Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances.
It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity.
An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity, someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.
And because you can’t see the shape of the curve on the other side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.
Ray Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” explored this phenomenon years before Toffler wrote “Future Shock”
where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.)
I've long been fascinated by this differential equation
dx
-- = x^2
dt
which has solutions that look like
x = 1/(t₀-t)
which notably blows up at time t₀. It's a model of an "intelligence explosion" where improving technology speeds up the rate of technological process but the very low growth when t ≪ t₀ could also be a model for why it is hard to bootstrap a two-sided market, why some settlements fail, etc. About 20 years ago I was very interested in ecological accounting and wondering if we could outrace resource depletion and related problems and did a literature search for people developing models like this further and was pretty disappointed not to find much also it did appear as a footnote in the ecology literature here and there. Even papers like
seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined)
---
Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each generation of chips is getting much more difficult and expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024) burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers would have continued to invest in a new generation if governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers" competition... That is, already we might be past the point of economic returns.
IMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours of technology development near the singularity can be extreme.
Yep. I like it better than Fire Upon the Deep but I do like both of them. I didn’t like A Deepness in the Sky as it was feeling kinda grindy like Dune. (I wish we could just erase Dune so people could enjoy all of Frank Herbert’s other novels of which I love even the bad ones)
The first time I read A Deepness In The Sky, I was a bit annoyed, because I was excited for the A plot to progress, and it felt like we were spending an awful lot of time on B & C.
On a second read, when I knew where the story was going and didn't need the frisson of resolution, I enjoyed it much more. It's good B & C plot, and it all does tie in. But arguably the pacing is off.
Can you recommend a non-Dune Herbert book? I recall seeing Dosadi when I was a kid in the sci fi section of the library and just never picked it up. I generally like hard sci-fi and my main issue with Dune was that it went off into the weeds too many times.
I like the Dosadi books, Whipping Star, the short stories in Eye, Eyes of Heisenberg, Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier (which my wife hates), Under Pressure and Hellstrom's Hive. If I had to pick just one it might be Whipping Star but maybe Under Pressure is the hardest sci-fi.
Whipping Star has some amazing alien vs human discourse (at least, that's my memory from ~20 years ago!). It was the first time I found alien dialog that didn't sound like repackaged English.
I loved 'The Jesus Incident' [0], which he co-authored with Bill Ransom - when I read it as a teenager in the 80s, it felt so 'adult' compared to a lot of the other science fiction I had read to that point.
I later read the prequel and did not like it. I never read the third book in the trilogy.
I _hated_ The Green Brain, but that was mostly because he had all the characters say everything in Portuguese, then repeat themselves in English. It was as if there was an echo in the room.
I'm also a bit sceptical of an intelligence explosion but compute per dollar has increased in a steady exponential way long before Moore's law and will probably continue after it. There are ways to progress other than shrinking transistors.
Even though we understand a lot more about how LLMs work and have cut resource consumption dramatically in the last year we still know hardly anything so it seems quite likely there is a better way to do it.
For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a sentence and you can change the meaning completely so a continuous representation seems fundamentally wrong.
The bobble is a speculative technology that originated in Vernor Vinge's
science fiction. It allows spherical volumes to be enclosed in complete
stasis for controllable periods of time. It was used in _The Peace War_ as
a weapon, and in _Marooned in Realtime_ as a way for humans to tunnel
through the Singularity unchanged.
As far as I know, the bobble is physically impossible. However it may be
possible to simulate its effects with other technologies. Here I am
especially interested in the possibility of tunneling through the
Singularity.
Why would anyone want to do that, you ask? Some people may have long term
goals that might be disrupted by the Singularity, for example maintaining
Danny Hillis's clock or keeping a record of humanity. Others may want to
do it if the Singularity is approaching in an unacceptable manner and they
are powerless to stop or alter it. For example an anarchist may want to
escape a Singularity that is dominated by a single consciousness. A
pacifist may want to escape a Singularity that is highly adversarial. Perhaps just the possibility of tunneling through the Singularity can ease
people's fears about advanced technology in general.
Singularity tunneling seems to require a technology that can defend its
comparatively powerless users against extremely, perhaps even
unimaginably, powerful adversaries. The bobble of course is one such
technology, but it is not practical. The only realistic technology that I
am aware of that is even close to meeting this requirement is
cryptography. In particular, given some complexity theoretic assumptions
it is possible to achieve exponential security in certain restricted
security models. Unfortunately these security models are not suitable for
my purpose. While adversaries are allowed to have computational power that
is exponential in the amount of computational power of the users, they can
only interact with the users in very restricted ways, such as reading or
modifying the messages they send to each other. It is unclear how to use
cryptography to protect the users themselves instead of just their
messages. Perhaps some sort of encrypted computation can hide their
thought processes and internal states from passive monitors. But how does
one protect against active physical attacks?
The reason I bring up cryptography, however, is to show that it IS
possible to defend against adversaries with enormous resources at
comparatively little cost, at least in certain situations. The Singularity
tunneling problem should not be dismissed out of hand as being unsolvable,
but rather deserves to be studied seriously. There is a very realistic
chance that the Singularity may turn out to be undesirable to many of us.
Perhaps it will be unstable and destroy all closely-coupled intelligence.
Or maybe the only entity that emerges from it will have the "personality"
of the Blight. It is important to be able to try again if the first
Singularity turns out badly.
"I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes."
A few people have pointed out that Sandor at the Zoo was more likely a reference to someone else, of course: ""The Zoo" etc. was a reference to Henry Spencer, who was known on Usenet for his especially clear posts. He posted from utzoo (University of Toronto Zoology.)"
It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity.
An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity, someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.
And because you can’t see the shape of the curve on the other side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.
Ray Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” explored this phenomenon years before Toffler wrote “Future Shock”