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ernor Vinge, in 1993, predicted:
“Within
thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman
intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
That is
a very provocative prediction! Might it
be accurate? Will we wake up one morning
to find that computers have taken control?
Will we suddenly find ourselves overtaken by a technological
singularity? Or is this all merely
scare-mongering?
What is
a technological singularity?
To answer
that, we must consider that all the previous phases of social change have been
gradual. Nothing happened overnight. Centuries of overlap occurred as one phase
slowly ended while another slowly began.
Today, however, change has come more swiftly with each passing
year. Sudden and dramatic changes could
well occur, and take us all by surprise. Things could quickly get out of control, and
there might be no way to reverse course.
Technology
is not only advancing rapidly, its speed is increasing. It is already foreseeable that very soon,
automobiles will not be driven by humans, but by autopilot. Some already can
be. Factories will run on their
own. Some already do. Aircraft will fly military missions without a
human pilot on board. This futuristic development
has already occurred, and all this is just the beginning.
Much of
the technological advance is driven by computer technology, a technology that
is increasingly becoming a mystery to more and more people. How many times have you heard a phrase something
like this: we cannot do anything about
this problem, it’s under computer control?
As of this
writing, most of the actual decision-making rests in the hands of humans. We
can override a computer decision. But as technology becomes ever more complicated,
it is inevitable that more and more decision-making will be turned over to
computers. Humans will no longer be able to handle the information overload
associated with such decision-making. We
cannot react quickly enough in emergency situations. We already depend on computers to do that for
us.
One
example is that computers on aircraft often handle more than a dozen decisions
per second, continuously over long periods of time. No human pilot could do such a thing, and
certainly not without making critical errors.
We have no choice but to hand such tasks over to computers.
It is
by no means far-fetched to predict that children now already alive will live
out their lives in a social infrastructure that is completely operated by
computers, in a system that we can no more understand than we can fathom our
present tax code. Children born today
might never need to learn to drive, because automobiles may have become
self-driving in the near future.
It also
is already a fact that computers are designed largely by other computers. It
has been suggested that this might result in ever faster advances in computers,
until finally, the advances are so fast that no human can understand or control
them. This might result in a sudden
event in which we will awaken one morning to discover that computers have
(whether literally or figuratively), taken over society.
This predicted,
sudden, transformative event is called by the name, “Technological Singularity.” Remember that in an earlier chapter,
we addressed the concept of a singularity as being one in which none of the
familiar rules apply anymore. If we find
ourselves in a technological singularity, all the rules may have changed, and
we might become helpless to understand those rules.
We
cannot hope to be able to predict what will happen when and if we suddenly
reach the predicted technological singularity.
According to some people, the computers may destroy us.[1] According to others, the computers will treat
us like pets, or like cattle grazing in the field. And according to still others, we will
implant computer chips into our own brains, making of ourselves the very
computers that we ourselves invented.
None of
those scenarios is particularly pleasing.
As
humans, we have a need to be free, to exercise our intellect, and to make our
own decisions. We can do that, but only as
beings that are as much of spirit as we are of substance.
Society
has developed an explosion of knowledge.[2] But can we match that knowledge with an equal advance in wisdom?
In the preceding
chapter, the question was raised, how long can a civilization last once it has
developed advanced technology? How far
advanced can technology get before we destroy ourselves with it? Is this an empty question, or is it like so
many other seemingly exotic subjects, founded in a principle of nature? (See the chapter on Penrose tiling.) Fractal geometry was once considered a mere
idle amusement until it was found to have practical applications in science and
engineering.
One
can, without exhaustive effort, devise a general framework for the calculation
of an inevitable doomsday for a technological society. Doomsday might mean total destruction, but it
might instead mean total transformation, from say a technological society to
something else.
. . . a computer chip implanted in the brain can
provide enormous benefits to individuals and their society. But it could also render humans more
dependent on a centralized control and command office which, in the wrong
hands, could make slaves of everyone with the chip. And when has technology not
eventually fallen into the wrong hands?
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