THE pattern, really.
My eyes have been recently opened, and I have a new religion, and a new bible. The religion is technology, and the bible is Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”.
If you plot on a logarithmic scale every major event in the human history of the universe, from the big bang through the cell phone, you get a straight line that will hit the X-axis within the next 20-50 years. That’s the Singularity.
The Singularity, like any great religious event, will change everything. This is the point at which technology, the driving force behind the evolution of life (having supplanted darwinian evolution, Kurzweil argues, by nature of the rapidity of the changes affected by it), takes in hand its own betterment. Up to that point, humanity, a wondrous accomplishment in and of itself, will have been the inventor and improver of tools and technology. From then on, the technology will improve itself. And this isn’t Terminator 2. This is our best chance at heaven on earth.
Transportation and communication will change utterly. All information ever collected will be instantly and appropriately available. Your computer will be in your shirt, your monitor in your glasses or tied directly to the visual centers of your brain. Foglets, flying nanobots far too small to see individually, will be able to gather and form solid matter in an instant, making the holodeck a reality or giving your computer, which will now be more than a stupid machine, an avatar in your world. If the speed of light can be bypassed, we’ll bypass it (or change it, also a possibility). And best of all, death will be truly optional. Nanobots will crawl through your body and fix whatever ails you. The human brain will be deciphered, and we’ll be able to rebuild it. All ailments will be optional. You’ll be able to download yourself, change bodies, know everything.
It seems impossible, but when you consider the rate at which technology is improving, it’s really inevitable. Fifteen years ago, most people had never even heard of the internet, and now look at what it can do and how it’s used. Look at email, and how it’s changed every facet of communal life. The price-performance rate of computers is doubling every year, allowing us to work exponentially faster (A $1,000 computer that took ten seconds to solve a certain kind of problem in the year 1998 is now a thousand times faster and can now solve 100 of those problems every second).
The visual centers of the human brain have been reverse-engineered, as have the aural centers. The human genome has been decoded, far more quickly than anyone would have thought possible. We’re at the elbow of a curve that’s about to shoot nearly straight up. Technological improvements that at the turn of the 20th century took years now take days. The wheel took tens of thousands of years to be adopted by the majority of humanity. Cell phones have taken ten years.
I’d been looking for something like this for a while. As many of you six or seven readers know, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the possibility of the improvement of the general human condition. I figured that the understanding of our own mortality was damning for humanity, that the fear of our imminent demise drove us to evil behavior and religion (not mutually exclusive, certainly). I was thinking of writing a play called The Big Jump, in which I would imagine a future where humanity was about to accept a new paradigm and overhaul its concept of humanity, which was the only way I could see the world becoming a better place.
And then I found this book, and it ties together both my hope for a better future, my religion (derived from Babylon 5’s Minbaris – that every living thing is an extension of the universe in an attempt to understand itself), and my sense that music and math and physics and art and love are all somehow the same thing. I’ve always wanted to learn more about the GUT, the grand unified theory, the theory of everything, the equation that solves every single question you might have. Now I find that the universe wants the same thing.
The key to getting technology to the Singularity is patterns. As fast as computers can calculate, as perfectly as their memory stores information, computers can’t recognize patterns very well. Only we humans can do that, still. And our understanding of patterns, our ability to read and decode them, will make the next evolutionary step towards that GUT possible. What’s fueling the current technological revolution is the fact that everything can be simplified. The wondrous complexity that is a human comes from a few simple instructions coded into our DNA, which is comprised of just a few simple building blocks.
Everything is reducable to something simpler and more fundamental. I suspect we’ll find that that simplest piece, the GUT, the foundation of stars, humans, light, and void, is God.
And when we find God, I suspect that will complete a cycle, and that the game of hide and seek will start again.
“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes” – Edsger Dijkstra
