Looking back into the future

The further you look back, the more you can see into the future. — Winston Churchill

Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish, a hundred million years ago, something like mice; then million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. — Carl Sagan

Seven Epics

1. Physics : If we rewind time to close to the big bang, it would be information stored as patterns of matter and energy. A few hundred thousand years later, atoms begin to form as electrons got stabilized in orbits around the nucleus. In another few millions of years, atoms started bonding together to form organic compounds.
2. Chemistry: Carbon was quite handy with the ability to make bonds in all four directions. Carbon based molecules became sophisticated and intricate to form ever complex and self replicating molecules like DNA which led to the origin of life.
3. Neocortex: Biological systems evolved a digital storage using DNA to record information about large society of molecules. Using this machinery of codons and ribosome, the earth was home to a plethora of evolutionary experiments. Organisms evolved in all shapes and forms, all of them evolved a globular nucleus where sensory inputs from the environment was transformed to motor output, but the learning was done through millions of generations. If you ever wonder how a spider learns to weave a web, although it has never seen one, the answer is that it never learnt it, instead was evolved over millions of generations of experiments. Evolution has no specific direction, it is an extensive search algorithm. During the cretaceous extinction event around 65 million years ago, evolution found a mechanism capable of learning instantly using the hierarchical mammalian new brain.
4. Fire: It was not until fire, that homo sapiens got the safety, light and energy to build and accelerate the building of their brains, because fire can break down proteins and other chemicals in raw food. Fire also made human communities portable, as fire itself was portable. The first transoceanic enterprise to Australia may have been possible without Oil Lamps and Light, but humans would never be able to inhabit Northern Europe without the advent of Fire. Fire ignited the spark of human imagination to tell stories about the world.
5. Language: It is said that the world is not made of atoms, but stories. We have made stories about Religion, Nation and Money. These stories are even so real that we believe in them. In fact these stories are the key strength that differentiates us from animals. You can never get a Banana from a monkey by promising it a thousand Banana in heaven, giving citizenship in a Banana Nation, or giving a million Dollars. These stories allow us to cooperate with strangers, taking us from insignificant apes to humans that control the planet. Written Language is yet another technology that freed our brain from remembering the story entirely in our mind. Sumerian merchants invented this to keep track of the administration of society — who owns and owes what to whom.
6. Artificial Intelligence. Fire and Language led to a series of revolutions in Agriculture, Wheel, Commerce and Industrial revolution to the Computer Revolution. Even in the Computer Industry, there has been major paradigm shifts, from Electromechanical to Relays to Vacuum Tubes to Transistors to Integrated Circuits. What is really interesting is the rate of paradigm shifts are doubling every decade, the power and price performance of all technology including speed, bandwidth and capacity are increasing exponentially faster than ever before. The printing press by Johannes Gutenberg has taken five hundred years to come to mass adoption, but the internet and mobile technology spread in only one decade. Deep Blue’s victory in Chess in 1997 was not considered intelligent. The mental steps underlying chess is complex and hidden, putting a mechanical interpretation is hard. When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Behind the scenes, there could be programers that can understand this. But even for them this interpretation loses its grips as the working program fills it memory with details too voluminous to grasp. We rarely call it intelligence because, after all the machines were taught from rules of years of human wisdom. When DeepMind AlphaZero defeated the world’s leading chess AI StockFish, it was done by the program learning from scratch for four hours. The advancing AI is now in all fields of Health, Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics. Computers will soon disappear as distinct devices, where displays will be projected to our retina and computing will be woven into our clothes and body. “Computer Science is no more about computers, like Astronomy is no more about Telescopes” — EW Dijkstra
7. Singularity: Telescopes are one of the biggest inventions that has been made. Single Cell Organisms could use chemical gradients to detect the neighbourhood. Mammals could see with their eye — an exquisite evolutionary sensory organ, a distance of a few miles. With the modern telescopes we could see the edge of the universe which is over 13 Billion Light years away. In Mathematics Singularity was denoted to specify something which transcends any finite limitation (eg. y = 1/x when x tends to zero) In Physics it represents a massive star with zero volume and infinite density such that even light cannot escape it. in the 1950, the legendary Mathematician and Computer Scientist John Von Neumann was quoted saying “the ever-accelerating progress of technology 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.” 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 that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt 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. 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. From the human point of view, this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. — VERNOR VINGE, “THE TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY,”