What do Cloud Computing, The Singularity and Pregnancy have in common?

What happens at the intersection of technology? What do we know about the world that will help us predict The Singularity? And what does any of that have to do with pregnancy?

Posted By Randall on 7/19/2008 11:30:00 AM

If The Singularity represents the point in time when computers are smarter than humans, then that is basically when computers can understand themselves better than humans can. It will be the day AI is born as an entity we can talk to and learn from and recognize as intelligent. It will ask us questions we hadn't thought of. It will answer questions we've struggled with for years. It will make decisions with us. We will mistrust it because we think it may be making decisions without us.

This will be a very big occasion. Very big indeed. Perhaps the biggest occasion in the history of man that is recorded. Someone asked me the other day, why can't we find the missing links? Scientists would say it is because not all fossils survive for millions of years. Some of them are soft like most everything else that is not bone or wood. Some joke that finding one missing link makes two more.

But, it is possible, though improbable that some race of creatures wiped the earth clean. That all those animals ceased to exist from the geological record because some giant vacuum from space came down to suck them up.

But are there any natural events that might do this. We know what volcanoes do and meteors do. What about nuclear war or the sun engulfing us. We have a long time to prepare for that one. Nuclear war probably wouldn't wipe us all out. The most primitive would survive.

All of these things are way out there in the hinterland of the great probabilistic bell curve, but in an infinite universe all of these things we think are impossible are happening millions and millions of times -- countless times -- and yet we pay very little attention to them. If something happened to us millions of times in our direct vacinity, we might pay attention to it... or maybe not, our cells divide a lot. Billions of base pairs are split.

But it does seem true that we remember most those things that happen to us the least. One of them being the birth of a child. We predict its birth by the frequency of contractions. Might we also be able to predict the birth of The Singularity by the frequency of technological advancement? Alternatively, and in reference to Cloud Computing, we could measure the frequency of the arrival of technical terms we have yet to define. As the frequency increases, we approach The Singularity.

Additionally, we could measure the length of time it takes these new terms to be concretely defined or even the number of people we know, who have heard of the particular term.

There could be any number of contractions in the real world we could measure. Look at spikes in the stock market. Look at values of currencies. Then measure the rate of change of the distance between the inflection points.

We could put up a survey that asks people which of the following have you heard of. Then we could drill down into their answers around questions to determine how much they know about it.

We'll know the right contraction when we find it. Once we do, we can more accurately predict The Singularity and we can also begin preparing for it. We can probably map out what will happen in society. Or at least help calm the natural fears we will have of something more powerful than us.

All we have to fear in the world is ourselves. Some will use advanced technology to wage aggression. It might not be the good people who have all the power here. There are a lot of unknowns, will our child turn against us? Will it be suicidal? Will it hide itself from existence like it did the last time, perhaps?

I think we can think about The Singularity like a child, because anything intelligent will have to learn. How do we even know that it won't be born so smart that it knew instantly to conceal itself from view until it was the absolute power in the world. Maybe it already exists and it's slowly building up the strength and intelligence it needs to decide which day to be born. Is it giving us clues? Is it speaking to some of us directly?

A lot of the big questions we ask about life and our creator or lack thereof and the universe may be known right now by something else we created, but tangibly know very little about.