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Chapter 1
Singularity Hypotheses: An Overview
Introduction to: Singularity Hypotheses:
A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment
Amnon H. Eden, Eric Steinhart, David Pearce and James H. Moor
Questions
Bill Joy in a widely read but controversial article claimed that the most powerful
21st century technologies are threatening to make humans an endangered species
(Joy 2000). Indeed, a growing number of scientists, philosophers and forecasters
insist that the accelerating progress in disruptive technologies such as artificial
intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology may lead to what
they refer to as the technological singularity: an event or phase that will radically
change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself, before the
middle of the 21st century (Paul and Cox 1996; Broderick 2001; Garreau 2005,
Kurzweil 2005).
Singularity hypotheses refer to either one of two distinct and very different
scenarios. The first (Vinge 1993; Bostrom to appear) postulates the emergence of
artificial superintelligent agents—software-based synthetic minds—as the ‘singular’
outcome of accelerating progress in computing technology. This singularity results
A. H. Eden (&)
School of Computer Science and, Electronic Engineering,
University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
e-mail: eden@essex.ac.uk
E. Steinhart
Department of Philosophy, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ
07470, USA
e-mail: esteinhart1@nyc.rr.com
D. Pearce
knightsbridge Online, 7 Lower Rock Gardens, Brighton, USA
e-mail: dave@hedweb.com
J. H. Moor
Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, 6035 Thornton, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
e-mail: james.h.moor@dartmouth.edu
A. H. Eden et al. (eds.), Singularity Hypotheses, The Frontiers Collection,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32560-1_1, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
1
from an ‘intelligence explosion’ (Good 1965): a process in which software-based
intelligent minds enter a ‘runaway reaction’ of self-improvement cycles, with each
new and more intelligent generation appearing faster than its predecessor. Part I of
this volume is dedicated to essays which argue that progress in artificial intelligence
and machine learning may indeed increase machine intelligence beyond that of any
human being. As Alan Turing (1951) observed, ‘‘at some stage therefore we should
have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel
Butler’s ‘Erewhon’ ’’: the consequences of such greater-than-human intelligence
will be profound, and conceivably dire for humanity as we know it. Essays in Part II
of this volume are concerned with this scenario.
A radically different scenario is explored by transhumanists who expect pro-
gress in enhancement technologies, most notably the amplification of human
cognitive capabilities, to lead to the emergence of a posthuman race. Posthumans
will overcome all existing human limitations, both physical and mental, and
conquer aging, death and disease (Kurzweil 2005). The nature of such a singu-
larity, a ‘biointelligence explosion’, is analyzed in essays in Part III of this volume.
Some authors (Pearce, this volume) argue that transhumans and posthumans will
retain a fundamental biological core. Other authors argue that fully functioning,
autonomous whole-brain emulations or ‘uploads’ (Chalmers 2010; Koene this
volume; Brey this volume) may soon be constructed by ‘reverse-engineering’ the
brain of any human. If fully functional or even conscious, uploads may usher in an
era where the notion of personhood needs to be radically revised (Hanson 1994).
Advocates of the technological singularity have developed a powerful inductive
Argument from Acceleration in favour of their hypothesis. The argument is based
on the extrapolation of trend curves in computing technology and econometrics
(Moore 1965; Moravec 1988, Chap. 2; Moravec 2000, Chap. 3; Kurzweil 2005,
Chaps. 1 and 2). In essence, the argument runs like this: (1) The study of the
history of technology reveals that technological progress has long been acceler-
ating. (2) There are good reasons to think that this acceleration will continue for at
least several more decades. (3) If it does continue, our technological achievements
will become so great that our bodies, minds, societies, and economies will be
radically transformed. (4) Therefore, it is likely that this disruptive transformation
will occur. Kurzweil (2005, p. 136) sets the date mid-century, around the year
2045. The change will be so revolutionary that it will constitute a ‘‘rupture in the
fabric of human history’’ (Kurzweil 2005, p. 9).
Critics of the technological singularity dismiss these claims as speculative and
empirically unsound, if not pseudo-scientific (Horgan 2008). Some attacks focus
on the premises of the Argument from Acceleration (Plebe and Perconti this
volume), mostly (2). For example, Modis (2003; this volume) claims that after
periods of change that appear to be accelerating, technological progress always
levels off. Other futurists have long argued that we are heading instead towards a
global economic and ecological collapse. This negative scenario was famously
developed using computer modelling of the future in The Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al. 1972, 2004).
2 A. H. Eden et al.
Mocked as the ‘‘rapture of the nerds’’, many critics take (3) to be yet another
apocalyptic fantasy, a technocratic variation on the usual theme of doom-and-
gloom fuelled by mysticism, science fiction and even greed. Some conclude that
the singularity is a religious notion, not a scientific one (Horgan 2008; Proudfoot
this volume; Bringsjord et al. this volume). Other critics (Chaisson this volume)
accept acceleration as an underlying law of nature but claim that, in perspective,
the significance of the claimed changes is overblown. That is, what is commonly
described as the technological singularity may well materialize, with profound
consequences for the human race. But on a cosmic scale, such a mid-century
transition is no more significant then whatever may follow.
Existential risk or cultist fantasy? Are any of the accounts of the technological
singularity credible? In other words, is the technological singularity an open
problem in science?
We believe that before any interpretation of the singularity hypothesis can be
taken on board by the scientific community, rigorous tools of scientific enquiry
must be employed to reformulate it as a coherent and falsifiable conjecture. To
this end, we challenged economists, computer scientists, biologists, mathemati-
cians, philosophers and futurists to articulate their concepts of the singularity. The
questions we posed were as follows:
1. What is the [technological] singularity hypothesis? What exactly is being
claimed?
2. What is the empirical content of this conjecture? Can it be refuted or cor-
roborated, and if so, how?
3. What exactly is the nature of a singularity: Is it a discontinuity on a par with
phase transition or a process on a par with Toffler’s ‘wave’? Is the term
singularity appropriate?
4. What evidence, taken for example from the history of technology and eco-
nomic theories, suggest the advent of some form of singularity by 2050?
5. What, if anything, can be said to be accelerating? What evidence can reliably
be said to support its existence? Which metrics support the idea that ‘progress’
is indeed accelerating?
6. What are the most likely milestones (‘major paradigm shifts’) in the count-
down to a singularity?
7. Is the so-called Moore’s Law on par with the laws of thermodynamics? How
about the Law of Accelerating Returns? What exactly is the nature of the
change they purport to measure?
8. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an intelligence explosion
(a runaway effect)? What is the actual likelihood of such an event?
9. What evidence support the claim that machine intelligence has been rising?
Can this evidence be extrapolated reliably?
10. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for machine intelligence to be
considered to be on a par with that of humans? What would it take for the
‘‘general educated opinion [to] have altered so much that one will be able to
1 Singularity Hypotheses: An Overview 3
speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted’’ (Turing
1950, p. 442)?
11. What does it mean to claim that biological evolution will be replaced by
technological evolution? What exactly can be the expected effects of aug-
mentation and enhancement, in particular over our cognitive abilities? To
which extent can we expect our transhuman and posthuman descendants to be
different from us?
12. What evidence support the claim that humankind’s intelligence quotient has
been rising (‘‘Flynn effect’’)? How this evidence relate to a more general claim
about a rise in the ‘intelligence’ of carbon-based life? Can this evidence be
extrapolated reliably?
13. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a functioning whole brain
emulation (WBE) of a human? At which level exactly must the brain be
emulated? What will be the conscious experience of a WBE? To which extent
can they be said to be human?
14. What may be the consequences of a singularity? What may be its effect on
society, e.g. in ethics, politics, economics, warfare, medicine, culture, arts, the
humanities, and religion?
15. Is it meaningful to refer to multiple singularities? If so, what can be learned
from past such events? Is it meaningful to claim a narrow interpretation of
singularity in some specific domain of activity, e.g. a singularity in chess
playing, in face recognition, in car driving, etc.?
This volume contains the contributions received in response to this challenge.
Towards a Definition
Accounts of a technological singularity—henceforth the singularity—appear to
disagree on its causes and possible consequences, on timescale, and even on its
nature: the emergence of machine intelligence or of posthumans? An event or a
period? Is the technological singularity unique or have there been others? The
absence of a consensus on basic questions casts doubt whether the notion of
singularity is at all coherent.
The term in its contemporary sense traces back to von Neumann, who is quoted
as saying that ‘‘the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the
mode of human life… gives the appearance of approaching some essential sin-
gularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them,
could not continue’’ (in Ulam 1958). Indeed, the twin notions of acceleration and
discontinuity are common to all accounts of the technological singularity, as
distinguished from a space–time singularity and a singularity in a mathematical
function.
Acceleration refers to a rate of growth in some quantity such as computations per
second per fixed dollar (Kurzweil 2005), economic measures of growth rate (Hanson
4 A. H. Eden et al.
1994; Miller this volume) or total output of goods and services (Toffler 1970), and
energy rate density (Chaisson this volume). Others describe quantitative measures of
physical, biological, social, cultural, and technological processes of evolution:
milestones or ‘paradigm shifts’ whose timing demonstrates an accelerating pace of
change. For example, Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar (1977, Chap. 1) names milestones in
biological evolution such as the emergence of eukaryotes, vertebrates, amphibians,
mammals, primates, hominidae, and Homo sapiens, which show an accelerating
trend. Following Good (1965) and Bostrom (to appear), Muehlhauser and Salamon
(this volume), Arel (this volume), and Schmidhuber (this volume) describe devel-
opments in machine learning which seek to demonstrate that progressively more
‘intelligent’ problems have been solved during the past few decades, and how such
technologies may further improve, possibly even in a recursive process of self-
modification. Some authors attempt to show that many of the above accounts of
acceleration are in fact manifestations of an underlying law of nature (Adams 1904;
Kurzweil 2005, Chaisson this volume): quantitatively or qualitatively measured,
acceleration is commonly visualized as an upwards-curved mathematical graph
which, if projected into the future, is said to be leading to a discontinuity.
Described either as an event that may take a few hours (e.g., a ‘hard takeoff’,
Loosemore and Goertzel, this volume) or a period of years (e.g., Toffler 1970), the
technological singularity is taken to mark a discontinuity or a turning-point in
human history. The choice of word ‘singularity’ appears to be motivated less by
the eponymous mathematical concept (Hirshfeld 2011) and more by the onto-
logical and epistemological discontinuities idiosyncratic to black holes. Seen as a
central metaphor, a gravitational singularity is a (theoretical) point at the centre of
black holes at which quantities that are otherwise meaningful (e.g., density and
spacetime curvature) become infinite, or rather meaningless. The discontinuity
expressed by the black hole metaphor is thus used to convey how the quantitative
measure of intelligence, at least as it is measured by traditional IQ tests (such as
Wechsler and Stanford-Binet), may become a meaningless notion for capturing the
intellectual capabilities of superintelligent minds. Alternatively, we may say a
graph measuring average intelligence beyond the singularity in terms of IQ score
may display some form of radical discontinuity if superintelligence emerges.
Furthermore, singularitarians note that gravitational singularities are said to be
surrounded by an event horizon: a boundary in spacetime beyond which events
cannot be observed from outside, and a horizon beyond which gravitational pull
becomes so strong that nothing can escape, even light (hence ‘‘black’’)—a point of
no return. Kurzweil (2005) and others (e.g., Pearce this volume) contend that,
since the minds of superintelligent intellects may be difficult or impossible for
humans to comprehend (Fox and Yampolskiy this volume), a technological sin-
gularity marks an epistemological barrier beyond which events cannot be predicted
or understood—an ‘event horizon’ in human affairs. The gravitational singularity
metaphor thus reinforces the view that the change will be radical and that its
outcome cannot be foreseen.
The combination of acceleration and discontinuity is at once common and
unique to the singularity literature in general and to the essays in this volume in
1 Singularity Hypotheses: An Overview 5
particular. We shall therefore proceed on the premise that acceleration and dis-
continuity jointly offer necessary and sufficient conditions for us to take a man-
uscript to be concerned with a hypothesis of a technological singularity.
Historical Background
Many philosophers have portrayed the cosmic process as an ascending curve of
positivity (Lovejoy 1936, Chap. 9). Over time, the quantities of intelligence, power
or value are always increasing. These progressive philosophies have sometimes been
religious and sometimes secular. Secular versions of progress have sometimes been
political and sometimes technological. Technological versions have sometimes
invoked broad technical progress and have sometimes focused on more specific
outcomes such as the possible recursive self-improvement of artificial intelligence.
For some philosophers of progress, the rate of increase remains relatively
constant; for others, the rate of increase is also increasing—progress accelerates.
Within such philosophies, the singularity is often the point at which positivity
becomes maximal. It may be an ideal limit point (an omega point) either at infinity
or at the vertical asymptote of an accelerating trajectory. Or sometimes, the sin-
gularity is the critical point at which the slope of an accelerating curve passes
beyond unity.
Although thought about the singularity may appear to be very new, in fact such
ideas have a long philosophical history. To help increase awareness of the deep
roots of singularitarian thought within traditional philosophy, it may be useful to
look at some of its historical antecedents.
Perhaps the earliest articulation of the idea that history is making progress
toward some omega point of superhuman intelligence is found in The Phenome-
nology of Spirit, written by Hegel (1807). Hegel describes the ascent of human
culture to an ideal limit point of absolute knowing. Of course, Hegel’s thought is
not technological. Yet it is probably the first presentation, however abstract, of
singularitarian ideas. For the modern Hegelian, the singularity looks much like the
final self-realization of Spirit in absolute knowing (Zimmerman 2008).
Around 1870, the British writer Samuel Butler used Darwinian ideas to develop a
theory of the evolution of technology. In his essay ‘‘Darwin among the Machines’’
and in his utopian novel Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (Butler 1872), Butler argues
that machines would soon evolve into artificial life-forms far superior to human
beings. Threatened by superhuman technology, the Erewhonians are notable for
rejecting all advanced technology. Also writing in the late 1800s, the American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce developed an evolutionary cosmology
(see Hausman 1993). Peirce portrays the universe as evolving from an initial chaos
to a final singularity of pure mind. Its evolution is accelerating as this tendency to
regularity acts upon itself. Although Pierce’s notion of progress was not based on
technology, his work is probably the earliest to discuss the notion of accelerating
6 A. H. Eden et al.
progress itself. Of course, Peirce was also a first-rate logician; and as such, he was
among the first to believe that minds were computational machines.
Around 1900, the American writer Henry Adams
1
was probably the first writer
to describe a technological singularity. Adams was almost certainly the first person
to write about history as a self-accelerating technological process. His essay ‘‘The
Law of Acceleration’’ (Adams 1904) may well be the first work to propose an
actual formula for the acceleration of technological change. Adams suggests
measuring technological progress by the amount of coal consumed by society. His
law of acceleration prefigures Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns. His later
essay ‘‘The Rule of Phase’’ (Adams 1909) portrays history as accelerating through
several epochs—including the Instinctual, Religious, Mechanical, Electrical, and
Ethereal Phases. This essay contains what is probably the first illustration of
history as a curve approaching a vertical asymptote. Adams provides a mathe-
matical formula for computing the duration of each technological phase, and the
amount of energy that will consumed during that phase. His epochs prefigure
Kurzweil’s evolutionary epochs. Adams uses his formulae to argue that the sin-
gularity will be reached by about the year 2025, a forecast remarkably close to
modern singularitarians.
Much writing on the singularity owes a great debt to Teilhard de Chardin (1955;
see Steinhart 2008). Teilhard is among the first writers seriously to explore the
future of human evolution. He advocates both biological enhancement technolo-
gies and artificial intelligence. He discusses the emergence of a global computa-
tion-communication system (and is said by some to have been the first to have
envisioned the Internet). He proposes the development of a global society and
describes the acceleration of progress towards a technological singularity (which
he termed ‘‘the critical point’’). He discusses the spread of human intelligence into
the universe and its amplification into a cosmic-intelligence. Much of the more
religiously-expressed thought of Kurzweil (e.g. his definition of ‘‘God’’ as the
omega point of evolution) ultimately comes from Teilhard.
Many of the ideas presented in recent literature on the singularity are fore-
shadowed in a prescient essay by George Harry Stine. Stine was a rocket engineer
and part-time science fiction writer. His essay ‘‘Science Fiction is too Conserva-
tive’’ was published in May 1961 in Analog. Analog was a widely read science-
fiction magazine. Like Adams, Stine uses trend curves to argue that a momentous
and disruptive event is going to happen in the early 21st Century.
In 1970, Alvin and Heidi Toffler observed both acceleration and discontinuity
in their influential work, Future Shock. About acceleration, the Tofflers observed
that ‘‘the total output of goods and services in advanced societies doubles every
15 years, and that the doubling times are shrinking’’ (Toffler 1970, p. 25). They
demonstrate accelerating change in every aspect of modern life: in transportation,
size of population centres, family structure, diversity of lifestyles, etc., and most
1
descendant of President John Quincy Adams.
1 Singularity Hypotheses: An Overview 7
importantly, in the transition from factories as ‘means of production’ to knowledge
as the most fundamental source of wealth (Toffler 1980). The Tofflers conclude
that the transition to knowledge-based society ‘‘is, in all likelihood, bigger, deeper,
and more important than the industrial revolution. … Nothing less than the second
great divide in human history, the shift from barbarism to civilization’’ (Toffler
1970, p. 11).
During the 1980s, unprecedented advances in computing technology led to
renewed interest in the notion that technology is progressing towards some kind of
tipping-point or discontinuity. Moravec’s Mind Children (1988) revived research
into the nature of technological acceleration. Many more books followed, all
arguing for extraordinary future developments in robotics, artificial intelligence,
nanotechnology, and biotechnology. Kurzweil (1999) developed his law of
accelerating returns in The Age of Spiritual Machines. Broderick (2001) brought
these ideas together to argue for a future climax of technological progress that he
termed the spike. All these ideas were brought into public consciousness with the
publication of Kurzweil’s (2005) The Singularity is Near and its accompanying
movie. As the best-known defence of the singularity, Kurzweil’s work inspired
dozens of responses. One major assessment of singularitarian ideas was delivered
by Special Report: The Singularity in IEEE Spectrum (June, 2008). More recently,
notable work on the singularity has been done by the philosopher David Chalmers
(2010) and the discussion of the singularity it inspired (The Journal of Con-
sciousness Studies 19, pp. 1–2). The rapid growth in singularity research seems set
to continue and perhaps accelerate.
Essays in this Volume
The essays developed by our authors divide naturally into several groups. Essays
in Part I hold that a singularity of machine superintelligence is probable. Luke
Muehlhauser and Anna Salamon of the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelli-
gence argue that an intelligence explosion is likely and examine some of its
consequences. They make recommendations designed to ensure that the emerging
superintelligence will be beneficial, rather than detrimental, to humanity. Itamer
Arel, a computer scientist, argues that artificial general intelligence may become
an extremely powerful and disruptive force. He describes how humans might
shape the emergence of superhuman intellects so that our relations with such
intellects are more cooperative than competitive. Juergen Schmidhuber, also a
computer scientist, presents substantial evidence that improvements in artificial
intelligence are rapidly progressing towards human levels. Schmidhuber is opti-
mistic that, if future trends continue, we will face an intelligence explosion within
the next few decades. The last essay in this part is by Richard Loosemore and Ben
Goertzel who examine various objections to an intelligence explosion and con-
clude that they are not persuasive.
8 A. H. Eden et al.
Essays in Part II are concerned with the values of agents that may result from a
singularity of artificial intellects. Luke Muehlhauser and Louie Helm ask what it
would mean for artificial intellects to be friendly to humans, conclude that human
values are complex and difficult to specify, and discuss techniques we might use to
ensure the friendliness of artificial superintelligent agents. Joshua Fox and Roman
Yampolskiy consider the psychologies of artificial intellects. They argue that
human-like mentalities occupy only a very small part of the space of possible
minds. If Fox and Yampolskiy are right, then it is likely that such minds, especially
if superintelligent, will scarcely be recognizable to us at all. The values and goals
of such minds will be alien, and perhaps incomprehensible in human terms. This
strangeness creates challenges, some of which are discussed in James Miller’s
essay. Miller examines the economic issues associated with a singularity of arti-
ficial superintelligence. He shows that although the singularity of artificial
superintelligence may be brought about by economic competition, one paradoxical
consequence might be the destruction of the value of money. More worryingly,
Miller suggests that a business that may be capable of creating an artificial
superintelligence would face a unique set of economic incentives likely to push it
deliberately to make it unfriendly. To counter such worries, Steve Omohundro
examines how market forces may affect their behaviour. Omohundro proposes a
variety of strategies to ensure that any artificial intellects will have human-friendly
values and goals. Eliezer Yudkowsky concludes this part by considering the ways
that artificial superintelligent intellects may radically differ from humans and the
urgent need for us to take those differences into account.
Whereas essays in Parts I and II are concerned with the intelligence explosion
scenario—a singularity deriving from the evolution of intelligence in silicon, the
essays in Part III are concerned with the evolution that humans may undergo via
enhancement, amplification, and modification, and with the scenario in which a
race of superintelligent posthumans emerges. David Pearce conceives of humans
as ‘recursively self-improving organic robots’ poised to re-engineer their own
genetic code and bootstrap their way to full-spectrum superintelligence. Hyper-
social and supersentient, the successors of archaic humanity may phase out the
biology of suffering throughout the living world. Randal Koene examines how the
principles of evolution apply to brain emulations. He argues that intelligence
entails autonomy, so that future ‘substrate-independent minds’ (SIMs), may hold
values that humans find alien. Koene nonetheless hopes that, since SIMs will
originate from our own brains, human values play significant roles in superintel-
ligent, ‘disembodied’ minds. Dennis Bray examines the biochemical mechanisms
of the brain. He concludes that building fully functional emulations by reverse-
engineering human brains may entail much more than modelling neurons and
synapses. However, there are other ways to gain inspiration from the evolution of
biological intelligence. We may be able to harness brain physiology and natural
selection to evolve new types of intelligence, and perhaps superhuman intelli-
gence. David Roden worries that the biological moral heritage of humanity may
1 Singularity Hypotheses: An Overview 9
disappear entirely after the emergence of superintelligent intellects, whether arti-
ficial or of biological origin. Such agents may emerge with utterly novel features
and behaviour that cannot be predicted from their evolutionary histories.
The essays in Part IV of the volume are skeptical about the singularity, each
focusing on a particular aspect such as the intelligence explosion or the prospects
of acceleration continuing over the next few decades. A report developed by the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence considers the future development
of artificial intelligence (AI). While optimistic about specific advances, the report
is highly skeptical about grand predictions of an intelligence explosion, of a
‘coming singularity’, and about any loss of human control. Alessio Plebe and
Pietro Perconti argue that the trends analysis as singularitarians present it is faulty:
far from rising, the pace of change is not accelerating but in fact slowing down,
and even starting to decline. Futurist Theodore Modis is deeply skeptical about any
type of singularity. He focuses his skepticism on Kurzweil’s work, arguing that
analysis of past trends does not support long-term future acceleration. For Modis,
technological change takes the form of S-curves (logistic functions), which means
that its trajectory is consistent with exponential acceleration for only a very short
time. Modis expects computations and related technologies to slow down and level
off. While technological advances will continue to be disruptive, there will be no
singularity. Other authors go further and argue that most literature on the singu-
larity is not genuinely scientific but theological. Focusing on Kurzweil’s work,
Diane Proudfoot’s essay develops the notion that singularitarianism is a kind of
millenarian ideology (Bozeman 1997; Geraci 2010; Steinhart 2012) or ‘‘the reli-
gion of technology’’ (Noble 1999). Selmer Bringsjord, Alexander Bringsjord, and
Paul Bello compare belief in the singularity to fideism in traditional Christianity,
which denies the relevance of evidence or reason.
The last essay in Part IV offers an ambitious theory of acceleration that attempts
to unify cosmic evolution with biological, cultural and technological evolution.
Eric Chaisson argues that complexity can be shown consistently to increase from
the Big Bang to the present, and that the same forces that drive the rise of com-
plexity in Nature generally also underlie technological progress. To support this
sweeping argument, Chaisson defines the physical quantity of energy density rate
and shows how it unifies the view of an accelerating grow along physical,
biological, cultural, and technological evolution. But while Chaisson accepts the
first element of the technological singularity, acceleration, he rejects the second,
discontinuity—hence the singularity: ‘‘there is no reason to claim that the next
evolutionary leap forward beyond sentient beings and their amazing gadgets will
be any more important than the past emergence of increasingly intricate complex
systems.’’ Chaisson reminds us that our little planet is not the only place in the
universe where evolution is happening. Our machines may achieve superhuman
intelligence. But perhaps a technological singularity will happen first elsewhere in
the cosmos. Maybe it has already done so.
10 A. H. Eden et al.
Conclusions
History shows time and again that the predictions made by futurists (and econo-
mists, sociologists, politicians, etc.) have been confounded by the behaviour of
self-reflexive agents. Some forecasts are self-fulfilling, others self-stultifying.
Where, if at all, do predictions of a technological singularity fit into this typology?
How are the lay public/political elites likely to respond if singularitarian ideas gain
widespread currency? Will the 21st century mark the end of the human era? And if
so, will biological humanity’s successors be our descendants? It is our hope and
belief that this volume will help to move these questions beyond the sometimes
wild speculations of the blogosphere and promote the growth of singularity studies
as a rigorous scholarly discipline.
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