Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs.

Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now Foundation at the Fort Mason Center. We had planned a quiet evening at home, watching Brian DePalma and Robert Altman, but Bruce gives great lectures, and after his recent talk at Microsoft I didn’t want to miss what could be a great talk. Thanks Cyn.

The talk can be found as an audio stream in Ogg and MP3.

Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation introduced Sterling. The topic was The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. Brand observes are discontinuities are potholes for group that’s planning for the next 10,000 years of human history.

The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!

Sterling starts with two definitions of The Singularity:

• Von Neumann to Ulam:

An unpublished speculation on the condition where the rate of change exceeds human control and comprehension.

• Vernor Vinge, a professor of mathematics in San Diego

The 1993 paper on the singularity is the cannonical defintion.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Fred Moulton reminds me that there’s been some philosophical papers in the past few years questioning if an emergent AI would decide to murder us all. Sterling didn’t mention these in his presentation.

However, Sterling’s not impressed with AI’s track record so far. He is not convinced that we’ll see ‘emergent’ AI.

He detours before heading to his next topic and discusses how the idea of the ‘singularity’ is a hard for SF writers to grapple. The technological singularity is impossible to communicate across, and thus the first way to read the title of his talk.

Dismissing Vinge

Sterling then puts up one of Vinge’s slides from his stump speech on the singularity. I can’t find these on Google or on Vinge’s site at San Diego State.

The slides are trend lines for computational power of machines compared to biological entities. A late 1990′s Mac is akin to a nematode. But while the Vax is a museum piece, the bacterium it supposedly superannuates still thrives.

He also has questions about Vinge’s definitions. Vinge talks about machines becoming self-aware, or ‘waking up.’ Biology does not, as of 2004, have a answer to what self-awareness is, so we cannot say if networked computers, ants, or a forest can or will have ‘woken up’.

There’s the matter of enhancing human intelligence, and Sterling’s open to that as being plausible. He then lays out alternatives to being super-smart. For example the psychologist Howard Gardner suggests we have multiple intelligences: cognition, emotional, physical, etc.

So instead of becoming some sort of human computing machine as the Mentats in Dune, enhancements might make us more able to be mindful, empathic, and realize what horribly rude people we are. One would hope they have good Prozac after that singularity.

Previous Singularities

Sterling lists three events that have singularity nature:

1. The Atomic Bomb
2. LSD
3. Computer Viruses

All three have changed the world, but only briefly.

Obsolescese and the Singularity

Sterling suggests the future will be a glut of undigested technical riches.

He continues with a new slide, Gartner Research’s Hype Cycle, a five-phase life-cycle of technology adoption. How ‘grown ups’ think about technology.

Of course, he adds, Gartner won’t tell you your business is dead as long as you have a budget for consultants.

The ‘S’ or logistic curve was the earlier form of Gartner’s hype cycle.

Returning to obsolescence, he asks the audience if we’d bother to pick up a copy of Windows 3.0 we found at the curb.

“The street didn’t pick up on the singularity.”

“There aren’t factions in the singularity movement.”

“The singularity has no end users.”

Schools of Thought

• Just No Way
• Superbian Transhumans
• Rapture of the Nerds
• Apocalypse

Judith Berman

• Singularity Resisters

Bill Joy

Science Fiction and Singularity

It’s a great way to make plot, “we had a singularity blow through”.

Ken McLeod’s Engines of Light novels, The Stone Canal, and The Sky Road are all about people living in the ruins of singularities.

We May be on the Edge of Nothing Important.

But we may be edging towards something important.

Like virus writers, the infrastructure of the singularity makers are well-contained. If you lock-up, bomb them, or take away their funding, they go away long before they produce anything self-sustaining.

There’s a large following for the singularity, but that crowd does not actively try to bring it about. This is the “geek rapture” crowd for whom Vinge is the equivalent of Left Behind.

They don’t imagine that a singularity could be monopolized, like the Biblical Fundamentalist version, or that it may be short lived: “And you have burned so brightly Roy.”

Science doesn’t reward thinking through consequences. We reward scary science that gives us things like hydrogen bombs, even the moral titans of science: Einstein, and Sakorov did their heavy lifting in the WMD area.

Containment

He suggests commercialization and broad patenting might stop a future singularity, but technologies with the biggest threat potential may pay off well in the market.

He suggests that two NGO superpowers may emerge who will attempt to marginalize the “kooks” on either side.

The conservative/religous opposition to stem-cell research may be an example of one of these new ‘superpowers’. The President’s Council on Bioethics’ report Reproduction and Responsiblity, talks about a biological singularity and opposes it.

Then there’s force. Sterling asks why wouldn’t a government ready to wage endless war on terrorism declare endless war on the singularity. The ‘nowhere to hide’ rhetoric of President Bush may extend from caves in Afghanistan to labs in China.

At this point, I must give a shout out to the Global Frequency, the sort of NGO one might want to have in this circumstance.

What Can We Say, Pace the Singularity

1. Posthuman is a soundbite.
2. Not just one singularity.
3. The posthuman condition is banal from a post human’s point of view.
4. Messy, embarassing, reversible singularites are preferable to the alternative.
5. It’s hard to be just a little bit dead.

Going back to Judith Berman, Sterling closes with the observation that the most adept political actors in the world right now are people who blow themselves up.

To get past that, we must go back to treating the future as process and not a destination.

And given that Clear Channel’s given plenty to the Bushies, it’s not a stretch to see the GOP actually give them the station.

New York, Michigan and other states prohibited shipments to individual buyers from out of state wineries.

The liquor wholesalers arrangements grew out of the post-Prohibition environment. Laws which were enacted out of a sense of morality (booze is a social ill and must be regulated) were hindering the development of new markets (small wineries who could leverage the internet to sell directly to retailers and wine fans).

The good news is that the courts are reconsidering these laws, that make a distributorship a plum franchise.

16 May 2005: the US Supreme Court struck down the laws banning interstate wine shipments to Michigan and New York.

These legislative initiatives aren’t just about copyright. They’re about building a regime that’s hostile to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers. That’s because their real fear isn’t copied Britney Spears CDs — it’s that people will abandon the crap they’re selling for works by independent artists, and cut out the middlemen.

[emphasis in original]

Glenn blames the Democrats, but I’m certain if the Democrats developed morals, and turned down Big Content’s money, then the bills would have Republican sponsors.

Still waiting for the Libertarians to learn that one dollar = one vote is a bad thing.

• Microsoft and Palladium (sorry, you can only send mail with a M$-signed ID to a party with a M$-signed ID)
• Ashcroft (“let me see every email signed by X”)
• The Copyright Cartel (“by buying this download, you give us the right to sell your email address to whomever we damn well want to, and if you refuse delivery, we’ll revoke the keys to your Celine Dion albums”)

We have a Constiutional right to anonymous communication, and even the Conservatives on the Supreme Court agree with this. Spam should be fought defensively with filters, and offensively by criminal prosecutions of people who exploit open relays.

This will especially teach people not to listen to unauthorized copies of music while driving.

Gordon’s joke is explored in Karl Schroeder’s novel Permanence.

Eugen Leitl adds:

“… lowering the threshold for the cranial explosive trigger in your GuardHelmet(TM) for copyright violation will result in big saving on LEOs while simultaneously addressing the overpopulation problem in unit 589. I think you’ll be thrilled to learn that the next scheduled firmware reflash (broadcast at +5 ksec) enhancing EEG DSP and disruptive TMS will also effectively squash on the residual thoughtcrime issue recently brought to our attention…” — a Ministry of Truth Announcement scrolling over your headup display

L. Timmel Duchamp had a story in Asimov’s a couple of years back where most people had to be plugged into a virtual world, and reality was only for the wealthy. Imagine how Rights Owners could really go to town in that scenario. Hell isn’t the absence of G-D, it’s being forced to see pop-up ads everywhere you go.

Obligatory bitch-slap of Celene Dion goes here.

My belief is that there is a central motivation in the Bush Cabinet. It doesn’t get much press play, but this is the enlightening, analytical key to most of the vagaries of their behavior. The key is that the Bush Cabinet does not want to get killed.

…

This is what the Cheney “undisclosed location” business is all about. This is what the Cheney “secret government” is all about. I don’t know where all those midranking officials are going, with their toothbrushes and their pyjamas, but I can promise you one thing: it’s out of nuclear blast range of downtown Washington DC.

Anyone who’d put Alan Greenspan in drag on his WebLog is possessed of a wicked imagination. Let us continue to hope he only uses his powers for good.

People in the audience started laughing, until they realized that Tom was Not Being Funny At All. He was chosen to frankly address the post-Sept. 11 whither-the-Oscars conundrum head-on. “Should we celebrate the magic the movies bring? Now?” Tom asked, his eyes boring into the eyes of the TV multitudes and implanting rays of total domination. “Dare I say it?” He flashed a smirk with his robotically flawless teeth. “More than EVER,” he hissed, laying on his most Extreme Scientological Unction. He had been commanded by the Elders to Obi-Wan-Kenobi-ize the audience into rebelieving in the importance of the obscenely superfluous Oscars. Tom Cruise is becoming the Scary Flaming Eye from “The Lord of the Rings,” and I fear that nobody can stop him.

Wilson’s spot on. Hollywood’s become Mordor, dispatching Black Riders in the guise of lawyers and lobbyists to liquidate anyone denouncing Scientology, routing around the charred waste of commercial radio, or refusing to bow down before the beautiful and terrible Goddess of the Trailer Park.

I skipped watching the show, why should I give tacit support to an industry who’s current stated goal is to become a government sanctioned monopoly with police powers, and whose leaders consider every Citizen with a turing machine to be a terrorist?

We remember the days, not long ago, when our users were stupid. They thought they were giving money to the artists. We want them to be stupid again.