Centerfield

Actually, one could argue that progress has slowed, at least in an everyday sense. Think about this way:

Take someone from 1965 (40 years ago) and put them into our world: The two hardest things for them to master would be the VCR/DVD and the PC. Other than that, they could quickly get the hang of modern dishwashers (remember, they were around in 1965), microwaves, cars (basically the same) and even entertainment wouldn't be that much different. More plastic and less metal.

Take that same person from 1965 and put them in 1925 and they would be lost. There would be little, if any electricity, few telephones, far more primitive cars, little air travel, no labor-saving devices like a vaccuum cleaners, dishwashers, electric irons and the like.

The pace of change from 1925 to 1965 is probably greater than the pace of change from 1965 to 2005.

That's an interesting thought, Jacknut, but I wonder if there isn't something you're overlooking there. Between 1925 and 1965, the number of uses for electricity in everyday life exploded. Electric power worked its way into our daily routines in a way that was unprecedented.

But from 1965 to 2005, you could say the same about computers. Yes, someone from 1965 would be able to operate a car or a dishwasher -- but there's nothing remarkable about that. He would be completely lost when it came to communication at home or in the workplace. Cell phones, e-mail, letter-writing, credit cards... There has been so much in the last 40 years that has revolutionized the day-to-day in conceptually changed ways.

I think that's an interesting point Jacknut but I think part of that is that particular space of time, and your chosen length of time. At this scope I don't think it's probably a smooth curve at all and you have the stair-step of electricity usage in there, but if you "zoom-out" the overall trend would be exponentially upward.

Between 1925 and 1965, the major revolutions were in transport and electrical appliances. Progress since then has been significantly slower.

Between 1965 and 2005, the major revolutions have been in electronics and information processing.

Someone from 1965 would have no trouble adapting to today's cars or jet planes. But an iPod would be a miracle. I have 7000 songs on mine; in 1965 that would have been several shelves full of LPs. And as for the Internet... Most people in 1965 had never used a computer, much less owned one.

The rate of change has increased, but in a different direction.

I am on the side of a certain kind of technological progress having slowed down. Neil Steinberg, author of "Complete and Utter Failure" calls it the "Arthur C Clarke Syndrome"; stated in Steinberg's tongue-in-cheek terms: "Just because technology can place three joyless Air Force colonels on the Moon" in 1969 doesn't mean we will have a Moon base in 2001 according to Clarke's novel.

As to using computers, any person in a profession in 1965 (like a lawyer) who knew how to prepare manuscripts using an electric typewriter should not have too much trouble with the basics of word processors and e-mail. On the other hand, there will be a kind of puzzlement "you mean you don't have supersonic airliners" and "butter and eggs are THAT cheap?" and "Where is your robot vacuum cleaner?" (There is such a thing, only most people don't have one because it is not what you think).

To the extent that the latter half of the 20th century may represent "peak oil" and a certain high water mark of energy-using technology, I have a joke about a future PBS special called "20th Century House" where some people are filmed in a "recreation of what it was like for your grandparents" and where the participants are given automobiles (which they wreck, not knowing how to operate one) and things like dishwashers and central heat and airconditioning!

I suspect the exponential assumption is not correct. Many growth processes follow an S-curve -- it starts slowly, then hits an exponential burst, then suddenly flattens out and appears to approach a limit. Of course there may be another burst of growth after that, but it requires a new impetus -- a discovery, an invention, a new paradigm (!).

Many old SF stories suggested that bioscience would be the next great leap forward -- and that was before computers took off.

I have been hearing this arguement for 35+ years.
It is that technology will significantly change the way human beings experience reality and that increases in intelligence will fundamentally change the world. There are several major flaws to this theory. On the scale of evolotionary time technology is an eye blink. The way we are built will not change (mind body problem).

One example- In his history of the wars between Athens and Sparta Thucidides said the primary causes were envy, greed and spite. Does anyone see less of this in the world today then 2400 years ago? Of course not. No increase in "intelligence" will change these aspects of humans at all. If intelligence allowed people to make better moral choices how does one explain Nazi Doctors?

Secondly, humans don't work in the world on a deductive model (see Bertrand Russell-The problems of philosophy). Deduction is a closed loop only induction creates the possibility of new knowledge. The abilty to see a line of research totally at odds with current ideas is a function of creativity not intelligence.

Thirdly, there is no evidence that humans understand why they do what they do now. Is solving these questions a matter of "intelligence" or of asking the wrong kinds of questions and using the wrong conceptual models to analyzse humans. This is a GIGO problem
(garbage in-garbage out) not an intelligence problem.

This is only a partial list. Others could add to it. One is that ontological problems are not a function of intelligence but of point of view. It may be that humans are incapable of answering certain meta questions at all. Godels work in set theory has some profound implications here in the relationship between completeness and consistency in the construction of different universes of discourse.

This is the magic bullet fantasy repeated largely.

I too love Vinge, although I'm not placing bets yet. Enough to say that one of my novel projects involves ordinary humans dealing with superhuman intelligences after a botched Singularity.

One setting I've created suggests that the time up to 2020 is lay the invisible groundwork time. Then after that comes the SF world of the engineer's dreams.

Pournelle had an interesting trick he used to save his Known Space from Vinge. He merely postulated that computers were a mature technology after a certain dramatic run-up. Which actually makes some sense to me reasoning from say the car analogy.

I wonder what you make of Steve Talbott's essay "Logic, DNA, and Poetry". Talbott maintains that AI has completely failed thus far to handle meaning and intentionality, the scientists having believed that they can model it in terms of logical manipulations.

First I believe that a Singularity event could be in the offing. All the ingredients are there or soon will be. But I don't think it would actually occur for several reasons:

1) Using the Carl Sagan, "A billion stars, in a billion galaxies..." condrum about intelligence the thought could be extrapolated to super intelligent machines. Somewhere in this entire universe there must be a couple of civilizations that reached this point. And having that capability, developed the basis for intergalactic travel/communication. So why haven't we heard from someone? And if it hasn't been detected by now, did it ever or will it ever exist?

2) The other is humans do not operate in a vacuum. Reading most of the Singularity lit out there a big assumption is made that the event horizon for the 'Bang' will go undetected. I propose that such an event will be well known to one and all and that a significant percentage of the population will know well ahead of time. And there is the rub.

Humans are driven by profit from their individual endeavors. Been that way for most of recorded history on this planet. Now consider how many decision makers need to be knowledgeable of a change in the environment to alter the course of an event? In the US I'll take a stab and say 10million. That's less than .5% of the population. Now if this 10m is told that in 5 years that society as they know it will change, that the investments they intend to make today will be toast in 5 and that future planning should be shelved till further notice, what do you think will happen? You can be guaranteed no decisions will be made, because remember in business; assurance of profit is guaranteed by mitigating risk. So I offer up two scenarios:

A) Infinite Uncertainty. Knowing of the pending event, decision makers hold back on all further investment. Why spend money on the equivalent of buggy whips? Progress and technology stagnate in anticipation of the event that due to the lack of access to the trigger event delays or cancels the Singularity from occurring. Society muddles thru in an asymptotic technical malaise, each player not wishing to take the next step in fear that to expend the investment they are locked out of resources when the anticipated Singularity supposedly does show up. In a worse case scenario society actually slips backwards having not maintained an emphasis on progress.

I would remind you of Y2K. Businesses across the planet shelved nearly all new development for 5 years to fix a problem. Those that were funded were part or parcel of a means to get them out of the Y2K mess. But it was uncertainty that stopped new IT business in it's tracks.

B) Intellectual Cargo Cultism. Like the postwar Cargo Cults of the SW Pacific whole societies place plans, operations and budgets on hold awaiting a Manna from Heaven based on the arrival of the Singularity. Scientific inquiry collapses due to lack of funding in anticipation of the 'Brain Dividend' that the Singularity is supposed to bring to the masses. Tax bases collapse as the economy spirals into depression accelerating the defunding of even further research. Revolution and/or famine breaks out in major sections of the globe. The singularity never occurs as society is thrown back 50 years.

Only have to remind you of the 'Peace Dividend' hysteria in Congress after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was anticipated that by 2004 that the defense budget would be half what it is now. What is to say that same thought process would not occur in NIST, NASA and the major universities on the same basis?

I would say the Singularity is a given but not a certainty.

Alot of good comments in this thread. A few quasi-random answers:

I hadn't read Talbott's essay, and I thank you for the link. It's true that conventional AI certainly hasn't lived up to its billing, for a variety of reasons.

What's going on here is different. It's not an attempt to understand high-level brain operation, but rather to simulate low-level brain operation and build up from there; in theory, this should give us an awfully brain-like thing over the next couple of decades. Indeed, IMHO, connectionists have been more successful in that they aimed lower, at a hittable target. Neural net software is widely available, and pretty good at what it does.

A similar observation can be made with regard to some of the other comments - large-scale neural network modeling does not per se involve high-level models of human operation, though some understanding should come from the experiments.

Rusty: the overall exponential curve is there. Networks speed up research into everything else by making communication easy,and did I mention Google? Computers speed up research into everything else, by making experiments much faster and alowing simulations. Electronics before it sped up research into computers and everything else. Etc. At any given time, there tends to be one major wave of innovation, but overall all research is happening exponentially faster.

Jon,

Having worked in high tech for fifty years, I seriously disagree with the idea that salvation, or intelligence will come from machines.

In fact, I just recently summarized my thoughts in a post which concludes that the Singularity is coming, and soon, but I think that it will occur as a result of the same incredible process that has driven change for centuries:

Like-minded people finding and talking to each other and then doing something about it

The internet and blogging will drive more change than AI or any proposed machine/mind melding.

Did you miss the new 4 stage process to convert biomass to fuel via a catalytic process?
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/06/wo/wo_060705jaffe.asp?trk=top
Did you miss that IBM is building a 22.8 teraflop supercomputer to model the human brain on the cellular level?
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8119714/
Did you miss two different processes announced this year that for real created nuclear fusion at around room temperature? http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7654627
Did you miss the nanometer size gold and silicon particles that are attracted to cancer cells and kill them upon exposure to infrared light? http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/nanotechnology/dn4341
Any one of these could result in a singularity. Knowledge is accumulating at an accelerating rate. Where it will crash into the cliff of a singularity is not known, but that it will is a pretty sure bet.

Why does everyone assume that humans will remain unmodified. Naturally we will redesign our genomes to increase existing capacities and add new ones, add various electro-optic prostheses, and network with each other and computers. Ultimately humans will merge with computers. Of course, it will be Homo sapiens II.

I think the "increasing CPU power leading to desktop human intelligence in 20 years" argument, popular with Ray Kurzweil and other AI researchers, is misguided. I agree with what Jeff Hawkins said in "On Intelligence" that current AI work is going in the wrong direction because they don't have an accurate understanding of how the brain works. If Hawkins' theory of a "common cortical algorithm" is correct then intelligent machines are more a matter of memory than computing power.

We'll know soon enough. Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing and Handspring) has already formed a company to develop software based on his idea (http://www.numenta.com/). If he's right, intelligent machines are much closer than people think.

Computers don't "think" the way people do, so trying to get them to behave like us is a lot more difficult than it seems. We are also very far away from understanding our own minds to be able to create a new one from scratch.

There are a lot of things in technology that are possible, but not worth the effort. It's possible to create a microprocessor using water instead of electricity. But why bother?

In my opinion, the singularity has already happened. Maybe we've always been in a "singularity" since cave men discovered fire and by the time the leaders of the tribe figured out what it really was, someone invented some other technological thing. Technology is moving fast enough so that our collective government is hopelessly lost in keeping up with it. Remember that on a large scale, it is the organization which must act, not the individual.

I don't particularly agree with the idea that it's a true singularity. We know that we can't study certain things at the atomic level because measuring it would hopelessly affect the system. But it's not a singularity. Before the advent of lightspeed communication (the mid to late 1800s), no one could ever know exactly what was going on all over the world at any given time. Even now, we can't know what's happening on the other side of the world until several milliseconds after the fact. That seems trivial for people, but not for computers. And we've always been in a state where no single person can know all of the technology known by the whole organization. That's been true even in Roman times.

For the record, 10m people is about 5% of the (adult) US population, not 0.5%...

This will be a very different planet in 50 or 100 years. Although I don't expect a Malthusian catastrophe, population growth in developed countries has practically ceased, while the Third World continues to grow. IIRC, world population is expected to level off eventually at around 20B. But almost all the extra 10B people will be dirt poor.

Demographics will change radically. Europe will be "Eurabia" by then, and America's ethnic profile will be far more Latino and Asian than it is today. Populations of the developed countries will grow older, thanks to medical advances, while the populations of undeveloped countries will be very young. China's path is a huge question mark.

In the long run, the new technologies invented in developed world should raise the standard of living for everyone else, but it may not be perceived that way, since I don't think there's much historical precedent for differences in living standards decreasing over time. Or if there is, for instance after the fall of Rome, it is not such a cheery prospect.

Anyway, I guess my point is that whatever the future is like, it will not be reached by any straight-line (or other) extrapolation from the present. Long-term dynamics and the random logic of events are probably far more important than the development of better AI or more godlike biotechnology, just as (to take the example used above) today's world, after the 20th century revolutions in electricity, transportation and communications isn't populated by flappers with cell phones and can't be modeled as simply a 19th century world with better toys.

As Yogi Berra supposedly said, "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future..."

To me this all sounds like equal measures of unbridled enthusiasm and close to pure speculation.

Sometimes collected data shows a patterm that can be modeled using a linear or exponential or other mathematical model. But this does not mean that there's an underlying rule of the universe that this pattern will continue. Because the data is driven by a real world beholden to at least 17 gazillion different variables, not one or two or three or a hundred or four thousand thirteen. Models are a good way to help us understand what we think is happening, and make semi-reasonable projections. But they are invariably (pun intended) simplifications because they don't incorporate all conceivable variables.

Even the ones that include a gazillion variables still had to start with some sort of presumptions that involved the semi-informed extraction of numbers from one's rectal cavity, based on what felt like a decent presumption.

There are any number of real world variables that could render current models obsolete. First, there's the giant assumption that humanity continues long enough...that the sun doesn't burn up or explode, that we don't get hit by a comet or have an ice age or whatever first. There's also the presumption that there are not inherent limits in the materials needed to construct fully realized artificial intelligence. Unforeseen obstacles. Granite ledges under 2 inches of topsoil.

Then there's the presumption that simulated/artificial intelligence is approaching human intelligence, even though the exact nature of human intelligence is not completely measurable.

The biggest and most suspect presumption is that of giant value being added by this mythical artificial intelligence. Will it really be better, faster, and cheaper, or will it be bound by the rubric that you can only ever pick 2 of those 3? Will the singularity free us from paradox?

The point is, there are many good reasons to think that human life (and even all life if you want to call some theoreticl future AI "life) has bounds. It's nice to think that if we can imagine it, it can or must eventually happen. But I doubt that.

Don't even get me started on the speed of light. Or time travel. Or evolving creative judgement, for that matter. Sure, a computer with a giant memory bank can beat most every human at chess. Fine. But if I get all the necessary materials to my backyard, can a robot build me a shed or fix an exhaust problem on my car using a a piece of tin can or a bottlecap? And if so, can it do so better, quicker, and less expensively than I can? And if a computer can drive my car for me, must it obey the speed limit? Is that better?

I have a hard time figuring what this supposed super intelligence is supposed to be able to do. I don't need no stinking singularity. I'll settle for a George Jetson flying car that folds into a briefcase, and a robot that does my laundry and plays planet poker and jupiter gin. :-)

Another problem I see that others have eluded to is the fact that we are a violent species. One poster above talked about how everyone would hold back investment etc. waiting for IT to happen. I say once it looks like we are on the right path, there will be a race to see who can do it first. It is just what we are, and the stakes will be seen as very high.

Suddenly someone will leap ahead, and of course, it will be surmised that they already reached the event but told no one. I mean come on, just because a singularity is reached does not necessarily mean that it will be front page news. what if China does it? And keeps it secret.

Instead of worrying about economic collapse, I would worry that such an event would spark a World War. the whole idea that if I get it, great. But I can not live in a world where the other side gets it, and outpaces me. What do you think we in America would do, if we did not get it first?

Jon Kay: What's going on here is different. It's not an attempt to understand high-level brain operation, but rather to simulate low-level brain operation and build up from there; in theory, this should give us an awfully brain-like thing over the next couple of decades.

I haven't read the book in question, so perhaps the answer is obvious, but I must ask the question: how will starting from low-level brain functions overcome the problem of meaning and intentionality? If I understand him correctly, Talbott's contention is that semantics cannot be expressed as a set logical rules. I suspect he would say that semantics and syntax are two different categories, like size and shape. Try as you might, you cannot represent size in terms of shape. It's a gap no reduction can bridge.

In any case, if you think that computers can achieve human intelligence in whatever way, then you pretty much have to believe the human mind is nothing more than the brain in action; that is, you have to be a physicalist with respect to human nature. But if you are a physicalist, shouldn't you also be an eliminativist, if you wish to be consistent?

Call it a WMD.

It's been so interesting reading the comments thus far that I've been drawn out of my habitual lurking to throw my 2 cents' worth out there :)
OK, first off, it seems to me that a Singularity's position in human history depends to some extent on the observer. To someone from the stone age, we've long since passed it. But to someone from 1925, we might be approaching it. To us, in 2005, it seems a long ways off. This has a corollary: if a Singularity is (partially) defined as the point at which human civilization is no longer comprehensible, wouldn't it recede into the future at the same rate as we approach it? I'm not sure I agree with the corollary, but it's interesting to think about.
The second point I wanted to make is to agree with David St Lawrence. Even if we develop human equivalant intelligence in machines, that doesn't mean they're going to be anything like us. Human minds are massively influenced by our bodies. We have hormones driving us crazy when we're younger, brain chemistry that gets out of whack all the time, and a host of hardwired biological impulses that we spend way too much time pacifying. (cough)sex(cough) An AI would have absolutely none of these. Nor would it have emotions the way we do -- our emotions are to some extent physiological states. AIs don't have a physiological state. I doubt an AI would have any built-in drives at all, except those programmed or hardwired into it. Again, David was right -- the combination of human and machine is very, very potent. We bring planning, pattern recognition, and purpose to the mix; they bring number-crunching and near-perfect memory. Anyone following the research about reading human neural patterns being read by instruments, allowing people to interface with computers using only their minds? How about the monkey that uses its mind to move a robotic arm?
Good God, I didn't mean to go on this long. Feel free to email me with comments, critiques, criticisms, etc.

As a friend of mine said recently. "Forget the flying cars. Where's my robot maid? I want my robot maid!"

What we've seen over the last two centuries is perpetual change, but not constant change, and it hasn't been smooth or predictable. We don't know where the next "quantum leap" in technology is going to come from, we can only guess. And those "quantum leaps" make all the previous predictions worthless. Pretty much by definition, successful innovation comes as a surprise.

I'm 50. There have been some changes in technology during my life but they have been refinements, not revolutions. Cars then, cars now. Boeing 707's then, Boeing 777's now. Phones then, portable phones now. As for computers I think they're fine, but they are not as revolutionary as the webheads believe. 50 years ago I could call someone in Paris on the phone, or send him a letter, or fax him something I had written. I could play games or read books. Computers help us do all those things more efficiently, but again, it's a matter of degree.

For most of human history we could not fly, and then we could. That's a revolution. For most of human history we could not write, and then we could. Revolution. For most of human history we haad no idea what caused illness, then we did. Again, that's a revolution. Being able to play Grand Theft Auto against an 11 year old in Singapore, not really a revolution.

Jim,

You could be correct, but human history is replete with examples of societies that under their present methods of operation go into collapse being unable to sustain themselves when the more advanced societies showed up on the scene. The collapse happens in the present tense of the event.

The difference is business/society now anticipate/plan for detecting change and adjust accorindingly, which was not done in the past. So my point was knowing in advance that the Singularity will come, the collapse of the old present method of operations occurs BEFORE the Singularity trigger event reaches fruition.

But certainly a race to the Singularity could occur.

The most brilliant philosophers and scientists have wondered about the cause of consciousness for thousands of years. No one has made any progress. Even with the recent understanding of computers the theory of intelligence has not progressed much beyond the ideas of Turing--which did not shed much light on the matter. The fact is that we might have sufficient computational power to simulate an intelligence in 30 years but we will still have no idea how to create the simulation. Sure we will be able to exactly recreate, and maybe even understand, the simple nueral networks of lower creatures like ants, but this will hardly lead to AI. Ants don't invent algorithms.

In fact the lack of progress in the creation of AI is not due to a lack of computational power but a lack of understanding. There are only two avenues from here. First, someone makes a breakthrough in the understanding of understanding. But this person would have to suceed where countless geniuses of the highest order have failed. Or more likely, the problem of AI cannot be understood by humans because even the most brilliant of us lack the IQ. The problem of AI is, I think, irreducible. That is it cannot be broken down into small understandable pieces but must be understood without reduction.

And trying to create AI by genetic algorithms is not feasible either. First, it is not clear even how to program the fitness criteria so that conscious intervention is not needed at every step (ala Turing test). Second, even with a hypothetical perfect selection algorithm, the computational power needed is staggering. Probably hundreds of millions (even billions) of generations would need to be spawned and tested. Each individual in latter generations would consist of millions of nuerons. This sort of compuational power is far far off indeed.

We are not even close to AI. And no AI means no singularity.

Sorry, no Singularity.

There is too much uncertainty in our physical universe for a technological Singularity to come to pass. Thanks to natural entropy and imperfect knowledge those things we create wear down and break over time. Not only that but contemporary homo sapiens are only able to comprehend their problems only so well. Moreover, contemporary homo sapiens can only articulate what they know of potential solutions--again--only so well. New things will be developed, only to work so well in certain dimensions, only to be replaced by other things which work only so well in related dimensions, which are then replaced...Heck, even nature works only so well over the course of time; witness the "oops, didn't work so ignore" genes in the genomes of just about (all?) every creature alive today.

As for cars remaining cars, and phones remaining phones: our interfaces for our technologies conform to cultural and linguistic metaphor and experiential analogies which change, albeit slowly, over several generations. For instance I don't anticipate a change in the computer "windowing" interface any time soon as the associated metaphors are just too strong a match for our culture.

I gotta disagree with the notion that we need to understand the exact nature of intelligence to create AI.

We're talking about artificial intelligence. In case you missed it, artificial means "not real" or fake. Seems to me that it's eminently plausible that clever computer scientists could create successive generations of calculating machines that behave in ways that simulate that which we identify as intelligence. Which BTW is something we all think we know when we see it, but which we can't satisfactorily define, as others have implied.

Suppose such a project can evolve by continued development and integration of systems devised to deal both with very specific small problems and prioritization of approaches based on general rules. Such a machine could well have emergent properties. Such an entity could behave as an intellgence far beyond human abilities. Whether it actually is conscious is in my view irrelevant to whether it could represent a singularity. If it provides elegant solutions to even one humankinds most intransigent problems and/or makes human life better in any transcendent way, I could care less whether it's really a duck, or only quacks like one.

Nicole, I don't get why entropy etc. implies that a revolutionary change is impossible. Isn't this like saying that friction implies that a wheel won't roll very fast. If things like entropy and friction imply upper bounds, isn't a judgment about the exact nature of those limits necessarily extremely speculative when history has shown progress to be punctuated(in other words, not always even and steady and following a simple pattern)?

To poach Just S.G.'s point, maybe the Singularity is 20 years in the future, and always will be. If our viewpoints are adaptable enough to keep up with ourselves and our toys, that is. That may or may not be true; at every stage of tech progress, there are always some who can't/won't use the new tools. So far, generational turnover has more or less managed to keep up, but that may not be true forever.

If there is a change of type of progress, incorporating true user-friendliness-involvement-engineering, the transitions may become smoother. So far, technologists and engineers have failed to design and build from this point of view -- maybe because a threshold needs to be passed for it to be possible to model the user up front in that design.

Another variable is the research on delayed aging championed by Aubrey de Grey and the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) group. This would be a Singularity of another sort, which would certainly influence the techno version.

machine intelligence will follow its own path, and what results should be quite different than human. A singularity - a vague catchphrase - the specific meaning is immediately interpreted differently by various readers. Alternately, why not just simply not that evolution cannot be understood prior, because it is.... evolution.

One could of course argue that we (= humans) ARE the Singularity. Are most species conscious? How do we know? No species has exploited the trick of culture as far as we have. One could quip: it's man's nature to make culture. Would someone from 1925 be at a complete loss in 2005? I don't think so. It would've taken them some time to adapt, but people then (certainly in the roaring '20s) had more cultural optimism than we do know (or for that matter existed in 1965).
I think even Enlightenment folks would be able to understand. The people who'd really fail to comprehend are the ones from the Middle Ages. Just think: no one thinks like Dante anymore. No one thinks like the author(s) of the Arabian Nights. People who knew of utopia's with machines or gadgets that could let you fly, would be able to learn.
It's curious, as a last note, how many present people do not understand that 1) there is no mind/body problem and 2) that science works deductively. Inductivism has been destroyed. One does not extrapolate a theory from the facts. You start with a theory and then you test it. A lot of times something else comes out, defying your expectations, but that basically, is the process we call progress.

bk, what I meant is that entropy and human psychology (as it currently stands, en masse) will place a limit on the rate of progressive change. I mean to imply that a kind of Heisenbergian limit exists beyond which the pace of progress will not be able to increase.

Perhaps it's the physicist in me that understands that "naked" singularities cannot exist (thank you, Roger Penrose). Forgive the stretch of the analogy, but there will always be an event horizon and Hawking evaporation. The pace of technological change will never reach the "instantaneous" stage, but I do submit it will continue to speed up until it becomes "damned fast."

I find this whole thread exceptionally fascinating. I am going to have to side the "old guy" here (mikereynolds)- the computer and information revolution may not be all it is cracked up to be. I will remember the quote about being able to play Grand Theft Auto with a kid in Singapore. Of all revolutions, it is certainly the most fragile, since non-physical, encoded information is the first thing to disappear over time in any cultural and social collapse.

Another thought, while we have certain profound revolutions in technology, they do not, in and of themselves, qualify as "progress" or "advancement". I question the entire notion of a continuum of more advanced technology as the equivalent of something akin to progress. Incredibly advanced cultures in the past crash and burn leaving behind the barest of clues how they accomplished their astonishing feats of culture.

Progress and technological advancement is highly specified to a culture and time in history. The future of a particular technology presumes, erroneously, that our culture will exist for a period long enough to find out what it leads to. From past human experience, once the tech is gone, it takes 100s of years to get it back again. And when that technological advancement does return, it is in a completely different form from what it took before.

The possibilities are too great to give any kind of prediction for technology, and there is an exceptionally high likelihood that the prediction will be wrong. Which does not mean we shouldn't try.

I love the idea of the Singularity, and I have great dreams for the technological future. I want to be plugged in and Matrix-ized 'cuz it looks way cool, the way I imagine it. But we humans have a knack for screwing it all up just when the fruit is ready to be picked. And if we don't, then nature helps out and the asteroid or volcano blots out the sky for 500 years and we are thrown to the empty skyscrapers, the dried up sewer channels underground, the overgrown shopping malls, the remnants of civilization seeking out a new way to survive. But that we do and we seem to do it very, very well.

SD

IMHO, conciousness is an intrinsic quality of matter, all matter. What makes us self-aware is the physical arrangement of the matter from which we are composed. Reverse engineering of the human brain is underway, and I think this will net the first concious "machine". A critical component of this AI will be a PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY, a meme set that will be primary guide for the emerging intelligence. To say that machines cannot be concious is to say that we are not (as many have), and is a ridiculous circular non-debate. To not give this emerging conciousness a philosophical outlook will handicap it severly. The debate shouldn't be about "what will it do?" but "what should it do?".