Stumped by Singularity
When breakthrough technology is introduced, society changes in ways that cannot be foreseen.
For a hunter-gatherer over a hundred thousand years ago, life in a city was unimaginable. To the hunter gatherer, technologies like agriculture, logistics, masonry and specialisation of trade were unavailable. It requires mental models of these technologies and how they combine to form cities to comprehend what life is like in a city.
For us today, true comprehension of what life will be like in as little as twenty years is impossible, and that’s ok. We don’t yet understand the true impact of things we are creating today, like AI, nor can we. We’ll have to find out along the way. Hunter-gatherers witnessed change over many generations. Now we live with change on a daily basis. Let’s explore what that means to our ability to forecast what life will be like in the near future.
Singularity
Many tech thinkers, Ray Kurzweil chief among them, espouse the idea of the singularity. The reasoning is that innovation leads to more and more rapid innovation. Therefore the plodding pace of progress that brought us the wheel, fire, swords and plows over millenia has accelerated to the current rapid progress where many breakthoughs occur close together. The last century is was indeed one of incredible innovations that changed the world. Indeed, from the hunter-gatherer’s perspective, the singularity is already here. We modern humans live every moment in a world that could only imagined as magic by earlier humans, if at all. To quote Brett King, author of Augmented:
“My six-year-old son Thomas won’t need a driver’s license to own a car and it’s highly likely he won’t even own a car; he’ll simply rent car ‘time’ instead. Throughout his entire life, he will never be without a smart device which will soon tell him when to go to the doctor for advice (and his insurer will require him to wear it), he’ll live in a smart house where robots clean and fridges or a household AI order groceries (delivered by a robot), he’ll never use a plastic card or checkbook to pay for anything (and likely no cash either) and he’ll interact with hundreds of computers that don’t have a mouse or keyboard. … [i]f you had predicted these changes 100 years ago, it would have simply been called science fiction”
The Event Horizon
One interesting aspect of singularities in stellar physics, or black holes, as they are commonly known, is the event horizon. At the event horizon, the ability of the outside universe to observe what happens inside that horizon stops. It’s a one-way information boundary. This is exactly what happens to our ability to imagine and organize our future when new technology is introduced.
Let’s look at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The brilliant visionaries who made a breakthrough success of the personal computer, smart phone and app store concepts could not have, and did not, predict phenomena like Tinder and Uber. The idea that we will primarily look online for romance or transportation presupposes that everyone is online all the time in a way even Jobs and Gates did not truly understand or envision.
This is the event horizon of innovation. We can foresee some of what is coming, but we cannot foresee what happens to society at large when new technology is introduced.
Waking up on the other side
Now that the pace of change is very rapid, that means our ability to think about the future as being similar to the present is very limited. Companies that digitally transform a sector or service, like Uber and Tinder did, change the world for all of us in a way that we do not foresee, even if we understand the service being provided on a personal level. The change is emergent and paves the way for other developments that were previously unimaginable. In this sense we are constantly passing through event horizons, only to come up against the next one.
We are finding out, collectively, what life is like now and indeed what it could be like, given our current capabilities. This is the wonderful thing about the introduction to Yuval Noah Hahari’s Homo Deus. It introduces the reader to the idea that we now have choices, as a species, that we never had before and indeed could not have foreseen. Pretty good choices, too, considering the constraints of war, plague and famine we were dealing with before.
The grass may well greener tomorrow
The good news of all this is that we can filter out a lot of noise from companies, hustlers and politicians who claim to be able to tell us about the future. The world has become far too complex, interconnected and evolves far too rapidly for anyone to have insight in what’s happening, let alone what’s going to happen. Change often threatens, especially when it’s sold with a large helping of fear, uncertainty and doubt by people who want to Do Something (or worse, Be Someone). The truth of change is that we can only understand it by going through its event horizon and looking around on the other side.
It’s incredibly hopeful to me that so many more people are coming online over the next decades, able to gather information, share their thoughts and come up with unforseeable and hopefully great things. We face some HUGE issues as a species. I have faith we may yet tackle them, although it will change us and the world in unknowable ways. On to the next horizon!
