Is It Singularity Yet?

[jeff_duntemann]

Every once in a while, I look around to see if the Singularity guys are still out there making noise, and shucky darns, they still are. I won't recap the whole Singularity thing, nor my primary objections; see my entry for August 28, 2004. But every couple of years, I feel obliged to demand

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[regek]

My understanding of "the singularity" as discussed by Ray Kurzweil has always been that there are certain unpredictable scientific developments that totally change predictions of things in the future. For example, the discovery of the transistor was a singularity. Before that effect was found, nobody could seriously imagine (i.e., without saying "A wizard did it.") a "better vacuum tube" that would be small enough that a modern cell phone has more processing power than ENIAC and uses a tiny fraction of the electricity. There were simply too many physical limitations to the technology.

Other singularities would be things like the discoveries of certain drugs (penicillin, most notably), the discovery of the principles behind an electron microscope, liquid-crystal displays, and even cellular radio technology.

A wonderful example of this can be seen by looking at the Shadowrun game. When it was first made, it was meant to be "futuristic". They took the technology of the day and extrapolated where it would be in 60 years. They came up with a world-wide network, but you had to literally jack yourself into it with a cable. In the current edition, everything is wireless. When they first wrote it, they didn't have any inkling of how cellular phones would redefine telecommunications, not just for voice but for everything. Digital cell phone networks and their use to carry data in addition to voice traffic had simply never been thought at that time, let alone 802.11a/b/g/n or Bluetooth.

Before the principles behind LCDs were discovered, laptop computers were inconceivable. Even the most visionary sci-fi writers either made essentially magic holographic displays or they effectively had luggables with tiny CRTs. Nobody would have talked about a computer that only weighs a few pounds and can carry all of your files in its storage because nobody could have foreseen the developments that made that possible.

Which brings up another interesting point. A singularity by that definition could also be a new application of existing technology. For example, nothing in the iPhone is really new, and yet it is changing the cellular phone industry. Microsoft have announced that they are going to be porting the full Internet Explorer engine to Windows Mobile, almost certainly because they see that people like the full browser on the iPhone. Other cell companies have started selling phones specifically designed to counter the iPhone's features. In this case, it's something that nobody foresaw that gets everyone to react to it.

People talking about The Singularity as a single event some time in the future don't seem to really get one thing. The last really big one that changed the face of business, science, technology, home life and everything else would probably be the transistor. As they say, we can never tell when the next one is going to be or what it's going to affect, but they don't seem to see that there are smaller ones happening all the time.

They also don't get that people aren't really that interested in replicating a brain in silicon. They're interested in YouTube, MySpace, American Idol, and other such "dreck". That's what sells, so that's what gets more research money. Hooray capitalism, right? So unless brain-replication becomes cool somehow, the technology to do it is likely to never happen.

[regek]

And actually, speaking of transistors, when did bipolar transistors come into widespread use? That's right! The 1950s!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there was a major singularity between 1900 and the 1950s. There have been several since then, but they don't seem nearly as important just now as that one was.