The Poo-Pooing of the Singularity

Dean is most impressed with Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near. Being a journeyman futurist, I have been a big Ray Kurzweil fan for a long time. But The Singularity Is Near is the type of book that transcends the futurist/nerdy niche. And Dean is right on point with these words:

I’m continually amused by how many people I encounter who think Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the approaching human singularity as some sort of Rapture for Nerds. This is ridiculous, and is almst entirely coming from people who haven’t read the book and have decided they know what’s in it and what it says and that it’s a bunch of nonsense.

How do you even have a discussion with such people? What it amounts to is, they don’t like the word. Plus, they want very badly to dismiss the ideas behind it.

But consider: it took over a decade to run the sequence for one of the simplest viruses on the planet, HIV, which is only three genes long, two incredibly short chromosomes. When the Human Genome project started, it was greeted with skepticism; yet the dozens of chromosomes and tens of thousands of genes took less time to sequence than HIV did, and was completed ahead of schedule. Now we routinely run genome mappings in periods measured in months.

That’s the power of exponential growth, and that’s what’s at the core of Kurzweil’s analysis. These exponential growth curves in computing technology, artificial intelligence software, nanotechnology, and biotechnology are going to completely change what it means to be human in a very short time period.

Welcome to the that’s all techno mumbo-jumbo club, Dean. It’s a club where even the most intelligent, astute, and observant of ideas are kept behind wraps because it sounds too weird, too supernatural, and too crazy. Usually the people that say things like that give you the ol’ we’ll be using gasoline forever speech (which includes much more than gasoline as its subject) and go all French (apologizes to my French friends) on you with a dismissive poo-poo. That sort of thinking is so tired. Once again, they told Thomas Edison he was crazy about the light bulb and look at us now: literally absorbing light bulbs. It goes without saying that reading is fundamental. Read, absorb, and try to understand THEN come talk to me. Examples of a burgeoning technological and biological singularity is all around us. Remember when there was no Internet? Not that long ago. Remember when cable boxes were clunky things with a hard to turn nob in order to change channels? Those are minor examples and look how far we’ve come.

Sometimes the truth is staring you in the face. If your not going to grasp and accept the truth, no matter. The truth has a way of making you do things. As jazz great Donald Byrd said in one of his songs:

Change! Makes you want to hustle.

[zing! to Dean Esmay]

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