Above is a picture of the campsite my friend James and I set up for the annual ABATE biker rally. It’s been a few years since I was last out there and it’s good to know little has changed about the things that happen at that huge party. I’d post more pictures on here, but I’d have to censor them. And I have quite a collection from just one night of clicking.
I’ll be following up with a few comments that were left on my blog while I was away… so, uh… to kill a little time, watch this completely unrelated video of a simulation of the earth being smashed by a 500km wide asteroid!
Less than a year ago when I first started writing this blog, I threw a couple posts out there (Part 1 and Part 2) that talked about the history of our existence. Not the existence of mere humans, but of the existence of reality as we have come to know it so far. The basic premise is that when the Universe was created, the state that it was in was that of the most simple form of energy you could find: A white-hot plasma. As time passed (in the scale of billions of years), the plasma began to cool, take shape, form matter, eventually solar systems and planets, later the building blocks of biological life, and then complex forms of life began to emerge out of that and so on. It’s been snowballing down the proverbial mountain ever since the beginning of time, gaining speed, momentum and novelty along the way.
My use of the word “novelty” (as well as a lot of the inspiration for these posts) comes from the late Terence McKenna. Terence described and quantified novelty as newness, density of complexification and dynamic change as opposed to static habituation. Others, most notably Ray Kurzweil, have echoed and expanded upon this idea a great deal (albeit on more of a scientific/mathematical basis instead of McKenna’s cosmological perspective). There is plenty to be said about this steady and predictable trend of technological advancements in particular, which is where Kurzweil roots a majority of his observations and predictions (while McKenna takes on a more broad perspective). Here’s a video of Ray Kurzweil talking about some of his predictions for the future of technology at a TED conference to help set the mood:
In a more broad sense, everything from the telescopic complexification of plasma into different forms of matter, to the birth and rapid acceleration of computer technology, are examples of an accelerating increase in novelty throughout history. So is the birth of the Internet and the explosion of information it continues to deliver to us and make increasingly easier to access. As is our ever increasing and eventual co-dependence upon it the Internet as we move closer to creating a mental symbiosis with it. That is to say that we will eventually come to depend upon the Internet just as much as it currently depends on us for its existence and relevancy, and that our dependence on it is accelerating.
So what is “The Great Singularity”? McKenna had a few different theories, the most interesting to me being the possible invention of a time travel, which would effectively cause the future collapse into the present and we would be immersed into a timeless “hyperspace”. Kurzweil takes on a more technical prediction of things to come with no consideration for such a radical leap, basing his predictions mostly on math in a similar fashion to the way Gordon E. Moore estimated the anticipated speed and cost of computer processors in the future.
Personally, I feel the underestimated wild card in this deck is Artificial Intelligence. I say underestimated because I feel that it will arrive a little sooner than Kurzweil anticipates and the impact it will have will probably represent something greater than your soon-to-be-daily paradigm shifting technological breakthrough. We make small breakthroughs of increasing significance all the time it seems, taking them for granted. But A.I. really won’t be worth much to us until it’s smart enough to improve itself without aid. There’s a lot of groundwork to yet be laid, and the foundation is the Internet itself. A quote from McKenna that simplifies it all is, “The future is mental.” And if you give some slack to his notion of time travel, it could just as well be some other form of paradigm shifting technology that would stand to be as equally jaw dropping. Imagine how predictions about the future might be if one day such a thing as a sentient, self-advancing computer-based supraintelligence actually existed.
The Internet is like an embryo in a state of gestation, developing at our own hands until it ultimately births Artificial Intelligence. But it’s not completely artificial because its source of information, its genetic construction if you will, is a product of our own human minds and experiences. So in a very real sense, the Internet and our mental selves are gradually becoming one and the same.
I came across a TED video yesterday that got me back into mood of writing about this kind of stuff. It was a talk given by Kevin Kelly, who is the executive editor of Wired Magazine. In it, he points out that the capabilities of Internet technology as it exists today were once thought to be totally unfeasible just 5000 days ago. And that in truth, we have seen it grow into something truly impressive in a very short span of time, achieving some of our wildest dreams (yet we are not impressed). There is no reason to believe this process of development is anywhere close to being finished.
In part one, I briefly talked about the seemingly coincidental similarity between the exponentially increasing complexity of reality in general and the ever quickening development and advancement of electronic technologies (among many other things not mentioned). The Universe (as far as we can tell) began with a sluggish pace that took billions of years of time to go by before molecules could form, later whole solar systems, then life itself, and now the advanced technologies that our own minds have given birth to. So too has the progression of these technologies started off at a sluggish pace with inventions like the wheel thousands of years ago, and then things snowballed from there on. Though the wheel probably wasn’t mans first paradigm-shifting invention. It was more likely to be the club, or some form of weapon used for either hunting or self defense.
So where are all of these technologies going? A more intriguing question might be: Do they have a single unifying purpose? Do the last several thousands of years of technological ingenuity represent a process equivalent to laying a foundation for something greater? Is there some common goal down the road that technology is helping to bring us towards? Scientists of old (or rather, those who are advocates of metaphysical naturalism or accidentalism… in other words, people who prefer to remove awe and wonder out of reality and turn everything into shades of gray; opponents of teleology) would like you to think that there could be no such thing. That the past 13 or 14 some billion years, and the formation of galaxies, our solar system and life as we know it is all a grand accident. An accidentalist would say that you have eyes not because you needed to see, but because you accidentally evolved them into being over the course of several millions of years and your species survived as a result. On the other hand, teleologist would suggest that a species evolved eyes in order to achieve an underlying desire to see and further adapt to its environment.
It is pretty interesting debate…until you notice that the accidentalist argument doesn’t take things such as creativity, the imagination and free will into account. You don’t accidentally invent something purposelessly with no goal in mind. You don’t do or think of anything without some form of goal in mind. I would find it difficult to argue that the computer was invented accidentally. The computer was invented as a result of what you might call “corrective feedback.” That is to say the short comings of a previous technology (or the genetics of a particular life form) were corrected (advanced) with the invention of a better technology based off of the previous generation, or by the combination of two complimentary technologies (or two survival oriented strains of DNA). An early example of this dates back to the addition of a governor being added to the steam engine. Another example might be the changing of skin color as a result of how much sunlight several generations of a particular group of humans are exposed to. Do you get a tan by accident?
Let’s take this notion of teleology, run with it and suggest that the universe and everything in it is goal oriented. It gets really interesting when you apply this philosophy to biology alone and presume the progression of evolution to have a goal of some sort. So what’s the goal of evolution and has it been reached yet? In short, I don’t think the goal has been reached. Some might say the mere existence of the human race seems achievement enough. After all, we are the most intelligent species on this planet if not the whole universe (as far as we have been able to detect). No other species has surpassed us in ability to invent and create new technologies. But this view presumes humans to be the perfected product of evolution at its finite best. Do you think the human race represents the perfected finality of biological evolution? You can’t answer that before attempting to figure out why we evolved into what we are in the first place.
This is where I briefly talk about this “conquest of dimensionality.” What do I mean by that? Well, if you go way back into the dawn of simple life, look at what it was capable of perceiving: jack squat. A single celled organisms or slimes stabilized on clay surfaces at most had practically no sense of the environment around it. They were immobile, had no perception of light or space or time. No ability to conceive of the past, present or future. But through evolution, what you see is the development of sensory preceptors (eyes, ears, the classic 5 senses in other words) and organs of locomotion (arms, legs, fins, etc). And then…there’s the human brain. That one mysterious evolutionary development which we still have no idea how to interpret or make sense of. What we do know about it is it’s probably one of the most complex things in all the universe. (And it’s still evolving).
Out of this brain, over the course of thousands of years, we have worked collectively in one form or another to give birth to social systems, technologies, creative ideas, language (very important), so on and so forth. To what end? Nobody knows for certain just yet, but to answer the question about whether or not the goal of biological evolution under the wing of teleology has been achieved would appear to be a plain and clear NO! Why? Because biology (human biology, anyway) appears to be attempting to find a way to co-evolve with machines, if not become machines. (Enter the Twilight Zone theme song). Why? It’s a strategy for survival.
In part 3: The symbiotic relationships of man and machine — past, present and future.
We humans are quite lucky to be living at this point in history as we will be the sole witnesses to some of the most earth shattering technological leaps we’ve ever created. Nanotechnology and its increasing integration in the field of medicine and genealogy, the development of artificial intelligence, the viral spreading of the Internet worldwide, the advances in robotics and a few other wild sciences that seem to come right out of Star Trek. All of these things we seem to take for granted, and one day we’re probably going to scoff at automobiles that still have a steering wheel in them. “You don’t have autopilot? Hmmm. How about a gas gauge? Do you still have one of those in your car? (chuckles)”
But that’s a little ways down the road in the future. What I’d like to focus on in this blog is the past, how we got here and how technology and its own evolution has coincided with the evolution of everything else in reality. This perspective requires you to be open to the theory of biological evolution and the age of the universe being in the billions of years (and not just a few thousand). If this is hard for you to do, that’s ok. A long time ago, people once believed the earth was flat and that the sun orbited us! (No kidding). Then Galileo and Copernicus came along to help clear up all that non-sense, though it took a while before everybody could calm down and accept their poignant observations as fact.
So lets presume the universe to be something close to 13 or 14 billion years old, and that it all started with this so-called Big Bang; a theoretical event which basically says the universe sprang forth from nothing for no reason in a single instant. A hard swallow, really. Science basically said, “Give us one free miracle and we will roll from there.” God could of well have stopped by and said, “Let there be light…” Same result in the end, more or less…
Everything in existence at that point in time was in the simplest form of matter; a super hot plasma. But then, after a few billion years, things began to cool and collect into what would later form atomic nuclei, and electrons could settle in to stable orbits. Getting cooler, the chemical and hydrogen bonds form (the basis of biology). So far, you can see that as the universe aged, it complexified ever so gradually creating newer more complex foundations for even more complex systems to emerge out of. Going through time in fast forward you would see a progression of foundations be laid one on another: Atomic Systems > Chemical Systems > Covalent Hydrogen Bond > Carbon Bond > Complex Chemistry that is pre-biotic or organic > macro-physical systems that we call membranes, gels, charge-transfer complexes > simple life (prokaryotes, un-nucleated DNA) > eukaryote, nucleated cells, complex colonies of cells > cell specialization > higher animals > social animals > complex social systems > technologies > globe-girdling electronically-based information-transfer-oriented-cultures, like ourselves. Whew!
Your own senses can confirm this feeling of all things getting more complex more quickly, and electronic technology is literally on the cutting edge of whatever new paradigm awaits our serendipitous discovery. But what’s more shocking is the realization that each progression and newer level of complexity arises at an accelerated, exponential rate.
Moore’s Law is often referenced as a general method of predicting how fast computer CPU’s are able to go in the future, in terms of clock cycles. The funny thing about this estimation (which is based partially upon previous and present technologies) is that it tends to create a upwardly curved line, indicating to us that the further you go, the faster newer forms of technology develop. And at this time there is no indication for such a trend or pattern of progression to ever slow down. The recent advancements made in the area of Quantum Computing seems to secure this telescopic tendency, as it is a precursor of something much larger than we’re willing pause and think about right now. It all just sounds too sci-fi for most of us. Then again, the computer itself was once an idea thought too ridiculous to pay much attention to. Yet here we are with our cell phones, Internet, e-mail and microwavable pizza.
You know, I don’t think it would be so naive to suggest that the coming advances in the realm of technology and life in general are actually the things we most often dismiss as never being able to achieve. I think it’s more naive to rule out such “impossibilities” based on dated scientific conventions, than it would be to say: “It’s not so much a matter of how or why, but when.” Although day-dreaming about the “why” part is still great fun.
I mentioned biology earlier with the intention of tying it in with technology. I’ll attempt to expand on that connection in my next blog, but here’s a spoiler for you: Biological Evolution is about a kind of conquest of dimensionality and modern technology is helping to extend and expand this conquest.
