Vinge, Vernor - SS -Technological Singularity.pdf - Vernor Vinge - przemosta

Technological Singularity

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Magazine: Whole Earth Review

Issue: December 10, 1993

Title: Technological Singularity

Author: Vernor Vinge

Technological Singularity

by Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge's vision of a technological "singularity" in humanity's near future has

haunted me since I first read of it in his science-fiction novel, Marooned in Realtime (1986).

I'm persuaded that the acceleration of technology-acceleration is even now distorting hu-

man institutions and expectations, whether or not we are approaching a metaphorical

"event horizon" beyond which everything becomes unrecognizable. When I invited Vinge to

write something about his current views on the singularity for the recent issue of Whole Earth

Review that I guest-edited, he replied that he had just presented a paper on the subject

for the VISION-21 Symposium, sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the

Ohio Aerospace Institute. In due course he revised the piece and sent it along. I can think

of no other technical paper that has so many references to science-fiction literature, as well it

should. Vinge is a mathematician at San Diego State University, specializing in distributed

computing and computer architecture. One of his short stories, "True Names" (1981), is

often mentioned along with John Brunner's Shockwave Rider and William Gibson's Neur-

omancer as an inspiration to the current generation of online computer pioneers. Vinge's

two "Realtime" novels (combined in Across Realtime --1991) have been nominated for Hugo

Awards, science fiction's top prize. His new novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, won the 1993

Hugo; it's reviewed on p. 95.

--Stewart Brand

--------------------------------------------------------------------------TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY

purposes if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.) A slightly different version of this

article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research

Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. --Vernor Vinge 1. What Is The

Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.

We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise

cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with great-

er-than-human intelligence. Science may achieve this breakthrough by several means (and

this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur): Computers that are

"awake" and superhumanly intelligent may be developed. (To date, there has been much

controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the an-

swer is "yes," then there is little doubt that more intelligent beings can be constructed shortly

thereafter.) Large computer networks and their associated users may "wake up" as superhu-

manly intelligent entities. Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users

may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect. The first three

possibilities depend on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in hardware has

followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe

that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.

(Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty

years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more specific: I'll be sur-

prised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence

drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason

why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities --on a

still-shorter time scale. The best analogy I see is to the evolutionary past: Animals can ad-

apt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its

work --the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans

have the ability to internalize the world and conduct what-if's in our heads; we can solve

many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection could. Now, by creating the

means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as

radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

This change will be a throwing-away of all the human rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye -

-an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that were thought might

only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. It's fair to call

this event a singularity ("the Singularity" for the purposes of this piece). It is a point where

our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules, a point that will loom vaster and

vaster over human affairs until the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally

happens, it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s very few saw

it: Stan Ulam 1 paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever-accelerating progress of technology and

changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some

essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them,

could not continue. Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is

thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the super-

humanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical

riches, never properly absorbed.) The 1960s saw recognition of some of the implications of

superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intel-

lectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of

these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines;

there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man

would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man

need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under

control. . . . It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent

machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but he does not pursue its most disturb-

ing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be human-

kind's "tool" --any more than humans are the tools of rabbits, robins, or chimpanzees.

Through the sixties and seventies and eighties, recognition of the cataclysm spread.

Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the

"hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that tech-

nology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the fu-

ture. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw

that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable . . . soon. Once, galactic

empires might have seemed a Posthuman domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones

are. What about the coming decades, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach

of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics

of machine sapience will have good press. After all, until we have hardware as powerful

as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we'll be able to create human-equivalent

(or greater) intelligence. (There is the farfetched possibility that we could make a human

equivalent out of less powerful hardware --if we were willing to give up speed, if we were will-

ing to settle for an artificial being that was literally slow. But it's much more likely that devis-

ing the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experi-

mentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen until after the devel-

opment of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science-fiction

writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comicbook

writers worry about how to create spectacular effects when everything visible can be

produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing high-

er-and higher-level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam)

that release us from most low-level drudgery. Put another way: the work that is truly pro-

ductive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming

of the Singularity, we will see the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come

true. Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread

ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appear-

ance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any tech-

nical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected --perhaps

even by the researchers involved ("But all our previous models were catatonic! We were

just tweaking some parameters . . ."). If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous

embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly awakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to

point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Posthuman era. And for all my techno-

logical optimism, I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental

events from one thousand years' remove . . . instead of twenty. 2. Can the Singularity Be

Avoided?

Well, maybe it won't happen at all: sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms we should

expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected argu-

ments of Penrose3 and Searle4 against the practicality of machine sapience. In August

1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate "How We Will Build a

Machine That Thinks." As you might guess from the workshop's title, the participants

were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact,

there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that al-

gorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much de-

bate about the raw hardware power present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest

1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain.

The majority of the participants agreed with Hans Moravec's estimate5 that we are ten to

forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was an other minority who conjec-

tured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally

believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as ten orders of mag-

nitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter,

if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the

early '00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off -

because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware

improvements. We'd end up with some very powerful hardware, but without the ability to

push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog

appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever "wake up" and there would

never be the intellectual runaway that is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be

seen as a golden age . . . and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the fu-

ture predic ted by Gunther Stent,6 who explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelli-

gence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the

world were to understand the "threat" and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the

goal would continue. The competitive advantage --economic, military, even artistic --of

every advance in automation is so compelling that forbidding such things merely assures

that someone else will get them first. Eric Drexler has provided spectacular insights about

Vinge, Vernor - SS -Technological Singularity.pdf

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