You may have heard that the Singularity is coming. Or maybe not. Either way, you should know that several people, some of them even smart, are all about the idea that humanity is on the verge of some unfathomable technological breakthrough, probably involving Artificial Intelligence, nano machines or both, that will irrevocably alter the path human history takes. There may be cake involved.
What you probably haven’t heard is why all these people (some of them smart, one of them named Ray Kurzweil) are so very full of shit. As usual, PZ Myers explains why the Singularity is Bullshit better than I ever could, while dissecting the Kurzweil’s fantasy chart of enlightenment:
Kurzweil cheats. The most obvious flaw is the way he lumps multiple events together as one to keep the distribution linear. For example, one “event” is “Genus Homo, Homo erectus, specialized stone tools”, and another is “Printing, experimental method” and “Writing, wheel”. If those were treated as separate events, they would have inserted major downward deflections in his chart a million years ago, and about 500 to a few thousand years ago.
The biology is fudged, too. Other “events” are “Class Mammalia“, “Superfamily Hominoidea“, “Family Hominidae“, the species “Homo sapiens“, and the subspecies “Homo sapiens sapiens“. Think about it. If the formation of a species, let alone a subspecies, is a major event about a million years ago, why isn’t each species back to the Cambrian awarded equivalent significance? Because it wouldn’t fit his line, of course. As he goes back farther in time, he’s using larger and larger artificial taxonomic distinctions to inflate the time between taxa.
It’s also simplifying the complex. “Spoken language” is treated as a discrete event, one little dot with a specific point of origin, as if it just poofed into existence. However, it was almost certainly a long-drawn-out, gradual process stretched out over hundreds of thousands of years. Primates communicate with vocalizations; why not smear that “spoken language” point into a fuzzy blur stretching back another million years or so?
[...] Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.
The Amazing Kurzweil* that PZ is talking about is Ray Kurzweil, who has made quite a name for himself with this Singularity shtick. He gives lectures, writes books and generally talks about this nonsensical idea to anyone willing to listen. I heard about the Singularity a few years back, when it first started to become a popular theme in science fiction books. It sounded fairly dull to me in that way that a lot of the more gizmo-obsessed techno sci-fi does. It usually leaves me cold by making bold claims about how we can shrug off this sweaty, smelly animal past and become beings of pure information living in a antiseptic world of math and magic, descending to the earthly plane to fight with giant robots like the universe is one big MMORPG. And this is why the idea rubs me the wrong way: it’s the Rapture repackaged for nerds. The Amazing Kurzweil claims we will all become immortal cyborgs living in the Matrix, probably next Tuesday. Saturday afternoon at the latest. (Or maybe by Halloween).
There are a number of problems with the idea of the Singularity, besides the obvious, that it’s just repackaged Calvinist self loathing and general religious nincompoopery.
The first, as PZ points out, is that it’s an oversimplified interpretation of cherry picked data points laid out on a grid with all the rigor of a chimpanzee flinging shit to mark his territory. On a long enough time line (which excludes contradicting data) all of human history looks like a grand escalation towards something better. And while there are a number of ways that we humans have gradually improved life on this planet, for us and other creatures, it hasn’t been a wholly beneficial ride to the top of the mountain. There have been set backs. You may have heard of one: The Dark Ages. To suggest otherwise is not just to strut one’s ignorance of the darker side of progress and the law of unintended consequences, but utter tautology. The universe has no purpose. It exists. Period. It isn’t goal oriented. it doesn’t favor the creative or the just or even the wealthy and the powerful, though they often as not win out over the rest of us through sheer cussed determination to screw us over before we screw them. Which brings up the next reason the singularity is just a pipe dream: technology is hoarded by the rich.
As William Gibson put it, “the future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” If we were to develop the Matrix-style technology that would allow us to live forever as godlike super cyborgs, it wouldn’t be plucky Mumbai orphans or taxi drivers in Saskatchewan who get to use it. It’d be Bill Gates and Dick Chaney. The Singularity: it runs on Windows and gasoline. And this differs form what we have now, how exactly? Other Than Dick Cheney being immortal. Great idea, Ray.
And while this might seem like the domain of a few basement dwellers or sci-fi geeks, who I’m normally all a booster for, the part that really bugs me is that there are otherwise smart people who take this stuff seriously. This is one of my biggest pet peeves: people who can’t distinguish fantasy from reality. And it suckers in some otherwise brilliant minds, who end up deluding themselves with nonsense that distracts them from solving real, manageable issues by diverting all their mental output on an escapist fantasy. People right now are wasting money trying to figure out how to escape into the Matrix who would otherwise be solving global warming.
Part of this relates to my theory of the competing schools of science fiction, but that’s a topic for another time. Suffice for now to say that the Singularity represents science fiction at its worst and most pernicious: escapist fantasy and gizmo porn dressed up like futurism. Why anybody but Baptists and pseudo intellectual geeks would want such a thing escapes me but then I’ve never been one to go in for all that religious talk.
