I, Singularitarian
Posted by neocount on December 15, 2009
Heh, heh, I’m feeling particularly proud of the title of this post (but I’m probably one amongst thousands who had this clever little idea), sorry, I digress, ok, seriously, I decided to write something on the subject of Singularity because, well, it’s been a while and I enjoy writing about this.
I first fell upon this strange an enticing subject matter right here … In the faculty archives of the Department of Computer Science at San Diego State University. What was I doing there? Well, browsing of course, just looking for something interesting to read. Way back then, the Internet was quite a different creature…
And like probably thousands of other people, my first reaction was, “NASA knows about this? Holy cow!”
I used my fancy brand new state of the art ‘Ink Jet’ printer, printed out this incredible, incredible, piece of… revelation?.. and spent the next five hours, like a 13 year old boy with a new porno mag (I’m a girl by the way, I’m plugging in a simile here!), in bed, under my covers, reading the thing over and over again (back then, reading on a monitor was not the norm, plus you paid per minute to use the Internet, so you printed out lots of ‘pages’ otherwise your parents killed you!).
It made so much sense to me! It felt so right! I was younger back then, and much more impressionable, but to this day I’m happy at the gut feeling Vernor Vinge’s words generated, they brought me to this point in time. A quantum symmetry was broken when I found that text on the ‘Internet’. A path through time had been established that literally brought me from that moment in time to this one. With every seemingly random act from that prime instant, that teenaged Jamie Maxwell turned into me. And what a cool ride it’s been so far.
However, I have do admit that I’m very disappointed that more people don’t write about it; don’t incorporate the math into their fiction. Not really the Singularity (Poof! The digital messiah is here, yey, we’re saved! Or are we…?) per se, but the doubly exponentially increasing power and influence of technology. I get annoyed at little sci-fi things like… It’s the year 2250. Why are there still streetlights outside?
Now doesn't this look like a neural net to you? The more light, the more neural activity. Clusters of minds needing light to function at night...
The math indicates that Nanotech (or any other type of tech) dealing with visual perception will become advanced enough and cheap enough… or, on the other side of the quadrant, epigenetic manipulation through the use of cloud-controlled nanotech will become so advanced… That seeing in the dark will have become a non-issue long before 2250. (How silly is it to use 1/15 of all the world’s energy, every day, to simply light the United States at night?)
We’ll either activate some dormant gene from way back when… or we’ll make one… or the tech will do the work… But whatever happens, sooner or later, electric streetlights will go the way of torches and oil lamps. Through necessity, we modify the environment with technology, in response, the environment modifies us behaviorally, genetically, and psychologically: we become the singularity daily because we change our natural environment. Exponentially so over the last 20-30 years. So yeah, I like the ‘Next logical evolutionary step’ theory. Plus, we have an evolutionary imperative to tend towards Singularity: If we don’t, we’ll either destroy ourselves or our environment, both ways we follow the laws of natural selection: Adapt or Die.
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