Comments on: How Many Singularities?

By: etbe

etbe — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:46:21 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
Nathan: The above Wikipedia link seems relevant. The more severe curses are “May you come to the attention of those in authority” and “May you find what you are looking for” (which seems particularly relevant to those who seek “interesting times”).

Predicting a collapse and what happens immediately afterwards is not that difficult. The long-term results are often impossible to predict, for example I don’t think that anyone would have predicted NAZI Germany vs the USSR in WW2 as a result of “The Great War” (they didn’t even predict a second world war). But they fall in a range of things that can be predicted.

A collapse of the environment might count as a singularity depending on how you define the term. But a collapse of an empire isn’t (in fact the long term view is that empires collapse as a matter of routine).

Felipe: The industrial revolution might count, but I think it’s less significant than the points I listed. Maybe we should count it under point 4 as “industrial and medical revolution”. As for the telephone, I think it’s just the first stage of the communications revolution which has recently given us mobile phones and the Internet. On it’s own the telephone didn’t change society that much (I think that organised postal systems and the telegraph did more).

Aigarius: That’s a great book! Charles describes future singularities, by definition you can’t have good predictions of future singularities (the predictions must be bad or they aren’t singularities), but he has some interesting ideas and an engaging writing style.

By: http://www.aigarius.com/

http://www.aigarius.com/ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:20:20 +0000

‘Accelerando’ by Charles Stross describes multiple potential singularities. All of the singularities that you have mentioned have a significant network effect – the more people participate, the better it is for each of them. That is a very good feature to look for when searching for the next big thing in any area.

By: Felipe Sateler

Felipe Sateler — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:19:01 +0000

Why did you leave out the Industrial Revolution and the regular telephone? The invention of the steam machines and (later on) internal combustion engines seems to be a great technological trunpoint that changed everything. Similarly, the telephone also changed society significantly. Note that ordering stuff overseas was not crazy talk in the late 1800s and early 1900s (ie, before the world wars seriously damaged the world’s globalization and economy).

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:12:29 +0000

You Want a Singularity? You might get one, good and hard.

etbe: Singularities are, historically, dime-a-dozen. Overwhelming the most frequent of them are out-and-out collapses, including mass starvation and massacres. Development of tools and weapons did not “immediately” vault early humans to the top of the food chain; that happened more than a million years later, so must be traced to some other cause. The effect of agriculture was certainly unpredictable: until the last century, and in rich countries, its main effect was a grossly-expanded but seriously malnourished population.

As developments likely to have surprising effects, the greatest currently may include (1) systematic, radical climate change, (2) systematic elimination of ocean food sources by factory fishing, (3) systematic elimination of river outflows, (4) systematic elimination of broad swaths of animal and plant species, some of which, necessarily, are linchpins in ecological systems we depend on, (5) uncontrolled deployment of nuclear weapons, (6) television-driven religious indoctrination, (7) agricultural use of antibiotics driving development of resistant bacteria.

You want a singularity? You might well get one in your lifetime, but I predict you won’t like it.