We live in a wondrous age. Never before has mankind enjoyed such free availability of knowledge, and such control over the natural world. Technology is at our fingertips, and (I firmly believe) embracing it is one of the steps towards the cultural maturity of our species.
You have probably seen this type of graph before. It shows the availability of computing power against time:
It's Science
This illustrates one important truth: we are heading for a ‘vanishing point’ – the point where we have access to infinite information, and infinite understanding and control over the natural world. This point in our development is referred to by futurists and sci-fi geeks alike as ‘The Singularity’. (There is an excellent article on The Singularity here, if you’re interested)
The Singularity is the point at which a civilization advances beyond the point where all the constraints we have struggled with since we stopped flinging poop suddenly vanish. It is the infinite abundance of energy, resources, computing power, knowledge, and the absolute control of matter. Or to put it another way:
It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond this event – call it the Technological Singularity – are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.
- I can’t find the author of this quote
Some say that at this point it will make more sense to ‘upload’ ourselves into a giant computer system, because our physical bodies and brains will only be a hindrance to attaining personal and cultural maturity – or ‘Omega Comprehension’ as Sci Fi author Peter F. Hamilton put it. It is the point where we realise our true and final potential as a species, and possibly move on to something greater than physical existence.
A lot of people think The Singularity is very close – something we will see within our lifetimes. A lot of people put it as close as 2050, and that’s pretty exciting. But we have a lot of steps to take, technologically and socially, before we are mature enough as a species to evolve along with our capability.
Fortunately, five of the technologies that will take us there are already (or nearly) available to us. In some sort of order involving importance and futuristic-ness, they are:
#5 Genetic Engineering
We live in an age of genetically-modified foods, and arguments about designer babies. Genetic engineering is upon us, and you can cry ‘slippery slope’ and ‘playing God’, but it ain’t going away. As I mentioned in the article about the Widening Beauty Gap, it is only a matter of time before genetic engineering is socially acceptable and widely available.
This will have a massive impact on our society. We already live longer than our ancestors, and don’t even worry about illnesses which would have wiped out cities a century ago. Genetic engineering and a greater understanding of cell biology will make things like cancer, HIV and Aids, heart disease and Alzheimer’s about as scary as smallpox.
We will all be prettier, and I believe that lifespans well in excess of a century will become the norm within fifty years, mostly because of genetic engineering.
The Down Side?
Our population is already exploding at an unsustainable rate. We all know that it has doubled in the blink of an eye, and this is in no small part due to advances in medicine. Doubling the lifespan of everyone on the planet would have catastrophic consequences in terms of overcrowding, resource and food shortages, etc. A solution to this will have to be found, or we will face widespread famine and war on a scale we can’t even imagine now.
#4 Nanotechnology & Metamaterials
This is some exciting stuff. A while ago scientists figured out that you could take single atoms of carbon and string them together in a type of rope to make carbon nanotubes. These tubes are Superman’s hair, only a thousand times thinner. Then some bright spark worked out how to write IBM using single silicon atoms.
Since then and in-between there have been some incredible advances in making incredibly tiny structures. We can already make glass that makes water bounce off it (no more windscreen wipers) and make cameras so small they can be swallowed like a pill. This is only the beginning.
Nanotechnology, when it becomes feasible and abundant, will revolutionize our society like nothing ever has. The industrial revolution and the Renaissance will look like municipal bye-elections by comparison. Imagine total control of matter, the stuff of the universe – true alchemy. Turning lead into gold will be a child’s trick. We will be able to take chunks of base metal ore, shove them into factories teeming with nanomachines, and wait for our space station to pop out the other end.
There is no theoretical reason why we cannot do this. Once we are able to control and alter matter at an atomic level we will be able to do anything imaginable with it. The only limit will be an availability of raw materials.
Metamaterials are an exciting new class of substances with many weird properties. They gain these properties not by virtue of what they are, but by how the particles are arranged. These arrangements allow metamaterials to seemingly break the laws of physics in some interesting ways. We already have liquids you can walk on, ferrofluids (video below) which are metallic fluids that respond to magnetic fields, and a God-damned real-life invisibility cloak.
The Down Side
Coupled with the next two on the list, we end up with some nasty Terminator situations. Those aside, however, there really aren’t any downsides to nanotechnology. Unless, like me, you were scared shitless by Alistair Reynold’s Century Rain.
#3 Quantum Computing
The D-Wave Quantum Computer
Quantum computing is like normal computing, except a million times more complicated to explain. The average person’s grasp of quantum mechanics and computing theory is zero (rightly so) and mine is little better, but I will try to begin with quantum mechanics in a nutshell:
Classic physics defines everything as having properties – mass, speed, direction, and position in time and space – and it assumes those to be absolute, otherwise nothing works (please don’t blast me if you know better – I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated). Quantum physics on the other hand accepts that a particle does not exist at a specific point, but rather in a ‘zone of probability’.
That means you can find it at any point in that zone at any time. Not just one or the other, but technically at all points it exists, just with a different probability of actually being there.
Quantum computing attempts to make use of the tiny changes in the quantum state of particles, and use these changes to drive calculations. A normal computer works by flipping a switch to denote on or off – a one or a zero, or a ‘bit’. Using some clever manipulation of math and linguistics, you can then combine a bunch of bits to store a message or do a sum. In a quantum computer, one particle can have (if I’m correct) up to six possible positions, meaning that more calculations can be done at the same time.
But there’s more: That’s only with one particle. Using a whole bunch of them, the power of the computer increases exponentially, until eventually you have a computer capable of calculating Pi to the last decimal, or something. It can also make use of a principle called ‘probabilistic computing’, which is basically a computer that guesses pretty close instead of working out exactly (when getting an answer fast is more important than getting the answer eventually), but it does it faster than a shart sneaks up on you.
To put it in perspective: it took a huge pile of graphics processors over a day to render a single second of the movie Avatar. It is difficult to say how long it would take using a sophisticated quantum computer, but my guess is that a human would see it as nearly instant. Going the standard route in computing, we could probably never attain that kind of speed.
The Down Side
As with nanotechnology, there isn’t an obvious down side to near-infinite computing power. It will solve a lot of problems we have right now that are solely limited by how fast our machines can crunch numbers. The down side will probably come in with the next technology.
#2 Artificial Intelligence
Don’t be fooled – we already have machines that can learn, make decisions, get moody, get high and make art, and convince us that they are human by being better at it than we are. Trillions of dollars are being poured into AI research all over the world, and some exciting stuff is happening.
The major advances are in Simulated Neural Nets – computers that not only work like a brain, but are built like one too. Our brains have billions of neurons, and trillions of synapses, all of which form an intricate net that somehow begets consciousness. Right now that ‘some how’ is the biggest thing between us and the T1000.
Researchers at IBM have already built a cat-like brain. (this is the link to the article debunking IBM’s ‘Cat Brain’ claim, but it is still very interesting reading). Or rather, a part of a cat’s brain. It’s capable of learning its environment, and is growing smarter and smarter every day. It is limited by how many neurons and synapses it has – about 1% of those found in the human brain – but the cool thing is that if it needs more, they can just bolt on some extras!
Research proposals are already underway to build a brain with the same structure, number of neurons and number of connections as the human brain. If any one thing brings us closer to the Singularity, it might be this.
The Down Side
This one is obvious:
Apart from sentient killer robots, there is one more thing that is perhaps even more worrying. Computers that are smarter than us and can think will, inevitably, attain their own Singularity. What’s more, they will be a lot closer to it than we were when we started. Whatever that will look like, it probably won’t work out well for us fleshies.
#1 Controllable Fusion
Finally we come to the holy grail. There is one problem will all of the above technologies: they will inevitably require a lot of energy. That’s energy we don’t have. It is highly likely that we will exhaust our planet’s natural energy reserves – at least the way we extract and use them – before we find another planet to rape. That’s where fusion comes in.
Fusion is not a myth out of The Saint – it’s real and it happens all over the places. It occurs in nature, in stars, and lately in our laboratories. But only in a crude form. When you split an atom, all its guts spill out and a lot of energy is released. But when you smash two atoms together – Hydrogen atoms, for example – they join, and release the energy they don’t need, which is a lot more.
Unlike nuclear fission which produces radioactive waste as a by-product, the end result of a fusion reaction is Helium or water, depending on what you use for fuel. Neither of these are too bad.
The person who creates a way to sustain a fusion reaction and extract its power will contribute more to the development of mankind than any human ever has, or ever will. They will also probably get laid more than anyone else ever has. It is the single most important thing our civilization can strive for, and it absolutely must be achieved at all costs.
Limitless, free energy will set us free. Combined with nanotechnology’s gift of control over matter, we will no longer have to compete for resources – something we have fought and died for since we can remember. Our species as a whole will suddenly have no reason to continue most of their wars, and we will truly be able to begin eradicating world poverty and hunger.
If that sounds like a pipe dream, think of it this way: if anything we need, from food to automobiles, can be made in an unmanned factory from raw materials, and cost nothing, there will be no need to have a job (and few available anyway) unless you wanted to make or build or grow things for the simple pleasure of it. The concept of being “wealthier” than someone will lose all meaning, because everyone will have free access to anything they want, and as much of it as they want (legislation permitting). The only thing we could possibly run out of is time.
The Down Side:
None whatsoever.
Your Host
Norman Conquest
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Nice ideals, but there will always be people looking to use tech to exploit other people.
Do you not think that there will be people who will purposefully sabotage things like this because it won’t benefit them becoming normal?
Sure once it happens there will be no need for ambition, but go to Donald Trump tomorrow and ask him if he would like to relegated to being just as good as everyone else, I don’t think he would dig it very much.
There are a lot of us that would love for this kind of thing to happen, but there are also just as many people that don’t want it to happen and have much more power than we do to influence things.
Summary: People are cunts
Thoughts?
In the middle of my rant, forgot to add, superb article Ch… Normy. Very cool stuff.
You have a fair point, but you’re still stuck in “flatworm” mentality. Sure, in the context of today’s society it makes no sense for Mr Trump to give up his wealth and power so that everyone can be the same. Americans typically do not like that idea.
However, if you look at that quote that postulates events after the singularity are “as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm”, we can imagine that that for post-singularity humans the idea of personal material wealth will most probably seem absurd and pointless – where is the payoff of accumulating vast piles of stuff, when all stuff is free? The numbers stored electronically in bank accounts will be as meaningless as an out-dated currency that is no longer in circulation.
It won’t be the case that wealth, resources and political power are redistributed equally – the concepts will simply cease to have any relevant meaning to our species.
There are definitely reasons to believe that certain people or organisations are hampering technological progress, when that progress will lead to their wallets getting lighter. This is normal, and will probably hamper progress, but I believe The Singularity is inevitable, whether we actively seek it out or whether it happens naturally.
A big part (perhaps the biggest and most difficult part) of achieving The Singularity is not technological superiority – that will arrive inevitably. The major challenge is cultural maturity: being able to accept the new direction of humanity, and the possibility of subsuming one’s identity beneath that of the civilization as a whole. And not all will go quietly. I imagine wars and cultural divides like we’ve never seen, splitting humanity into two or more distinct species (those who accept nanotech implants in their brains and the accelerated consciousness it provides, and those who hang on to archaic morals and stigmas about technology – just like today we still have Bush supporters). This theme occurs in a lot of sci-fi that deals with a post- or near-singularity humanity, probably because it seams like the most logical way for us to go.
Certainly we won’t all suddenly decide to upload ourselves into The Matrix and be happy about it, but as our planet dies it will become impractical to maintain our consciousnesses purely in a physical analogue form, and we will eventually have to allow our minds to expand into a more hospitable substrate than neurons and synapses.