The Information Singularity Arrives Next Tuesday, Around Lunchtime.
You may not have heard of him, but Raymond Kurzweil is one of the most interesting people on the planet. He pioneered character recognition and flatbed scanning in the 70s, made some of the best synths through the 80s and 90s, and he is a leading light in the world of artificial intelligence and accessible education. He’s the reason that Stephen Hawking can talk, that blind people can read regular text, that I can play a convincing piano sound with no strings with headphones on, that you can see an old photo on your computer screen, that we can turn text from an ancient book into digital form without retyping it, and that software can predict trends in the stock market.
Kurzweil has this idea about the future of computers. He calls it the Technological Singularity. The idea is that as computers get faster and cleverer, as we feed more data into them, and as we create systems that allow them to intelligently manage and indeed interpret this information, they’ll become smarter and will become able to improve themselves without our input, and essentially, we’ll be out of the picture, so to speak. It’s not a dystopian Steven King-esque “Maximum Overdrive” vision of the future (for a reasonably credible version of that, see here), but rather a statement of fact as Kurzweil sees it, and that when it happens, he says, we will adapt and continue to live in this “singularity”. Kurzweil also believes these advances (along with advances in nanotechnology and other areas) will result in potential immortality for people in the future. In the meantime, he’s drinking a lot of green tea to keep himself young so he doesn’t miss the event when it happens!
This Technological Singularity sounds a bit far-fetched. But than again, lots of Kurzweil’s ideas about the future sounded far fetched when he pitched them, He predicted the pervasiveness of wireless data transfer, peer-to-peer networking, remote controlled warfare, and flash-memory, before they became technologically possible. He did also predict that we’d be riding around in cars that drove themselves by the end of the decade, and that the main way we’d be interacting with computers would be by talking to them within 2 years. Neither of these things are likely to happen quite so soon. But they may not be that far off.
But what isn’t as far fetched is the related concept of what I guess you could call the Information Singularity, which is an idea hypthothesised by Jacques F. Vallée, one of the people responsible for the invention of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. The Information Singularity puts forward the idea that all information will eventually become available instantaneously everywhere, which is, perhaps quite a far-fetched concept too, but there’s no doubt that our ability to create, develop, combine and share information is improving “exponentially”; a term I use with a bit of trepidation, but you get the idea.
We all have a thirst for knowledge, and up until recently, that thirst could be hard to quench quickly. What’s the capital of Estonia? Who was the president of the US in 1925? What’s the exchange rate between £STG and CA$? What’s the weather like in Brussels today? These were questions that, ten or even five years ago might take anything from an ask around the office to a trip to a library or a long distance phone call to find out. Now we’ve got Google, Wikipedia, Ask.com, Weather.com etc. to answer these questions as soon as they come up. Widgets and gadgets on our desktop get the info to us before we even need it.
And they’re just facts. What about opinions? The war in Iraq? Chavez? Mugabe? You can find a million opinions about these things with a quick trip to Blogger or Wordpress. Indeed, you can become the informer well as the informed so easily, even I can do it!
We can exchange our opinions and expertise with people all over the world in a instant, and others can add to this expertise in another instant. We can collaborate like never before. The Open Source movement is an example of this collaboration. And the rate of change seems to get faster and faster, as Kurzweil and Vallée predicted.
The problem we all face now is managing all this information. How can I fit it all in my little brain? The answer is, I can’t. And in fact, we are getting to a stage where information is being updated and changed so often, and by so many people (as in the case of wikis, forums and blogs), that there’s no point keeping it in there anyway, as it’ll be out of date as soon as you’ve read it. So, basically, the next step is to get computers to manage the information as intelligently, efficiently, and hopefully usefully as possible. Systems like Google Earth, the rather brilliant StumbleUpon, the Music Genome Project and the amazing Photosynth system (recently acquired by Microsoft) are some of the next steps in this information management. We are starting to enable computers to put heretofore unconnected information together in new and exciting ways that we maybe didn’t even think of ourselves.
Basically, now that we have all the information in the world at our fingertips (ok, not quite, but we’re getting there), we are getting computers to intelligently sort it out for us. We are telling them what to think, by filling them with data which we are supplying.
These “singularities” are probably best taken with a pinch of salt. They take current trends and expand them into the future without supposing that these trends themselves may change. And trends do change. For example, while the population of the World is still growing, its rate of growth is, for the first time ever in human history, slowing down.
Still, in some ways, the Information Singularity is here right now, and I am starting to think that maybe Kurzweil is, in part at least, right about the Technological Singularity coming too.