Evaluating the Technological Singularity Concept

I was first attracted to the idea of the Technological Singularity because I was a recovering pseudoscience freak and immersed in learning all about a mass medium called the World Wide Web. The year was 1997. I was back in Oregon after a disastrous first attempt at college in Rochester, New York; my arms were in pain from a word processing job I had just quit; and I was living off of cashed-out retirement funds that would only last a few months. For 16+ hours every day I browsed the web, learned HTML and CSS, wrote and critiqued fiction, and watched television.

One day I read Vernor Vinge’s “The Coming Technological Singularity“. The first two sentence piqued my interest immediately:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Vinge was a well-regarded computer science professor and science fiction author and he had presented this essay at, of all places, the VISION-21 Symposium held March 30 and 31, 1993 and “sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute.” Was this concept by an apparently well-respected academic pseudoscience, or was it a perceptive observation about just where technology was heading?

It is Vinge’s version of the Singularity that grabbed my attention, but it is Ray Kurzweil’s version that held me. In his version, all technologies, not only artificial intelligence, are progressing at an exponential rate, merging into each other during the Information Age, and eventually leading to a massive discontinuity in human history when everything we know becomes obsolete overnight. Today, there is a debate about which version should be called the “Technological Singularity”. I tend to stick with Vinge’s definition, while secretly harboring Kurzweil’s vision. I cannot help it; when I came across Kurzweil I was also tabulating data about technological progress in spreadsheets and creating graphs. The exponential growth was obvious to me: technologies follow s-curve growth patterns but new technologies arriving just in time to replace plateauing old technologies. I was also becoming fluent in the analogies, concepts, and word and phrase choices used to describe the Internet, web, and other emerging technologies: Moore’s Law, spider’s webs, threads, evolution, gardens, convergence, etc.

Twelve years after first reading about the concept, I have a deeper understanding of Vinge’s Technological Singularity and a deeper appreciation for the progress of all technologies, not just artificial intelligence. However, the concept remains a fringe idea between science and pseudoscience. The Technological Singularity might today enjoy more mainstream popularity and business interest by notable corporations like Google and Intel, but it remains a fact that ideas in this purgatory demand compelling evidence to push them toward further legitimate research and development.

To critically evaluate a concept like the Technological Singularity, reading popular fare like Kurzweil’s books and singularitarian commentary, or attending events like the Singularity Summit is not enough. My own previous vocal exuberance must be tempered by quiet learning and contemplation. That is why I am studying, for example, the impact of mass media on education through history and reading Patterns of Technological Innovation by Devendra Sahal to learn what “technology”, “innovation”, and “technological progress” actually mean.