The Coming Technological Singularity

This article was originally written for my college magazine.

The age of humanity as we know it is coming to an end.
We all remember the scary monotone voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the Terminator series. And how does one forget the menacing “agents” from the Matrix? These are fictional artificial beings with superhuman abilities coming from a world where humans have been replaced by machines as the dominant race. This happens shortly after a technological singularity. While the possibility of machines dominating our planet one day is an entertaining notion for us, and an especially profitable one for filmmakers, it has over the years evolved into a very serious academic research area. The advances brought out on the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and nanotechnology bring the possibility of a technological singularity ever closer. And it might be sooner than you think. The creation of the first true artificial intelligence, which analysts put some time after 2040, will supposedly usher in an unprecedented age in human history. And this point in time will be known as "the singularity" or as critics derisively call it - "the rapture of the nerds".


One of the defining principles of the coming singularity is the law of accelerating returns, which states that technological progress happens not in a linear fashion, but in an exponential manner. Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you get two apples today and four apples tomorrow, then how many do you expect to get the day after? Six? Right, as long as you prefer thinking linearly. But there is another option: eight. How? Instead of adding two to the previous number, try multiplying two to it. Then you will get eight instead of six as the third number in the series. What you get here is an exponential series of the form 2^x which will give you a billion digit number within a few iterations! You can try this on your friends and get the “linear” response 90% of the time. So what does this show? The human mind is conditioned out of everyday experience to assume that all growth patterns are linear while in fact many like those seen in the technology industry are in fact exponential. Take for example Moore’s law, coined in 1965 which states that integrated circuits will double in performance every 18 months. This single accelerating principle, which still holds to this day, is the reason behind the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phones. Almost everything you can imagine in this world has been affected by this law. Similar patterns are seen in the Biotech industry with ever faster and cheaper sequencing of DNA and in the Nanotech industry with its super-small machines that are approaching the size of a molecule. The day when smarter than human intelligence is invented, may come sooner than you think as intelligence at its base is nothing but computation.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the effects that the singularity will have on the human race. The negative singularity school with proponents like Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems believes that such an event would be catastrophic to humanity with the machines eventually dominating us with their superior mental ability just as much as we dominate chimpanzees and monkeys today. After all, would you listen to your dog or cat to decide what is best for you? The positive singularity school however is more optimistic. Its proponents like the inventor, Ray Kurzweil [pic above right] envision the emergence of AI that is truly beneficial to humanity. They hope for a world where human misery and suffering will be ended by the rapid technological and scientific advancement brought by super smart machines. They also advocate the gradual merging of humans and machines to ensure that humans after the singularity still stay relevant, albeit in a way that we simply cannot imagine right now.

Singularity used to be a fringe science and technology area had been entirely under the domain of science fiction writers until the past decade. Then the concept began to get closer academic scrutiny and today it is a legitimate field of research on its own. The Singularity University was started inside the NASA Ames research center last month by Kurzweil with help from Larry Page of Google, NASA and several Nobel Prize winners. Here graduate students and executives learn everything from nanotechnology, genetics to artificial intelligence, to prepare for a world that will see unprecedented economic growth just as the ushering in of the industrial age saw the total economic output of the world double every 15 years (60 times as fast as the previous agricultural era). The momentum has also built up over the last couple of years for the development of safe and beneficial artificial intelligence.
The age of the machines has dawned.

A GNU Morality

This is my first blog posted from a non-windows machine. For a while now I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop [dual boot with vista] and I have to say that I am pretty pleased with it all. So pleased in fact that I rarely boot to vista these days. But then why change? I personally find Microsoft's operating systems to be substandard and of inferior quality. I in fact passionately hate the lot, having used various windows flavors from Win'95, Win'98 to XP and Vista, with all of them leaving me in various degrees of frustration, disillusionment and anger. And it's not only the operating systems, I hate most products they make except perhaps the ones from MS Research. Not just because crapware like Vista are DRM software in disguise and not because the constant crashes and BSODs are a real pain in the behind. I hate Microsoft products for a deeper reason. And that is the same reason why I have been using Ubuntu [Intrepid Ibex] almost exclusively for the past one month. It's about morality. Maybe morality is not a good word, it has been misused by people in the west for hundreds of years, especially the religious kind so much that it has now almost dissapperered from mainstream vocabulary. I think I will use a better term : Dharma. Although translated usually as "Duty" in English, the word has deeper connotations to it which are frankly untranslatable to English. Oh yeah, you must be thinking : "What has Dharma got to do with software?". Well, it has everything to do with it. Just watch "The Matrix", you'll know :). Ok seriously, I believe that using free software is more Dharmic than using closed source, proprietary systems. Suppose you buy a car and you decide later to modify it to your liking. It could be a NO2 booster or a car radio for that matter, but the point is : you can do whatever you want with your car, and the car manufacturer wont care. This has been done from the days of the Ford model-T by small town mechanics and auto-enthusiasts to the present day Dileep Chabrias. So we consider it legal and very much moral [read Dharmic] to modify cars, furniture or anything we buy to suit our likings and needs, right? Not really. Well, at least not according to the guys at Microsoft, Apple and other proprietary system vendors. So you are stuck with an annoying OS that comes bundled with your PC and you have spent a fortune on that and other software that ends up costing even more than the hardware. And if you feel like modifying some aspect of it to your liking?? Well, you don't. Period. You bought only the binary and not the source code that build the application. Sounds absurd doesn't it? Well, as simple as this argument sounds it is not an easy one to arrive at. And the people who first arrived at that conclusion were the men and women of the GNU foundation, and not least of all the great RMS : Richard Stallman himself. An iconic figure, the Gandhi of the software world who works out of the MIT AI lab, he foresaw the far reaching consequences of the [then] gradual decline of openness in software. This came about after the US copyright law of 1976.

"In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused the software's source code for the Xerox 9700 laser printer (code-named "Dover"), the industry's first. Stallman had modified the software on an older printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users when a printer was jammed. Not being able to add this feature to the Dover printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This one experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free to modify the software they use." [Courtesy : Wikipedia]

He also commented on what was to be the moral underpinnings of the free software movement :

"Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to "share with their neighbor" and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He has repeatedly said that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are "antisocial" and "unethical". . . . He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software." [Courtesy : Wikipedia]

The GNU project was established in order to make a completely free operating system, which as Stallman frequently states is about being "free as speech and not free as in beer". By early 1990's, the project had built all the necessary tools for an OS except for one very crucial part : the Kernel. Thankfully a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds built a kernel using GNU tools and released it under the GPL. The kernel was soon adopted by the GNU movement and the marriage resulted in one of the pivotal moments in software history: The birth of GNU/Linux. The free software movement has never looked back since. As of today, 423 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers run on GNU/Linux. The next revolution came with the South African billionaire and space tourist, Mark Shuttleworth entering the scene and his non-profit Canonical Ltd's "Ubuntu" coming into the picture. Ubuntu means "Humanity towards others" in Zulu and is derivative of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It's user friendly approach and the steady monetary support by Shuttleworth saw the beginning of a second dawn for the free software movement. And this time, with Linux starting to penetrate the lucrative desktop market, Microsoft was facing the heat. Today they are hundreds of Linux distributions. GNU/Linux is being adopted everywhere from classroom computers to low cost netbooks. This was all a result of the uncompromising souls at GNU and the free software movement. Today we see the values of the free software movement seeping into the creative arts as well [Creative Commons licence]. The selfless work and endeavor of the free software movement and the thousands of developers who adhere to it shows a commitment to morality. and a bright future that is open and free. Free as in speech.

I leave you with an XKCD cartoon about RMS, who by the way I was fortunate enough to meet two weeks before at the Free Software, Free Society [FSFS] International Conference in Trivandrum. I got an autograph from him that said "Happy Hacking". And do visit the Open Source Car Project website. A very logical conclusion to my "car" argument earlier.