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January 23, 2007
Have singularities happened before?
A great interview with Joe Quirk, evolutionary psychologist and singularity theorist is over at 10 zen monkeys. The technological singularity is a theoretical point (or more accurately a brief interval) where changes in our lives from technologically become so vast that we cannot imagine what life will be like afterwards, much as you cannot observe what happens on the other side of a black hole (another singularity).
It raises all sorts of issues I've never considered before, including whether singularities have happened before.
RU: So what do you really think? Are you fundamentally a believer in “The Singularity” or are you a skeptic?JQ: I'm a scared skeptic and a hopeful skeptic. Most people who hear about it think it's whacko, so I find myself defending it more often than criticizing it. And I think Kurzweil's actual arguments in his two most important books are more compelling than the counter-argument from Incredulity, which is just a knee-jerk reaction -- "C'mon, this is Rapture for the geeks." Every group makes up some kind of mythos, and this is a mythos for the geeks. I keep thinking of other examples of Singularities. I've never heard anyone talk about the Singularity that's already happened. Let's see if you guys can point it out.
RU: Language?
JQ: That's one, but I've never heard anyone talk about the Singularity of techneme -- the singularity of tools. Imagine a Homo habilis playing with his stone axe, and his buddy says to him, "Grok! These stone axes are not going to change for millions of years, because we're on the flat part of an exponential curve. But this has an abstract design within it, which means it contains information that can be passed down through the generations. And in another 3 million years, we're going to have a feedback loop of information, and pretty soon our tools are going to cover the world; they're going to be on our bodies; and we're going to go from a few thousand of us to a few billion of us. Everything we touch will be a tool. Our tool designs are going to inhabit matter and build our dreams around us. Everything we look at is going to be a manifestation, an embodiment of an idea."
Posted by OneEyedMan at January 23, 2007 2:54 PM
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