that radical Islam (in the form of Iran) represents and that this failure of recognition will make the final confrontation inevitable.

In Part IV, I described how disruptive change increases our tendencies for irrationality, not only in less sophisticated people, like the Islmaists, but also in less well recognized forms, within highly evolved and sophisticated elites. 

In this post, I aim to show that we are already in the middle of an unprecedented period of such rapid, disruptive change that the Clash of Civilizations which has been underway in its current phase since 9/11 can only accelerate in the next several years and is likely, short of a miracle, to eventuate in catastrophic conflict well before most people can imagine.

My premise starts with the most disruptive of emotions, Anxiety.

Anxiety differs from fear in a very fundamental way.  When you know the danger you face, you feel fear; when the source or object of danger is unknown, you feel anxiety.  A simple example:  if you are crossing the street and a car is speeding out of control toward you, you will feel fear.  If you have the same feeling while crossing the street in the absence of any such speeding car, you are feeling anxiety.  Physiologically, both experiences are the same, but the mental experience is quite different.

The Singularity & the 12th Imam: Part IV

In The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil looked at the natural history of information processing and discovered that the rate of increase in the ability to manipulate information has a logarithmic slope; in other words, the rate of information processing ability increases at an exponential rate.  Furthermore, he suggested that within the next 30-40 years we will reach a time at which the pace of technological advance (the current embodiment of information processing) will become so rapid as to make further predictions impossible, a point which he called "The Singularity". 

Kevin Kelly, as part of an article critiquing certain aspects of Kurzweil's idea, described the Singularity in fairly accessible terms.  (Vinge refers to Verner Vinge, who originated the idea of an Artificial Intelligence Singularity):

In Vinge’s analysis, at some point not too far away, innovations in computer power would enable us to design computers more intelligent than we are, and these smarter computers could design computers yet smarter than themselves, and so on, the loop of computers-making-newer-computers accelerating very quickly towards unimaginable levels of intelligence. This progress in IQ and power, when graphed, generates a rising curve which appears to approach the straight up limit of infinity. In mathematical terms it resembles the singularity of a black hole, because, as Vinge announced, it will be impossible to know anything beyond this threshold. If we make an AI which in turn makes a greater AI, ad infinitum, then their future is unknowable to us, just as our lives have been unfathomable to a slug. So the singularity became a black hole, an impenetrable veil hiding our future from us.

In his response to Kelly's article, Kurzweil wrote a clarifying post and used the Internet to illustrate the concept of a "transformative technology":

Consider the Internet. When the Arpanet went from 10,000 nodes to 20,000 in one year, and then to 40,000 and then 80,000, it was of interest only to a few thousand scientists. When ten years later it went from 10 million nodes to 20 million, and then 40 million and 80 million, the appearance of this curve looks identical (especially when viewed on a log plot), but the consequences were profoundly more transformative. There is a point in the smooth exponential growth of these different aspects of information technology when they transform the world as we know it. [Emphasis mine-SW]

One of Kurzweil's great insights was that almost any information technology, when looked at over time, shows the same pattern of exponential growth, with minimal change until a threshold is hit, followed by explosive transformations. 

What does this have to do with Apocalyptic cults and irrational reactions to disruption fueled angst?

The Singularity & the 12th Imam: Part III

In Part I of this series, I laid out the thesis that disruptive technologies tend to increase people's anxieties and insecurities and that often, this leads to magical wishes for deliverance, from religion or political ideology especially; in the current times, this is expressed overtly by the Persian Shia belief in the Apocalyptic return of the 12th Imam.

In Part II, I suggested that Iran's rulers have a limited time frame in which to either increase their Oil revenues by conquest or control of the markets (facilitated in either case by their acquisition of nuclear weapons) or lose control of their country; I put a 5 year horizon on the current status quo.

The question I will address today is whether or not the Civilized World will be able to recognize the danger that we all face and mobilize for action before the worst case scenarios eventuate.

There is almost no chance that China or Russia will allow the UN to be an effective force for constraining Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.  They have both announced their adamant opposition to sanctions, let alone military force.  Neither Russia nor China see Iran as a direct threat to themselves.  They have no problem with Iran threatening the Western Europeans, Japanese, and Americans; for reasons that I will address, their insouciance is foolish, but that is unlikely to change any time soon.  The upshot is that the Iranians will continue to use the UN to delay and defer, all the while continuing their nuclear program.  Once again, any credible threat of force will have to come from the United States, most likely without the UK, or from Israel (which will be blamed on the US in any event.)

The Left in this country, working through their allies in the permanent bureaucracy, the Congress and the MSM, have done a masterful job of hamstringing the Bush administration.  The current dominant frame for Iraq is that the United States is caught in a quasi-civil war, with no hope of success.  Further, this was an unnecessary war based on lies, or at best slanted ("cooked") intelligence done for Oil or at the behest of various big business interests.  The memes are muddled, but effective nonetheless; gaining the support of the American people for an attack on Iran would be more than problematic.  I do not mean this to imply that the administration has been blameless; certainly not.