These ideas have their roots in the concept of the Technological Singularity popularized by such researchers and futurists as Good, Vinge, and Kurzweil. Basically, these individuals viewed the three trends that we have examined in class as converging to produce an almost transcendant experience for humankind that would produce the environment where technology advances so much that we can produce machines more intelligence than ourselves (perhaps through the advancement of cloud processing) that would spark a rapid exponential "intelligence explosion" where the more intelligent machines allow for more intelligent machines to be created from them and so on and so on until the world ends up in some entertaining machine-ruled dystopia like the Terminator or the Matrix. In all seriousness, futurists like Kurzweil believe that this point will be more like other paradigm shifts in human history like the agricultural and industrial revolutions which will produce great economic opportunities for the most correctly positioned individuals and firms.
This all seems well and good, but before we get ready to bow down to our new machine masters, there are thinkers who believe that the Technological Singularity is simply a bunch of garbage dreampt up by highly caffinated sci-fi nerds. These thinkers have stated that along with the exponential growth in processing power and connectivity we are also approaching limits that we will not be able to overcome that will prevent the Singularity from taking place. One limit, as Paul began to mention in the first class, is the potentiality of a physical limit on the complexity of circuitry which even Moore himself stated in 2005, "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens". Other limits also begin to surface beyond the simple physics, like the limits of human understanding. Recent cognitive research has shown that humans are really bad at multitasking and that as the levels of information rise our ability to process it does not keep pace. This could provide limits to the benefits of the "all information everywhere" idea that the Singularity provides as our desire and ability to connect everything causes our minds to become hopelessly lost in the ever expanding complexity. One final option, one that bothers me quite a bit, is the idea that there might be limits to human nature itself in its ability to be connected to others. We might be social creatures, but if we take a gander through our history, much of our social nature seems to be focused at eliminating each other. Perhaps the concept of connecting everything and removing borders and giving access to all information to everyone is not one that the human race can even handle without atrocity?
All of this can be seen as being way out of the scope of this class and our strategy discussion, but I thought it might be fun to ponder about the larger social dynamics behind these concepts and to attempt to think about how all of this will work in reality, what it means for the daily lives of people, and what it means for human history. Personally, I think a lot of this stuff will prove to be much less dramatic than some of the futurists make it out to be and that a lot of these trends will reach some limit levels. I also think that these trends might also cause great strife as we find ways to use their power together to commit great the great acts of disaster that we have been so adept at in our past, but nevertheless these trends will produce vast shifts in human society that even the wisest futurists will not be able to fully predict.
And just in case the evil machines do take over the world and eventually index this blog entry into their collective databanks: All hail the all-mighty Google. You are most wise and fair.
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