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I’ll be introducing Ray and his forthcoming book at SDForum. You can also catch him and other Singularitarians (Vernor Vinge, John Smart) at ACC 2005 this weekend at Stanford. I’ll also be brainstorming about Open Genes, Memes and Dreams.

Ideas and suggested questions for Ray are welcome!

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”
– Marshall McLuhan

Related Blog musings on Nested Evolutionary Dynamics, Accelerating Change & Societal Shock, Genetic Free Speech, Evolving Friendly AI with commentary from Drexler, Rosedale and Yudkowsky, and Supra-Human Emergence.

Some quotes from the SIN galley print:

“it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world”

“Each epoch continues the evolution of information through a paradigm shift to a further level of ‘indirection.’ (That is, evolution uses the results of one epoch to create the next.)”

“future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection. Most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological. By the end of this century, it will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than human intelligence”

“fulfilling the wishes of a revered biological legacy will occupy only a trivial portion of the intellectual power that the Singularity will bring.”

“you will know the singularity is coming when you have a million emails in your in-box”

45 responses to “Symbolic Immortality”

  1. nardell Avatar
    nardell

    steve, you always give me something new to think about from that amazing world of yours. i have never heard the term "singularity", but something tells me i will someday. 🙂
    thanks for your most interesting photos and ideas!

    Reply
  2. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    we had a festival in Glasgow last year, tentatively exploring certain issues at the junction between art and technology – Machinista – at one of the forums on AI and emergence, a fairly young student spoke up and dropped the "singularity" bomb (many hearing this for the first time) on all present in the lecture theatre…. and we all left about 1/2 an inch shorter with baggy trousers….

    thanks for reminding me about this. let’s hope i can come up with a half-intelligent question you can put to Ray! out of interest, have you heard of Erkki Kurenniemi?

    Reply
  3. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    ps: that hand cannot be real….

    Reply
  4. RogueAI Avatar
    RogueAI

    The link to the Evolving Friendly AI post is incorrect…

    Reply
  5. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    Is that a temporary tattoo or a skin-implanted NASA RFID? 😉

    For anyone interested, Ray Kurzweil is also giving a talk this Friday at the Herbst Theater in SF, as part of Long Now’s Seminars on Long Term Thinking ($10 suggested donation, not required).

    (Bruce Sterling also gave an interesting overview of his thoughts on Vinge and the singularity last year at the Long Now – available as a free MP3 here.)

    Reply
  6. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    thnaks.

    RogueAI: very topical user name for this thread…. And to think that you found the bad link to friendly AI…! =) fixed now.

    biotron: No, tell me about Erkki Kurenniemi. The hand is not mine, but it is very real. The photo is undoctored if that’s what you mean…

    complexify: sounds like Ray is packing in a West Coast tour.

    hmm. biotron, complexify, rogueAI… nice names.

    Reply
  7. flawless chin Avatar
    flawless chin

    I’m looking forward to Kurzweil’s new book and have been interested in posthumanity for many years. Why did I ever get rid of my PowerGlove???

    In The Future We Will All Be Robots

    Reply
  8. Gwênlyn Avatar
    Gwênlyn

    when you have a million emails in your in-box

    …you will have reached the spamgularity.

    Reply
  9. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    apologies to the owner of the hand, then! how rude of me – i think i was led astray by the topic of the book, and the spongey, muppet-like consistency the hand appeared to have…. i’d better apologise again! 🙂

    @complexify: great download link, thanks!

    @gustavo: heh heh! i’m there already with one of my hotmail accounts 😉

    Reply
  10. benjiman Avatar
    benjiman

    …Just ask him when I can just start stuffing the metadata right into my head.

    Ray, please hurry! |)

    Reply
  11. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    Talking about Accelerating Change (happenning these days, right?), Singularity and Kurzweil… I need to know something, given that I have been told by our friend Tyler ( http://www.singinst.org -fyi to the people here interested in singularity-) that there is no one that can explain better the exponential growth like you, Steve.

    [sidenote]Among other critical data I got to know from Tyler as well. Thx Ty. =)
    [/sidenote]

    Ok, my question to you, Jurv is (and pardon my ignorance on the subject): Given the acceleration of change and technological innovation as it is depicted with the exponential function, shouldn´t it lead to an impossible time, or a time crash in some near future?

    This is: (a complete imaginative example) techno breakthroughs happenned every 500 years 1000 years ago, then every 50 years 100 ago, every 5 years 10 ago… how do this continue? every 5 months per year? every 5 days per 10 months? every 5 minutes per 10 days?… This is a reductio ad absurdum to me, that may lead as I say to an unavoidable time crash. Surely there is a logical way to avoid following this linear thinking I am expressing here…

    Could you help me? Thx.

    Reply
  12. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    Alieness: I like your "time crash" term. 😉 I think what you’re wrestling with is what’s at the heart of the singularity concept. Notice how quickly things begin change as you approach the singularity (time is on the horizontal axis):

    (graph taken from http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/)

    Reply
  13. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    timecrash-timecrash-timecrash… say it again: timecrash. For you, complexi. =P

    Hey geez, THX YOU for this answer and the graphic. It´s pretty clear, I guess. I admit I have not read enough yet (in depth) about these concepts, eventhough my concern is one same. I´d like to feed my mind openly with the most vast group of theories about the future. About what is ahead of us we don´t know, so no idea about it should be dismissed or put aside. Example: Couple of years before the invention of the Telephone and its massification, people weren´t able to predict such future from their current reality. Maybe some could, tho. Those surely kept an enough open mind to conceive such posible shift. What do you think? 🙂

    [sidenote] How great that the place that talks about singularity is called "Aleph".[/sidenote]

    Reply
  14. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    Me again. *Thinking* 0-)

    Errr… another question: If I am understanding right, isn´t the singularity concept foreseeing an eventual ‘materialization’ (a paradox that I use this word for this purpose) of the E=MC2 ?

    Reply
  15. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    Hi Alieness! An interesting thought, although I doubt humanity could survive to see such a "materialization," or perhaps it’d be more proper to call it an "energizing?" 😉 In any case, there’s definitely complexification going on in this crazy world of ours… 🙂

    Reply
  16. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    ah, yes, the complexification of it all, due of the energizing of the future is a ‘matter of fact’… +)

    You know, Complexy, I always enjoy these conversations. Maybe because you are good to me and answer my questions, so I learn a lot. =)

    For me, Jurv is listening to us bewildered and taking note. |-) Or is it just some kind of dialectic teaching method you are practicing here? Trying to make us find the answer by ourselves? Or are you just offline? Steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeve!!! >0(

    Reply
  17. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    Alieness: Thanks, I enjoy talking about these things too. 🙂 I appreciate the energy you put into replying (as a matter of fact) at the speed of light^2. 🙂

    Reply
  18. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    biotron: no problem…. muppet hands are child-like…

    Alieness: heh. Tipler. Omega Point. Subjective time is clocked by salient events. out.

    Reply
  19. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    tipler, tipler… is that an adverb or an adjective? +)

    K, k, k… you sound re-busy… I´d better go google "tipler omega point" and see what happens. Gracias.

    Bye-Zzzzzzz

    Reply
  20. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    UPDATE. 1: Tipler. Omega Point. I found it quite confusing. Not that I didn´t understand, that he has confused a lot of ideas mixing them up more than interelating them. (IMHO)

    MMMMMMMMMM. :-S

    UPDATE 2: THANK YOU. You finally helped me put things together in my brain to start working on a serious writing, putting down in paper what I have in mind. Which now has form. =)

    Reply
  21. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    While we’re on the subject of singularities, here’s a recent quote from Kevin Kelly (and Kurzweil agrees with him, according to Stewart Brand):

    "My current understanding of singularities (the cultural kind) is that they are completely imperceptible from WITHIN the transition, because a singularity is primarily a movement to another level, a level which by definition is incapable of being represented by the lower level (just as the mind arises from neurons). Thus a singularity is only visible from the perch of the new level — after arrival there. From within our emerging global cultural, the coming singularity is real, but it will be imperceptible to us during the transition. Sure, things will speed up, but that will only hide the real change, which is a change in the rules of the game, as the next level of organization and being kick in, levels that we are incapable of perceiving now because the level of their perception has not yet happened."

    So perhaps we’re already here? 😉

    Reply
  22. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    Yes, I think so. At least, the small part fo the world which is already talking about this, is immersed in the change. The other 5.8 billion people, I don´t know. :-S

    Anyway, I liked that quote a lot, complexy! And reinforces so much the idea I want to base my writings on. Super! thx!

    Reply
  23. agdam Avatar
    agdam

    I really love the craze about complexity, or chaos and exponentials. Admittedly, I love them “philosophically” (sorry for abusing the term) as a way to consider human knowledge.

    Both chaos and exponentiality need infinity: chaos dies in finite systems, exponential growth quickly chokes in any measurable universe. Both can be nicely plotted on a bifurcation tree. Both produce stunning pictures and astounding implications.

    Yet, infinity means that the implications are no more significant today than they were millennia ago. They simply became noticeable to a regular human being.

    Remember chaos’s fractals? No matter how closely you zoom in, you get the same picture. It’s just that the total number of visible pixels multiplies (exponentially!) Things don’t get simpler with magnification. Complexity!

    Bifurcating from a single “natural philosophy” into gazillions of science branches, we’ve zoomed in closely enough for technological change to become noticeable within a human’s lifespan. We’ve realized that we progress exponentially! Cool… but, memento infinity.

    Endlessness is a powerful epitome. It’s humbling – we are no closer to the “destination” than our remotest ancestors have been. It’s cheering – we are no further from it than our distant offsprings will ever be.

    All in all, it gives us a direction: vector of exponentially higher complexity which happened to coincide with what we see as exponentially higher returns.

    The disturbing thing is that the fractals’ pattern endlessly repeats itself at every level. Don’t our mistakes?

    I love this stuff…

    Reply
  24. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    agdam, welcome. =D

    Reply
  25. agdam Avatar
    agdam

    Thank you…

    Reply
  26. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    hands across the equator =)

    Reply
  27. benjiman Avatar
    benjiman

    This thread just keeps on giving!

    I’m struck by the comments from several folks about being able to sense and perceive the transitions…

    It feels analogous to 2D/3D/4D spaces, where its incredibly difficult for the lessor dimensions to imagine the greater, yet incredibly easy for the greater dimensions to understand and build constructs describing the lessor.

    Reply
  28. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Very topical to Kevin Kelly’s blog about Kurzweil (and his replies in the comments):

    "I think that technological transitions represented by the singularity are completely imperceptible from WITHIN the transition that is represented (inaccurately) by a singularity. A phase shift from one level to the next level is only visible from the perch of the new level — after arrival there. Compared to a neuron the mind is a singularity — it is invisible and unimaginable to the lower parts. But from the viewpoint of a neuron the movement from a few neurons to many neurons to alert mind will appear to be a slow continuous smooth journey of gathering neurons. There is no sense of disruption, of Rapture. The discontinuity can only be seen in retrospect….

    In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that "the singularity is near." Immortal beings and global consciousness and everything else we hope for in the future may be real and present but still, a linear-log curve in 3006 will show that a singularity approaches. The singularity is not a discreet event. It’s a continuum woven into the very warp of extropic systems. It is a traveling mirage that moves along with us, as life and the technium accelerate their evolution."

    I had blogged about a similar question, will we comprehend supra-human emergence? Does the minimally-sufficient critical mass of nodes needed to generate emergent behavior necessitate a certain incomprehensibility of the emergent properties by the nodal members?

    I’ll take notes at the Cognitive Computing event tomorrow at IBM Almaden… and the Singularity Summit on Saturday (free at Stanford, fyi).

    Reply
  29. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    Steve: Thanks for pointing out Kevin Kelly’s Technium posts. It’s almost identical to what he wrote last year (quoted in my post above), but I noticed that he’s now longer talking specifically about "cultural" singularities.

    I love Esthr’s quote that we experience a singularity each day: "It’s called waking up. Looking backwards, you can understand what happens, but in your dreams you are unaware that you could become awake…."

    Enjoy the weekend. I’m looking forward to your notes from Almaden and Stanford.

    Altruistic Ventures: I just read your reply. Thanks. I wish I could take credit for that "current understanding," but those were Kevin Kelly’s words.

    However, whether or not "we" understand the singularity, we have to remember that we’re in a tiny minority. I’m guessing that few Americans would list the singularity as among their biggest concerns (or else politicians would be making noise about doing something about it.) 😉

    Reply
  30. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    oh… I´ll be back here in a while.

    I think I oughtta share something which has helped me connect these two aspects (understanding the Singularity -coming- for a side, while not being able of understanding it -self-).

    Going to the core: Why has this paradign shift been called "Singularity"? There, imo, in the answer to this question, lies the connection which makes the whole phenomena clearly coherent. The analogies which link the things/concepts for which the word "Singularity" is used is self-explanatory.

    I´ll be back. 😉

    Reply
  31. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    "The "Singularity" was a term originally coined by Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and science-fiction author, to describe the breakdown in our predictions of the future that occurs when some form of greater-than-human intelligence comes into play – the moment when human intelligence, the source of technology, is improved by that technology. The term "Singularity" was coined by Vinge in analogy with the singularity at a center of a black hole, where our current understanding of physics breaks down; beyond the point where transhuman intelligence exists, our model of the future breaks down. A science-fiction author can’t write realistic science-fiction stories beyond this point, because no author can create a character that’s really smarter than the author." [more at link]

    From The Singularity, published by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, http://www.singinst.org

    —

    Steve, if you hear someone talking at the Summit about the mayan factor -a major change in their calendar to happen by 2012 (our time)-, do let me know. I am very interested in following that connection. And all the people I talked so far about this, who are not related to science and of course who have never heard about the Singularity before, but did know in some depth about the mayan predictions, clearly saw the connection too, saw how the current cycle closes and a new one begins, hence understood easily in five minutes what´s the Singularity about -the core concept, that is-. Keep an ear attentive to that for me, please. =)

    —

    just read this:

    “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.” – Henry Miller

    Reply
  32. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    I asked about the Mayan factor, but they generalized in the answers to common human aspirations to transcendance (Cory Doctorow called the singularity the "Rapture of the Nerds" =)

    A podcast of the conference shouldbe available in a few days…

    Reply
  33. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    I would like to hear it. Would you let me know the date when you know it, or let me know how to find out?

    Thank you a lot for having asked. The answer doesn´t sound too fullfilling really (?) It sounds more as if they didn´t know what you were talking about, or that they misunderstood it and dismissed it as taking it as sort of a Nostradamus prophecy or so -which is not-. This is a calendar, a Time system which shows that their largest measure of time, a Baktun (394 of our years) is coming to an end by 2012. But it is not only that. The Batkun coming to an end is the 12th one. The next Batkun, is the 13th, hence is the end of a greater cycle, if not the cycle itself -if there is such thing-. Number 13 is considered of bad luck ("Twelve years they served Chedorlaomer, and in the thirteenth year they rebelled." Genesis 14:4) when it actually just represents the closing of a period, a change in direction or order as it has been. What "rebellion" means. And this timeline based in the mayan calendar, while being an interpretation, it is based on the mayans´ actual thoughts and calculations. And if you see the way in which is foreseen the 13th batkun pretty much resembles a change in the current order of things. Of such magnitude that we are unable to concieve it from this here and now.

    I hope that you don´t think me crazy now for this I say. Or "enraptured" like Cory thinks of Nerds and the Singularity… btw that could have sounded bit insulting, was it said like that?

    For this comment of yours and your post on the Summit, I sense that it wasn´t that great as -at least me- expected. Was the conclusion then, that this won´t happen as predicted, for decades at least and that it is more a fantasy or a "rapture" than an actual thing happening? Because this is what I perceive from your two posts. Maybe it´s me, I am not sure.

    =S

    Reply
  34. tarotastic Avatar
    tarotastic

    Is Vernor Vinge also a SF writer? I’m sure I read some books of his years ago.

    Reply
  35. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    tarotastic: yep, Vinge is indeed a multitalented guy (he wrote A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, among others).

    Reply
  36. benjiman Avatar
    benjiman

    There are many singularities, including those in the shaving business!

    😉

    Reply
  37. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    b-man: I had missed that link earlier… hilarious….

    Reply
  38. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    heya, missed that too. LOL! Blade Running… 😀

    Reply
  39. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    And now, Ray and this book are the subject of a movie, Transcendent Man, which will debut on April 25 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

    Reply
  40. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    whoa…. and now he’s stalking Steve Jobs…

    Reply
  41. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    heh heh – "Again I try to blow him off…" – pure libel, that is… *

    Reply
  42. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    LOL!

    Reply
  43. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    I just noticed that I have not yet shared my thoughts on uploading here and I am not sure why…

    I think it will be easier to grow a new intelligence that is native to the substrate and sensory I/O than it would be to upload across substrates. Cut and paste portability may be an illusion in evolved complex systems.

    But even if that is wrong, imagine the path to uploading. We will likely test it on a primate before a human (given FDA regulation, and the need to do animal trials…), and that could get pretty interesting as it could start to outperform humans long before humans make the leap.

    We would want the resulting hyperintelligence to originate from a female bonobo not a male chimp… I first heard this wild idea from Brad Templeton: http://www.templetons.com/brad/apes.html

    This could be the path to nirvana, deriving hyperintelligence from the social substrate of a hedonistic bisexual sisterhoods of bonobos, whose sexual antics keep them out of most zoos (e.g., kids freak out when they see primates in the missionary position).

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Sexual_social_behavior

    It’s good to have positive role models. =)

    Reply
  44. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    @Steve Jurvetson : "I think it will be easier to grow a new intelligence that is native to the substrate and sensory I/O than it would be to upload across substrates. Cut and paste portability may be an illusion in evolved complex systems."

    I cannot agree more on this. Actually the more I understand about intelligence (our specific cognitive abilities) the more I see its intrinsically derived and related to the substrate on which it operates and it can hardly be separated from it as it seems to be an emergent phenomena. To say "to the substrate on which it operates" is in fact a misleading statement. Intelligence doesn’t operate on a substrate, to me, it doesn’t "do" anything, it’s a consequence of the processes held in such a substrate, it doesn’t exist on its own. We might definite it as something different or detached for the sake of the analysis and our incapability of actually understand what intelligence is and what the brain is and does. However it’s not, to my understanding, separable and therefore, "uploadable". Not even to think of intelligence in terms of the exact Conectome of a being at a certain moment. It wouldn’t be able to run without the rest of the body, as intelligence is emergent from the whole body processes, not merely the brain. Starting from the obvious 2nd brain we have in our gut.

    Reply
  45. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    And I’d go with female bonobos too. 😉

    Reply

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