Deconstructing Singularity to Empower Forecasting.
An open research I’d love you to partecipate to
“The Singularity is Near” is a book that everyone should read, no matter which age, occupation or geography. One of the many contemporary projections about the future in which the borders between science and sci-fi weirdly blurs. Here you go for a short explanatory video, or you can look at the following images I lovely baked to summarize the theory. Here the eminent Noel Harari defines the singularitarian cult as the first perfect example of the incoming gang of techno-religions.
When I discovered Ray Kurzweil and his theories my mind and future conception got a great shake. Lots of thinking and lots of reading. At the present moment I find myself more critic than favourable about the singularity hypotesis, at both an ethical and analytical level. But in these months I got quite bothered in observing people discussing the theory:
Kurzweil’s enemies and many savy scholars simply reject the whole packet without extracting and appreciating the valuable elements and interesting frames in his intellectual production. The most prolific and audacious technologist in human history could seem a bit arrogant and pumped, but his incredible 40 years of experience in all the fields of innovation and his data-rich forecasting makes him an extremely interesting subject in the worst case.
I see this happening everyday in my university life and online, especially in the intellectuals realm: when a source of knowledge doesn’t satisfy (partially or totally) the ethos of a thinker, the source is valued as a zero and completelly ignored. Such a gigantic conceptual castle can of course reveal weak foundations (Spoiler: it does and it’s not my opinion) but do you really think there’s nothing interesting, maybe in his dungeons?
For example, leftists doesn’t read reports written by the capitalist intelligence (and of course viceversa), because the neoliberal ideology pollutes and distorts the findings: one could acknowledge it and try to select what kind of information is valid despite the bad filters upstream, which elements is better to trash out and which ones have to be accepted with caution. This is training against the bubble thinking destroying the quality of our mediascapes. And if it’s true that not all thinkers are biased the same, all thinkers are informed by implicit assumptions and cultural schemes.
I will pay extreme attention to separate my ethical personal considerations from the analytical act. But this is really harder than it seems and sometimes it’s way better to make the ambiguity explicit instead of ignoring it.
I chose this theory as research object because the debate on technology will be a crucial one: how do we manage the coming avalanche of accelerating complexity? How do we face the historical novelty of self-propelling exponential dynamics? What kinds of human beings are we becoming when AI brutalizes the borders of our “human being” definition?
The future of technology is not the fizzy core of my analysis though. If it was, I would really had chosen “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly as protagonist book of the work, its lucidity is something extraordinary. Neither is the singularity theory per se (even if we are going veeeery deep in its analysis) because in that case I would have broaden my sight on all the Singularity Models.
My interest lies in the social construction of theories. That’s an important building block for the development of a serious science of prediction. But if Philip Tetlock -the man who revolutionized it- in his marvelous “Superforecasting” posed the attention on (I’m simplifying) “better measuring the outcomes”, this apparently abstract knowledge will help us comprehending the structural observable forces and dynamics to which every forecaster is subjected. Why an intellectual agent build and promote an imagined world in the future, in jargon a “socio-technical scenario”? How does the social position of a thinker can generate blind spots in his vision? Yes, there are sociologists who study intellectuals worlds and of course sociologists who study sociologists (who study sociologists who study sociologists ok I’ll stop it).
Sociologists also study innovation processes and they get really angry when you tell them that technology is the main driver of societal change. As my thesis advisor made me realize, the first exponential growth in cotton production was allowed by slaves, not machines.
Innovation is a function of science, technology AND society having problematic sex. And it’s all but a linear process. And nobody listen to sociologists because they are so annoying.
Coming to the core of the research, I thought that analyzing Kurweil predictions in view of what this 15 years has shown us (AH, you were wrong here and there!!) is not so exciting. A more interesting take came to my mind reading the marvelous “Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Taleb, which deals with the structural blind spots of our perception: which relevant phenomena did the singularitarian king completely avoid to mention in his forecasting?
I will focus on what is missing in the -hopefully shared- convinction that a serious future portrait and the theory underlying it should be comprehensive of all the possible dimensions of analysis to be considered really unbiased and effective in predicting. And when a missing element is individuated, I’ll try to make a sense of why that hasn’t been included in the theory -from a sociological point of view.
An example to better explain what i mean: Kurweil never considers or mentions social sciences’ theories about the concrete social networks (companies, research centres etc etc) that effectively drive this exponential growth of computing . Their rate of change and adaptment is not considered. This could have made him forecast a certain date for a certain technological upgrade that ex-post we have seen to be still far in the future; this mistake in prediction could be dued to a superficial knowledge of the above mentioned concrete socio-structural dynamics of change (seen as secondary in the process). He missed this family of theories because of his socio-cultural context of intellectual development. Computer scientists and enterpreneur tend to underestimate social sciences and to consider them non-scientifical.
It’s just an example, but we’ll really travel from the height of universal theories deep down to the flesh of inventors. And trust me on this, destructuring abstract complexity and exploring technologists’ way of seeing reality will both be quite useful frames for mankind in this century.
So, again, the driving research question in essence is:
What is missing in Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory and related predictions? Which relevant elements, empirical dimensions and theoretical frameworks are ignored? Why?
It’s impossible to consider the whole human wisdom in crafting a theory. Not everything is relevant. These absencies will thus reveal themselves in two ways: by analyzing concrete prediction failures and by confronting the singularity scenario with an army of heterogeneous theories. Not to establish a death Avengers vs Skynet fight between theories, but to light up certain dimensions of the singularity hypotesis and re-think them with different eyes, in the spirit of this publication and especially of any good thinker. As a chemist in his lab makes different compounds interacting in order to discover what their combination could bring to, I’m looking forward to enjoy unexpected colourful explosions.
Wanna be updated about them?
Wanna empower your forecasting? Wanna discover the blind spots that the universe structure made impossible for you to see?
Interested in collaborating? (read the next part, my friend of empirical discoveries)
What about empirical data? The singularity theory has been circulating for so many years now (13 years since the book publishing) but the collective intelligence still hasn’t produced a systematic and updated archive of the arguments on the singularity -or more probably, I didn’t find it in the web ocean. It’s not just a question of yes/no to that theory acceptance; in a good democracy as in a good science the important part is not winning but the process of building meaningful connections and foster generative behaviours that empower the full ecosystem.
For this reason I would like to reconstruct the ensemble of arguments about the singularity scenario, to collect a plurality of voices and perspectives about one of the most intriguing claim about our future. To understand with time if this vision is correct, at least useful, or dramatically naive. In all the cases someone will learn something, because somebody has to be wrong; and in these times of chaos everybody should buy a real black swan, call it HUMBLENESS and leave him scratching around the office remembering us to be cautious about our certainties.
Interested in the archive? I’m open about advice and ideas because it doesn’t exist yet. It could of course continue even after the thesis, and touching futurology or transhumanism or AI or whatever. Remember to leave me your mail in the form above or write me at giulioquarta96@gmail.com
These are the sources and places I frequented until now. Plus conferences attending and talking with the experts I manage to interact to.
- Singularity We Blog: How to thank you enough, Nikola Danaylov? Years and years of video interviews to the brightest minds (Kurzweil itself, but also Chomsky, Minsky, Rifkin… literally hundreds of experts) dealing about singularity and surroundings, long deep talks about the thousand facets of transhumanism and our future. That is not only tech, as your motto explicits: “technology is not enough” . It’s rare to find a thinker with both enthusiasm AND critical views of his matter.
- Reddit: r/singularity is a very partecipated forum of discussions about singularity and forecasting. Thank you crowd. And of course thank you Wikipedia you won’t get a place in the list because you already have a place in our heart.
- Medium: Just search for “singularity” on Medium and be surprised about the number of singularity related publications. 65! (Sad PS: 99% is empty)
- Scientific papers and reports: not many actually, but they exist and what a serious research could be this without certified science? The distributed treasure of extra-accademic reports is a vital source too.
- Books: not many more than papers, but growing with the collective interest about AI. I’ll spare you the list.
- Web Sites: The web is so big. I hope it doesn’t grow exponentially because researcher’s life is already discretely painful.
- Youtube: just. a. gold. mine. The 50 and more -long and short- videos I watched this year allowed me to discover many thinkers and perspectives. I’ll archive the best of course.
- And last but not least… Ray Kurzweil. The many books he wrote are nothing if compared to the astonishing amount of contents he produced about himself and his theory. Youtube is flooded of his conferences. Singularity University is the organism he created to promote his scenario and #changetheworld with exponentiality. That will be deeply analyzed too. Ok but a movie maybe? Of course there is a movie (actually 3)! Here you go with the piece of epic-documentary he conceived and produced.
Again, if you have something to say comment this story or write me at giuioquarta96@gmail.com or sign up to the newsletter. I’ll try to combine a serious research work with fresh expositions about the coolest emerging insights and I’m sure strangers will give me the best advice.
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