Milestones leading up to the Good Singularity?

I have long held that our present American Civil War (no less than that) is a three-sided affair. There is a quiet majority who still believe in things like pragmatic problem-solving, grand ambition, chipping away at old-bad habits while pursuing technological progress and – above all – courteously negotiating in good faith, instead of raging at our neighbors and our institutions, portraying them as monsters. This majority is presently beleaguered from all sides. Both Left and Right seem bent on crushing any remnant of the old optimistic, can-do spirit that built the nation and an amazing civilization.

All right, I admit that one of those two wings happens to be, at-present, far worse, more dangerous and profoundly more insane; but the other is no less poisonous in its underlying cynicism and suspicion of can-do enthusiasm. 

Hence, what are we to do… those of us who think that: 
(1) past efforts at self-improvement actually worked… and hence... 
(2) more efforts at vigorous self-improvement should be high on our agenda?* 

The solution? To keep on plugging away! To persevere. Continue fighting to make our kids and their kids better than us, the way our parents and grandparents tried to do that -- and succeeded -- with us.

By proudly endeavoring to make the next generation both more ethical and vastly more scientifically/technological powerful – because only that combination can save the world.

With me so far?  Then let’s look for examples of our side in this civil war… or rather, our center… fighting back:

== A Manufacturing Renaissance? ==

“We’ve launched an all-hands-on-deck effort between our brightest academic minds, some of our boldest business leaders and our most dedicated public servants from science and technology agencies, all with one big goal, and that is a renaissance of American manufacturing,” President Obama said in remarks at the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, a high-technology facility adjacent to a rusted factory symbolic of the area’s industrial past, Mr. Obama said federal agencies would invest more than $500 million to seed the initiative. Of that, $70 million is to go to robotics projects. 

I was already aboard the effort to spark a new Manufacturing renaissance. A year ago, I was asked by the Metals Service Center Institute to create a comic book set 20 years from now that discusses the many reasons for US industrial decline... and how it might come back. Have a look at Tinkerers!  

Quoted near the end: "One of the biggest challenges we face as a Nation is the decline in our ability to make things." - Dr. Regina Dugan, Director of DARPA. (DARPA is investing $1 billion in alternative design and production methods, enabling new generations of modular, networked, "seamless," and democratized manufacturing.  In our pragmatic civilization, we need to remember that individuals and self-made teams are the long-term solution creators… but our government, the one we own, will be key to empowering, stimulating, playing a vital role.

== LET’S START BY ENCOURAGING KIDS TO PROGRAM ==

Speaking of empowering… Computerworld Magazine examined the strange disappearance of any useful programming language from modern personal computers, a topic that I launched with my much-discussed Salon article “Why Johnny Can’t Code.”  It’s a subject of great importance, since without a reliable common “lingua franca” language that all students share, teachers and textbooks cannot do what was routine in the 1980s… assign simple, twelve-line programs to their kids, introducing them to the very “basic” notions. Like the fact that human-written symbols propel math-fueled lines of code that command every single pixel that they ever see!

People arguing over “which introductory language is best (e.g. Python vs Perl etc) miss the entire point and are wasting everybody’s time.  The lack of any shared, simple language on ALL computers has crippled the ability of educators to reach the millions of kids who own computers right now. Kids who could be computer tinkerers, the way their parents were.  Any shared language… any at all… would empower educators and students, so long as using it involves as few steps as possible. Anything that requires downloading, instructions or procedure-teaching will lose 95% of students.

My original article sure stirred up a storm! And now I am pleased to say this problem was solved – somewhat - by a person it inspired. Drop by QuiteBasic – a complete turn-key BASIC system that a kid can start typing-into the instant the window opens, showing both graphics and results sections, as well.  Totally intuitive.  Suddenly, via the web, every BASIC assignment in all those old textbooks can come alive!

A perfect solution?  Heck no! By all means start a grass-roots campaign to persuade Apple and Microsoft etc to agree on a turnkey educational, compact and simple introductory language to offer on all PCs! Make it Python, Perl, whatever. Just do it.  But till then, at least quitebasic offers a glimpse of that old can-do spirit.

== And while we’re talking progress toward the Singularity ==

The Technological Singularity – a quasi mythical apotheosis that some foresee in our near, or very-near, future. A transition when our skill, knowledge and immense computing power increase exponentially to enable true Artificial Intelligence and humans are transformed into... well... godlike beings.  Can we even begin to imagine what life would look like after this?

Listen to Ray Kurzweil speak on The Coming Singularity -- and how the exponential growth of information technology will revolutionize human civilization… and your future.

What is the Technological Singularity? An excellent article by Joel Falconer, on The Next Web, cites futurist Ray Kurzweil on the coming Singularity, along with my warning about iffy far-range forecasting: "How can models created within an earlier, cruder system, properly simulate & predict the behavior of a later, vastly more complex system?" 

If you want an even broader perspective, try my noted introduction to the whole topic: “Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism about the Human Future.” For there are dangers along the way, one being Renunciation  -- as a fraction of the population rejects science and technology as a means toward progress.

How about portrayals in fiction? I mean, other than clichés about mega-AI gone berserk, trying to flatten us? Now, from a writer's perspective, the Singularity presents a problem. One can write stories leading up to the Singularity, about problems like rebellious AI, or about heroic techies paving the way to bright horizons. But how do you write a tale set AFTER the singularity has happened – the good version – and we’ve all become gods? Heh. Never dare me! That's the topic of my novella, Stones of Significance.

Ah, but not all techies think the Singularity will be cool.  One chilling scenario: serving our new machine Overlords: Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak,  speculates that humans may become pets for our new robot overlords: "We're already creating the superior beings, I think we lost the battle to the machines long ago. We're going to become the pets, the dogs of the house."

== Singularity related miscellany! ==

Creeply… but probably helpful… new teaching tool! Do you want to play the violin, but can't be bothered to learn how? Then strap on this electric finger stimulator called PossessedHand that makes your fingers move with no input from your own brain.  Developed by scientists at Tokyo University in conjunction with Sony, hand consists of a pair of wrist bands that deliver mild electrical stimuli directly to the muscles that control your fingers, something normally done by your own brain. 

Or do Cyborgs already walk among us? "Cyborg is your grandma with a hearing aid, her replacement hip, and anyone who runs around with one of those Bluetooth in-ear headsets," says Kosta Grammatis, an enginner with the EyeBorg Project. 

Author Michael Choroset, in the World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the Internet, envisions a seamless interface of humans with machines in the near future. Wearable computers, implanted chips, neural interfaces and prosthetic limbs will be common occurrences. But will this lead to a world wide mind -- a type of collective consciousness?

And how do we distinguish Mind vs. Machine? In The Atlantic, Brian Christian describes his experience participating in the annual Turing Test, given each year by the AI community, which confers the Loebner Prize on the winner. A panel of judges poses questions to unseen answerers – one computer, one human, and attempts to discern which is which, in essence looking for the Most Human Computer. Christian, however, won the Most Human Human award.

In The Significance of Watson, Ray Kurzweil discusses the significance of IBM's Watson computer  -- and how this relates to the Turing Test.

Hive Mind: Mimicking the collective behavior of ants and bees is one approach to modeling artificial intelligence. Groups of ants are good at solving problems, i.e. finding the shortest route to a food source. Computer algorithms based upon this type of swarm intelligence have proved useful, particularly in solving logistics problems. 

Finally, how would we begin to define a universal intelligence  -- and how to apply it to humans, animals, machines or even extraterrestrials we may encounter?  

== How to Manage a Flood of Information ==

In the last decade, a tsunami of data and information has been created by twenty-first century science, which has become generating huge databases: the human genome, astronomical sky surveys, environmental monitoring of earth's ecosystems, the Large Hadron Collider, to name a few. James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, discusses how we can avoid drowning in this sea of data, and begin to make sense of the world.

Kevin Kelly discusses his book: What Technology Wants “We are moving from being people of the book….to people of the screen.” These screens will track your eye movements on the screen, noting where you focus your attention, and adapting to you. Our books will soon be looking back at us. 

All books will be linked together, with hyper-links of the sort I envisioned in my novel, Earth. Reading will be more of a shared, communal activity. The shift will continue toward accessing rather than owning information, as we live ever more in a flux of real-time streaming data.

Google looks to your previous queries (and the clicks that follow) and refines its search results accordingly...

...Such selectivity may eventually trap us inside our own “information cocoons,” as the legal scholar Cass Sunstein put it in his 2001 book Republic.com 2.0. He posited that this could be one of the Internet’s most pernicious effects on the public sphere. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, Eli Pariser’s important new inquiry into the dangers of excessive personalization, advances a similar argument. 

But while Sunstein worried that citizens would deliberately use technology to over-customize what they read, Pariser, the board president of the political advocacy group MoveOn.org, worries that technology companies are already silently doing this for us. As a result, he writes, “personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”..."

Very entertaining and informative... and the last five minutes are scarier n’ shit! Jesse Schell’s mind-blowing talk on the future of games (from DICE 2010)... describing how game design invades the real world... is just astounding. Especially the creepy/inspiring worrisome last five minutes.  Someone turn this into a sci fi story!  (Actually, some eerily parallel things were already in my new novel, EXISTENCE. You’ll see! In 2012.)

Enough to keep you busy a while?  Hey, I am finally finishing a great Big Brin Book… a novel more sprawling and ambitious than EARTH … entitles EXISTENCE.  Back to work.

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* Ponder my statement about "self-improvement" in the second paragraph. The Left despises phrase #1 and the Right hates #2. Think about it. That fact encapsulates our problem. Especially for those of us who believe that #1 leads directly to #2.