A Public Service Announcement Regarding Singularity

"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. As used by Ray Kurzweil, the phrase refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030.  And when it happens you will get to live forever.  Well maybe not you, but some of us will.

Sounds nice, but here's what I think.

Kurzweil better be wrong about when singularity will begin, because the principal feature of this watershed moment is that it will be the moment where the current state of human ignorance will become forever fixed.

Let me explain.

Despite millennia of advances in thought and technical achievement, we humans still live in an era where people are largely ignorant. Prejudice and bias have probably not significantly diminished from what they were 500 years ago. Western Culture, for example, has transitioned from a world dominated largely by Christian religious prejudice against other religions, to a pastiche of other prejudices and biases (e.g. "indians or black people are inferior" or "our nation state is better than your nation state").

Prejudice is often fed by fear. And fear is a close friend of ignorance, which in turn causes people to act irrationally and to make rash evaluations of circumstance. Religion has, in the past, employed tactics of fear to discredit certain scientific discoveries that it deemed "heretical." Think Galileo.  Oh, the religious people nowadays have a nice explanation of the so-called Galileo Affair. Hey it's nice to hear from the Catholics that the Church's condemnation of "Galileo was certainly unjust" but it is also predictable to hear them say that the condemnation "in no way impugns the infallibility of Catholic Dogma." And what of the Spanish Inquisition? Also, apparently, an acceptable misunderstanding.  You know, "we can't help it when fear runs amok."

Yeah, right.

But it serves no good purpose to pick on the Catholic Church, which is just an institution--with all of the flaws that institutions always have. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not with our institutions but with ourselves.

We humans have had to learn, in our long and sometimes brutish existence, to gather food and to build communities so as to thrive despite the onslaughts of nature. Threat assessment has, therefore, long been a paramount skill requirement for us humans. Proper threat assessment means that fears are directed toward real threats, rather than wasting time and energy addressing false threats.  And so what about our threat assessment capabilities?

Well, we have, over the years, certainly identified a number of boogie-men.  And upon doing so we have managed to ward them off with some ritualistic chanting or what not.  Sadly, a lot of these boogie men turned out not to be real.  Time and energy were wasted.  Then came...science, which  is relatively new, and seems to have helped reduce the number of boogie-men. But has it made our threat assessment better?  Is it helping us manage our fears more productively?

Probably not as much as we'd like to think. 

Ask anyone who studies how humans evaluate risk and you'll learn that people tend to overestimate the risk of things that they don't control (i.e. crashing in a commercial airliner), especially if the tragedy is visually reinforced by television images of smoke and fire. Terrorist-created explosions also belong in the category of things that we humans, as a whole, overestimate the risk of.   On the other hand, mundane everyday activities like climbing a ladder or driving a car, which we do control, are far more risky than we acknowledge.

So if we aren't very good at evaluating threat in the ordinary, non-political and non-religious world, then how much better are we likely to be when we introduce social, political and theological passion into the equation?

Not very.  And boy is that obvious.

The bottom line is that we humans are very susceptible to having our fear lead us instead of our rationality. Perhaps that's because our "rationality" is a relatively new skill, and so when we encounter trouble or conflict our "instincts" lead us to use the more familiar skill, which is to assess threat based on "our beliefs" rather than a sober assessment of facts and measurable probabilities.  Maybe it's something else that keeps us from making intelligent decisions (even when we have sufficient information to do so).   Who knows? 

So Kurzweil says that Singularity is coming, does he?  Great.  I have one question, though.  Is Singularity going to purge us of our fears and irrational beliefs?  Is it going to make us more enlightened beings?

Unless technology is somehow going to make us better thinkers then we are going to carry into this brave (and sudden) new world our very strong tendency to be led by fear and dogmatic beliefs (a/k/a "bias and prejudice"). The only way we won't pollute this new "Singular World" with our pathetic cognitive weaknesses will be if only the "intellectually pure" are admitted. Or let's put it this way, you can't send a "representative cross-section" of our current world there, that's for sure.

So what Kurzweil is talking about is that "some chosen people" will make it to a bold new "paradise" and this going to happen very soon. Doesn't that sound a lot like religion and the promise of heaven or some second coming?

Nah.  It's about science, and what is probable.

Okay, next question: who decides who gets on the spaceship when it departs for the land of Singularity?

Well, I'm guessing here, but maybe Kurzweil thinks he is sufficiently pure--and free of prejudice and faulty thinking--so as to be a worthy candidate to make it to the new world.  And I'm sure he is.  After all he knows a lot of stuff and seems to be really smart.

I'd like to think that I'm sufficiently free of prejudice and bias and faulty thinking.  But really, in all honesty, I have to say that I hope the screening process will prevent me from boarding the spaceship. The sad truth is I'm flawed. I'm trying to be better and trying to not let passion rule my analysis, but frankly I'm not doing a very good job. And, even if I live to the year 2030, I don't think I'll be ready.

But my death is probably not such a bad thing for me. Or--more importantly-- for the world that will come after I die. Maybe that's the real purpose of death: to trim down the accumulated bias and prejudice of today's world, much in the same way that forest fires actually serve a beneficial purpose by denuding a forest.

So if you are thinking of joining "The Singularity," please stop. Not even you can prevent ignorance and prejudice, despite your best efforts.  And you certainly can't do it by the year 2030.  So do the responsible thing and die, so that the next generation can take over and challenge your faulty assumptions and beliefs. The human race is counting on you, so don't mess it up.  Please plan on dying at the appropriate time.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Last update: 6/5/2003; 10:08:56 PM.