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 These are fictional artificial beings with superhuman abilities coming from a world where humans have been replaced by machines as the dominant race.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 Quantum Of Water

I saw "Quantum Of Solace" yesterday. But this post is not going to be a review about the godawesome movie that it is. The movie definitely gets a 10/10 from me, and anyone who has watched Casino Royale would know that Daniel Craig brings the real n gritty James Bond of Ian Fleming back to life with his superb acting. [Warning : Spoiler Ahead !!] But I'm going to talk about a very important issue that is at the heart of the film : Water politics. In the film, Dominic Greene, a member of a secret organization that is [revealed in Casino Royale] is a businessman heading a company called "Greene Planet". But Greene is anything but "Green". He plots to overthrow the Bolivian government in order to control it's water resources. Mathieu Amalric who plays Greene in the film modeled his role as a wily & pitiful figure, more a politician than the crazed villains of earlier bond films. Amalric based Greene on "the smile of Tony Blair and the craziness of Sarkozy". Buying huge tracts of land in the Amazon rain forest for "reforestation" purposes, Greene reminds one of the many supposedly "green" capitalists who seek to make their billions from the current global focus on anything "environmental". The first effects of such businessmen is already being felt the world over with the current food crisis [overshadowed by the economic one] being worsened by the push [especially in the US thanks to Bush] for bio-fuels made from sugar cane & corn. The hungry in Somalia & Darfur have to compete with the biofuel industry to survive and in the end it is not the biofuel companies that are losing. But Dominic Greene's plan for controlling water resources makes the whole biofuel fiasco look like child's play. According to him : "This is the world's most precious resource; we need to control as much of it as we can." And the man has a point.

"Many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil, but wars of the 21st century will be over water."

- Isamil Serageldin, World Bank Vice President

According to many critics, the Iraq war was nothing but one of America's ways of ensuring a smooth supply of oil from one of the largest oil fields in the world. Around the world, we see a lot of scrambling around for natural resources with significant consequences like China's support of corrupt African regimes. India fares no better with ONGC partnering with repressive regimes like that of Sudan and Burma for developing oil & natural gas fields. Russia flexes it's muscle with a helpless European Union with it's energy company Gazprom providing a significant amount of Europe's gas supply. Energy security is one of the more significant issues in the global security scenario with Obama promising an energy technology revolution once he comes to power. Hopefully his administration will be able to do so. But the current energy crisis will pale in comparison to the coming scuffle for natural resources, the most significant being water. A steady water supply is one of the pre-requisites of any civilization, as historical records show. One can see that almost all of the world's major cities sprung around rivers, coasts & lakes. A city that loses it's water supply simply fades away. The disappearance (or redirection) of the Saraswati river is speculated to be one of the reasons for the gradual fading away of the Indus valley civilization. Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery warned that unless measures are taken the city of Perth could become the first ghost metropolis, with no water to sustain it's population. Los Angeles and it's surrounding ever expanding suburbia is practically on a desert and struggles to find adequate water supply. The same is with Las Vegas and Beijing. The situation is made even worse by global warming as snow fall lessen & glaciers that feed the world's biggest rivers recede. Our very own Ganga is living on borrowed time. The Gangotri glacier which contributes to 70% of Ganga's water is receding at an ever accelerating pace and according to a UN climate report, it could vanish entirely by 2030. From then on, the holiest of holy Hindu rivers will be a seasonal occasion coming and going with the monsoons. About half of India's population [and the entire Bangladeshi population] is dependent on it and the future spells a catastrophe of epic proportions. The same holds for all the rivers originating in the Himalayas like the Indus, the Yangtze, the Mekong & the Brahmaputra. This does not bode well for old treaties like the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan that barely survived many of our wars. The future may see that India & Pakistan fight not for Kashmir but for the rivers that they share. And yeah, Bond goes after Greene motivated by duty and not after revenge for Vesper's death.

The LHC, The End Of The World And The Fountain

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] officially came online on Wednesday. Doomsayers and the rest of mankind alike heaved a sigh of relief. There were no black holes created, even less any strangelets. Maybe they rejoiced without reading the fine print. Maybe the end-of-the-world-is-nigh folks need to strap on their boots once again because the funny rhyming rapper/scientists never really initiated any collision. Yeah that's right, the CERN scientists and engineers "rapped" about the LHC. And it's pretty impressive. Watch the video below shot at the LHC itself with CERN scientists and engineers all grooving around in it.

So there is CERN playing around with some protons on wednesday in some test runs. Even xkcd joked about it. The collisions are scheduled to happen within the month, no specific date. So should we be worried? Not according to the overwhelming majority of scientists. The probability of micro black holes devouring the earth is even lesser than that of Bush solving a quadratic equation. You see micro black holes will likely form but a form of radiation called "Hawking radiation" [after Stephen Hawking] will seep out of them and they will fade away in microseconds.

On the other hand Professor Otto Rossler from the University of Tubingen,Germany is all crazy over the LHC. This is one of the sweet things he has to say about the LHC - “Nothing will happen for at least four years. Then the weather will change completely, wiping out life. There will be a Biblical Armageddon.”[1]. Yeah ... that kind of "crazy". He's sued CERN in the European Court of Human Rights and ranted on and on about the "end of humanity" to the hungry world media. But inevitably his voice soon began to be ignored. Feeling sympathetic and wanting to know about this "mad" professor, I checked out the Wikipedia entry on him. And let me tell you, this guy is no dufus. He is close to being a polymath in scientific circles, authoring scientific papers on biogenesis, differentiable automata, artificial universes and the origins of language !! He bases his LHC claims on some obscure commentary by a scientist on the General theory of relativity some hundred years back. Ok, maybe he's a bit paranoid but we will just sit around and watch if his predictions come true. Rest assured, there won't be anyone (or anything) around to congratulate him if he turns out right :).

The end of the world aside, yesterday I happened to watch a movie called "The Fountain" by Darren Aronofsky. And boy did it take my breath away. It was pure poetry in motion. And I couldn't make any sense of it. But I felt that wasn't it. I was missing something. There was some hidden meaning behind it all. The story was spread across three ages with the lead actor Hugh Jackman as a conquistador, a scientist and as a astronaut/Bodhisattva and the story kept going back and forth the time lines. And the common theme that bonds it all is the Mayan "tree of life" and the protagonist's love/devotion for Izzy/Queen Isabella played by Rachel Weisz. It's about a man's quest to find the elixir of life, a cure for mortality. Later I went and downloaded the movie [I do piracy for educational purposes only ;)]. Finally I could claim to make some sense out of it. And one thing I learned was that this movie has to be appreciated by one's own terms. I would recommend watching it alone. Frankly, it's an awesome spiritual experience. I remember a critic saying so "This movie is too advanced for our times, our tastes have not evolved enough to truly appreciate the movie". One thing I can definitely say about the movie is that the protagonist finally understands the futility of it all and finally accepts death as the true path to immortality.

The Mayan Tree Of Life in The Fountain

Talking about LHC and the Mayan tree of life, it is interesting to note that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21st, 2012. The "long" version of their calendar which started around 5000 years back stops abruptly at 2012. They don't exactly say what happens then. Maybe Professor Otto is onto something.