The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (6 page)

Epoch Three: Brains.
Each epoch continues the evolution of information through a paradigm shift to a further level of “indirection.” (That is, evolution uses the results of one epoch to create the next.) For example, in the third epoch, DNA-guided evolution produced organisms that could detect information with their own sensory organs and process and store that information in their own brains and nervous systems. These were made possible by second-epoch mechanisms (DNA and epigenetic information of proteins and RNA fragments that control gene expression), which (indirectly) enabled and defined third-epoch information-processing mechanisms (the brains and nervous systems of organisms). The third epoch started with the ability of early animals to recognize patterns, which still accounts for the vast majority of the activity in our brains.
¹⁰
Ultimately, our own species evolved the ability to create abstract mental models of the world we experience and to contemplate the rational implications of these models. We have the ability to redesign the world in our own minds and to put these ideas into action.

Epoch Four: Technology.
Combining the endowment of rational and abstract thought with our opposable thumb, our species ushered in the fourth epoch and the next level of indirection: the evolution of human-created technology. This started out with simple mechanisms and developed into elaborate automata (automated mechanical machines). Ultimately, with sophisticated computational and communication devices, technology was itself capable of sensing, storing, and evaluating elaborate patterns of information. To compare the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year (see the next chapter). Of course, neither brain size nor computer capacity is the sole determinant of intelligence, but they do represent enabling factors.

If we place key milestones of both biological evolution and human technological development on a single graph plotting both the
x
-axis (number of
years ago) and the
y
-axis (the paradigm-shift time) on logarithmic scales, we find a reasonably straight line (continual acceleration), with biological evolution leading directly to human-directed development.
¹¹

Countdown to Singularity:
Biological evolution and human technology both show continual acceleration, indicated by the shorter time to the next event (two billion years from the origin of life to cells; fourteen years from the PC to the World Wide Web)
.

Linear view of evolution:
This version of the preceding figure uses the same data but with a linear scale for time before present instead of a logarithmic one. This shows the acceleration more dramatically, but details are not visible. From a linear perspective, most key events have just happened “recently.”

The above figures reflect my view of key developments in biological and technological history. Note, however, that the straight line, demonstrating the continual acceleration of evolution, does not depend on my particular selection of events. Many observers and reference books have compiled lists of important events in biological and technological evolution, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies. Despite the diversity of approaches, however, if we combine lists from a variety of sources (for example, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, the American Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagan’s “cosmic calendar,” and others), we observe the same obvious smooth acceleration. The following plot combines fifteen different lists of key events.
¹²
Since different thinkers assign different dates to the same event, and different lists include similar or overlapping events selected according to different criteria, we see an expected “thickening” of the trend line due to the “noisiness” (statistical variance) of this data. The overall trend, however, is very clear.

Fifteen views of evolution:
Major paradigm shifts in the history of the world, as seen by fifteen different lists of key events. There is a clear trend of smooth acceleration through biological and then technological evolution
.

Physicist and complexity theorist Theodore Modis analyzed these lists and determined twenty-eight clusters of events (which he called canonical milestones) by combining identical, similar, and/or related events from the different lists.
¹³
This process essentially removes the “noise” (for example, the variability of dates between lists) from the lists, revealing again the same progression:

Canonical milestones based on clusters of events from thirteen lists
.

The attributes that are growing exponentially in these charts are order and complexity, concepts we will explore in the next chapter. This acceleration matches our commonsense observations. A billion years ago, not much happened over the course of even one million years. But a quarter-million years ago epochal events such as the evolution of our species occurred in time frames of just one hundred thousand years. In technology, if we go back fifty thousand years, not much happened over a one-thousand-year period. But in the recent past, we see new paradigms, such as the World Wide Web, progress from inception to mass adoption (meaning that they are used by a quarter of the population in advanced countries) within only a decade.

Epoch Five: The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence.
Looking ahead several decades, the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch. It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. The fifth epoch will enable our human-machine civilization to transcend the human brain’s limitations of a mere hundred trillion extremely slow connections.
¹⁴

The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution. But the Singularity will also amplify the ability to act on our destructive inclinations, so its full story has not yet been written.

Epoch Six: The Universe Wakes Up.
I will discuss this topic in
chapter 6
, under the heading “. . . on the Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos.” In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation (based on limits we will discuss in
chapter 3
) to spread out from its origin on Earth.

We currently understand the speed of light as a bounding factor on the transfer of information. Circumventing this limit has to be regarded as highly speculative, but there are hints that this constraint may be able to be superseded.
¹⁵
If there are even subtle deviations, we will ultimately harness this superluminal ability. Whether our civilization infuses the rest of the universe with its creativity and intelligence quickly or slowly depends on its immutability. In any event the “dumb” matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence, which will constitute the sixth epoch in the evolution of patterns of information.

This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe.

The Singularity Is Near

You know, things are going to be really different! . . . No, no, I mean really different!

                   —M
ARK
M
ILLER (COMPUTER SCIENTIST) TO
E
RIC
D
REXLER, AROUND
1986

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities—on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work—the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our
heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. From the human point of view, this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.

                   —V
ERNOR
V
INGE
, “T
HE
T
ECHNOLOGICAL
S
INGULARITY
,” 1993

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.