In 1993, Vernor Vinge wrote about a concept he called the `Singularity'. His thesis was simple and startling:
He argues that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. because of the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
Two major avenues lead to superhuman intellect:
Vinge argues also that
I would believe Vinge's argument, except that a similar extrapolation that I calculated in the late 1950s did not occur. At that time, I extrapolated the rate of increase of human travel speed: over the past few millennia, it increased dramatically and exponentially, from running, to horses, to railroad trains, to airplanes, to rockets ....
A straightforward extrapolation had humans reaching speeds that would enable them to explore Uranus and Neptune in the 1970s (probably by using nuclear thermal rocket engines). My extrapolation held for a decade: men went to the moon. Then humans stopped going faster.
That experience made me realize that Vinge's Singularity is a millennial religious concept in modern garb.
Suppose in years past that you thought the Second Coming was real and would be soon. You would have had the same belief, that human history is coming to an end. Nowadays, many people will remind you that the belief that many held a millennium ago proved false. Human history did not end a thousand years ago. The Second Coming did not occur.
Vinge brought the notion up to date. He makes extrapolations of a kind that many contemporary people expect: that we shall see advances in computing and in people that lead to dramatic changes. Moreover, he puts the event itself far enough off — a generation or so in the future — so that immediate feedback is lacking. But he did not put it so far in the future that people cannot dream of it for themselves.
Vinge does have a powerful argument going for him: that contemporary communications are better than those from a thousand years ago. In those days, outside of basic observations and mathematics, transcultural communication was more or less unknown.
People with fundamentally different beliefs tried to persuade another by appealing to cultural understandings which were not shared and to authorities which also were not shared. You could not persuade someone who started his or her calendar on a different date that the end of the world would come at the beginning of 1000 Anno Domini.
The contemporary means of communicating knowledge strives to generate an internal experience of some sort within the listener, either by replicating the reasoning, as in a mathematical proof, or by replicating the observation, as in astronomy, or by replicating the experiment, as in physics. This is scientific communication. The method is strong, since an internal experience is undeniable.
The advantage of scientific communication as a method of persuasion is that it is robust. If you have a good reputation, many will simply accept your assertion. Indeed, people almost always depend on others when forming their opinions. But sometimes the other person thinks you are wrong and will not listen. This is why appeals fail; they go to an unshared culture or an unshared authority.
But young people are different. Some of them may refuse to listen to their elders. They are the ones whom you may reach if you provide them with an appropriate internal experience.
Vinge faces the disadvantage of arguing for the the likelihood of a one-time-only event. However, in his attempt to provide a convincing internal experience to his readers, he is using arguments that belong to no single culture, but are persuasive in all.
Unfortunately, my late 1950s argument for increased speed was similar: you, too, can look up the speeds of people running, riding horses, trains, and airplanes. You, too, can make the extrapolation.
While scientific communication is robust, the content conveyed is not always true.
I rather hope Vinge's Singularity does occur. But I fear that we shall see a slow down or stop in advances in `artificial intelligence' and `intelligence augmentation' that parallels the stop in human speed that we saw after the Apollo flights.
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