Technological singularity — a common misconception
Transhumanists like to talk about the Singularity. They give the impression that technological advancement will increase at an ever-accelerating pace, until suddenly — at some point in the not-to-distant future — something will happen, something beyond comprehension, that will change the world and our society in ways we can’t even imagine.
The misconception that I’d like to point out is this: the Singularity is often viewed as a matter of technological advancement. It’s not. It’s a matter of human perception.
The whole idea behind all of this is that the rate of technological advancement in our society has been roughly exponential up till now, and we have no good reason to expect that to stop in the near future. Because of this, soon the rate of technological advancement will be way faster than even the pretty fast pace of today. It will be zooming! But for those of you who know any math, you might be wondering, “why ’singularity’”? Good question — the exponential function doesn’t have a singularity. It just keeps increasing ad infinitum. A singularity (in mathematics) looks like this: 
Nobody says anything like “technological advancement looks like a rational function with a pole at 2045.” They say that it’s exponential. A function which gets really big as time goes on, but it always exists. Nothing weird.
So where’s this “Singularity” coming from? As I said, it’s a matter of perception. The Singularity is the point at which the advancement of technology is so rapid that it’s beyond the ability of humans to comprehend. Here’s a picture of an exponential function:
See how the curve goes up off the graph at around x=3? There’s not really a singularity at x=3. If you zoomed out, you would see a similar-looking graph, except the curve wouldn’t go out of sight until x=4 or something. So, the situation is just like this. Humans only have limited capacity for understanding new stuff. Once technology is advancing too rapidly, it will “go off the graph”, out of the realm of our understanding, out of our control. Who knows what will happen around that time? Alarmists like to say things like the world will be destroyed, robots will take over and eradicate the inferior humans. Transhumanists like to say that we will transcend our mortal selves, become part of computers, end human suffering and become immortal, or whatever. I have my own (less extreme) beliefs, but that’s for later. Either way, technological advancement probably won’t change its behavior. It’ll keep plugging on innocently, exponentially, oblivious to the impact it’s having on human society.
April 4, 2008 at 11:41 pm
The concept of technological singularity goes back at least 40 years. It has nothing to do with the graph of technological change. It has more to do with the idea of black holes and the event horizon. At some point, things will change in ways that we can not visualize now. Our future is not predictable, because we can’t see past the singularity.
Science Fiction writers could not write stories about it, because you can not reasonably emulate the lives of people that live in that time, just as someone from 200 years ago could not really understand our lives.
April 5, 2008 at 7:10 am
I disagree. A “singularity” (referring to a black hole) is exactly the same thing as a singularity of a function. That term came out of attempts to describe black holes mathematically; you get some differential equations, and the solution will have a singularity. That term has somehow been popularized in science fiction to mean something like a doorway to another world, I guess because everyone seems to hope that wormholes exist and will allow us to do wonderful things.
The technological singularity has everything to do with the graph of technological change. The human ability to comprehend something with a high rate of change is limited. If you write a simple program that starts out with $1 and adds 5% every time you click (compounded interest), it will appear to increase very slowly for a long time, and then all of a sudden it will appear to skyrocket. At a certain point, technological growth will appear to skyrocket, even though nothing “new” has happened (in the sense that the process and forces driving technological growth haven’t changed), and this is where something fundamental has to shift in our society. In the example with $1 in the bank, not much is going on for a long time, and then suddenly you are rich. In the real world, we don’t have any good way to predict what the final result will be…
April 5, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Actually, on closer inspection, I like the singularity graph. After just a few beers, I would say that is a perfect explanation.
Technilogical innovation will accellerate to the point where we can no longer grasp what is happening. Then something will change, IN US, and it will seem like innovation has slowed down and become stable.
I hope that the change is an improvement in our comprehension, and not an end of innovation. It is always easier for socieity to kill the witches than to accept magic.
April 5, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Yeah. To me that is a big concern. So I intend to be involved! If this will mean the creation of some new paradigm that will change how we perceive the world, that will change the definition of “human”, then how could I stand by and just watch the proceedings? No, I will put what force I can in favor of progress!
April 17, 2009 at 3:14 pm
[...] over the heat that a current processor produces, to truly take advantage you would need a Technological Singularity. A TS is technology capable of perpetual improvement, for instance a processor running an [...]