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"Foresight Development at UAT," John Smart, 2007. (Course Overview. Course Wiki). A core (required) undergraduate course in Foresight Development (futures studies education plus personal foresight activities), developed and taught first at the innovative University of Advancing Technology, Phoenix, AZ. Acceleration-awareness for the university student! | |
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"Speaking to the Web," John Smart, 2007 (18 min). (Video. Audio. Transcript). An informal interview, discussing incremental AI, the conversational interface, digital twins, inner space, and other quite important yet oft-overlooked trends in technological evolutionary development. Courtesy of SIAI and Future Current. | |
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"Systems Theories of Accelerating Change," John Smart, 2006 (20 min). (Video. Audio. Slides. Transcript). A formal presentation at Singularity Summit 2006. Considering accelerating change from universal, biological, human cultural, and technological perspectives, and introducing a few well known and a few unorthodox ideas in acceleration mechanics. Courtesy of SIAI and Future Current. | |
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"Driving Toward an Electric Future: Natural Gas, PHEV's (Next-Generation Hybrids), and Nanobattery Advances," John Smart, 2006. A discussion of trends pushing us toward Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle networks in coming years. The new nanobatteries promise to make electric car recharging almost as fast as gas tank filling at commercial recharge stations, and tomorrow's power grids more decentralized than today's gas stations, supporting greater city densities. | |
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How to Be a Tech Futurist, John Smart, 2005 (PowerPoint, 132 slides, 7MB). Presented at World Future Society 2005, Chicago, IL (July), and at Tech Forum 2005 at the University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix, AZ (June). Some considerations for predicting, managing, and creating the future in a world of accelerating change. | |
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Review of "A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation," Johnathan Heubner, TF&SC 2005, John Smart, 2005. Huebner's paper proposes that human-observed innovation has been globally saturating since the industrial revolution. In the context of other papers on innovation saturation also referenced here, his study may indicate a need for us to learn how to see and measure innovation from a technological, not just a human perspective in coming years. | |
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| What is the Technological Singularity? |  |
Earth's electronic systems have been self-organizing, in a symbiotic relationship with human society, at rates approaching the speed of light since Faraday's time. Grossly, this generalized rate of evolutionary development is at least seven million times faster than the speed of thought in biological systems (the speed of an action potential and synaptic diffusion in a human brain). In an utterly surprising state of affairs, every new computing system over the last century of technological development has managed to be consistently more miniaturized, more resource efficient (per standard computation, however defined), more human autonomous (in the replication of its complexity, again however defined) and more biologically-inspired (having features of evolutionary development or organization increasingly similar to our own) than the last. Physicists presently see no near-term limit to accelerating computational capacity and efficiency trends, other than the Planck-scale limit of fundamental universal structure itself. As a result, the continued acceleration of local technological intelligence is very likely to be the central driver and determinant of the modern era. Hesitantly at first, and quickly now, these increasingly fast and microscopic physical extensions of our humanity may soon learn (encode, predict, and understand) both the physical and abstract nature of all the slow and macroscopic systems in our local environment—our biological selves included. Some 20 to 140 years from now—depending on which evolutionary theorist, systems theorist, computer scientist, technology studies scholar, or futurist you happen to agree with—the ever-increasing rate of technological change in our local environment is expected to undergo a permanent and irreversible developmental phase change, or technological "singularity," becoming either A) fully autonomous in its self-development, B) human-surpassing in its mental complexity, or C) effectively instantaneous in self-improvement when viewed from our perspective, or if only one of these at first, soon after all of the above. It has been postulated by some that local environmental events after this point must also be "future-incomprehensible" to existing humanity, though we disagree. In this fascinating process, technology and biology are becoming ever more seamlessly interconnected and interdependent. As Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute describes, technology is becoming organic, and nature is becoming technologic. Even our minds and intentions, in a process that William Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation calls "personality capture," are becoming incrementally encoded into our increasingly intelligent technological infrastructure, so that it may better anticipate our needs, and serve us with increasing responsiveness and effectiveness with each passing year. While the human animal is scarcely different with each new generation, our "houses" become exponentially smarter, as well as increasingly natural extensions of ourselves. Ultimately, as few discussing these issues currently realize, "What is the singularity?" may not be the most important question to ask, from the human perspective. As we develop increasingly powerful types of human-surpassing technological intelligence in coming decades, and as each successive generation becomes more seamlessly integrated with human actors, actively engaged in solving key human problems, it will become appropriate to ask not what, but "Who is the singularity?" Relatively soon in time, in a profound yet surprisingly subtle phase transition for planetary intelligence, "it" will be "us." Acceleration Studies Foundation Our affiliated nonprofit organization, the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF), is dedicated to analysis, informed speculation, and promoting agendas for action in understanding and managing accelerating change. We are an independent community of scholars, professionals and lay futurists systematically exploring science, technology, business, global, political, social, and personal dialogs in accelerating change. Please join us in considering, critiquing, and prioritizing what may be the single most important issue of the human era. The Prediction Wall With increasing anxiety, many of our best thinkers have seen a looming "Prediction Wall" emerge in recent decades. There is a growing inability of human minds to credibly imagine our onrushing future, a future that must apparently include greater-than-human technological sophistication and intelligence. At the same time, we now admit to living in a present populated by growing numbers of increasingly interconnected technological systems that no one human being understands. The Millenial generation assumes the normality of living in a world of complex, rapidly improving, and yet amazingly stable technological systems, erected like vast beehives or termite mounds, systems maintained and incrementally improved by large swarms of partially-aware human beings, each of which has only a very limited conceptualization of the full potentialities and inherent developmental trajectory of the new technological environment that is emerging. Business leaders face the prediction wall acutely in technologically-dependent fields (and what enterprise isn't technologically-dependent these days?), where the ten-year business plans of the 1950's have been replaced with ten-week (quarterly) plans of the 2000's, and where planning beyond two years in some fields can be unwise speculation. But perhaps most astonishingly, we are coming to realize that even our traditional seers, the authors of speculative fiction, have failed us in recent decades. In "Science Fiction Without the Future," 2001, Judith Berman notes that the vast majority of recent efforts in this genre have abandoned both foresighted technological critique and any realistic attempt to portray the hyperaccelerated technological world of fifty years hence. It's as if many of our best minds are giving up and turning to nostalgia as they see the wall of their own conceptualizing limitations rising before them. The Prediction Crystal Ball Yet at the same time as the prediction wall has emerged in most areas of the future, prediction in certain special domains (the "crystal ball") is now easier than ever. As technology roadmapping expert Richard Albright notes in "What can past technology forecasts tell us about the future?" (Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Jan 2002) information and communications technologies have followed highly predictable (81% over 40 years, in this particular estimate) capacity growth curves since at least the birth of digital computing in the 1940's. Furthermore, as Rolf Landauer and others have found (C. H. Bennett and R. Landauer, "The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation", Scientific American, 48-56, July, 1985), there appears to be no forseeable limit to these capacity growth curves. This strongly suggests we inhabit a special universe that supports accelerating computational efficiencies and energy densities as far down as we can see. While there must eventually be a physical limit to computational efficiency, it may exist only at the Planck scale of space and time. For the forseeable future, predictable technological acceleration will be the dominant planetary phenomenon, one that any serious future-thinker should incorporate into their models and policy considerations. We have more to say about this in some thoughts on the future of professional futurism and in particular technology forecasting, roadmapping, strategic planning, and futures studies. An Essential Singularity To some, exponential growth in technological change appears to be an unstoppable force, driven by stunning and continuous advances in computer and communications industries. Technology, in other words, appears to be rapidly pushing us toward, in John Von Neumann's (late 1940's or early 1950's) phrase, "some essential singularity," a coming phase transition in the nature and power of local computation, beyond which, like a mathematical or gravitational singularity, several aspects of the future must be permanently obscured from our biological vantage point. Several individuals deserve credit for early and extensive championing of the idea of continually accelerating computation, and for considering information technology's future effects on society. Please see our Brief History of Intellectual Discussion of Accelerating Change for more on this on this long and distinguished dialog. Arguably the most important 20th century pioneer and advocate of these ideas has been the roboticist Hans Moravec. Moravec began writing about accelerating computer power extensively in the 1970's, including a famous piece published in February 1979 in Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, entitled "Today's Computers, Intelligent Machines, and Our Future." The final section of this essay "considers the implications of the emergence of intelligent machines, and concludes that they are the final step in a revolution in the nature of life. Classical evolution based on DNA, random mutations and natural selection may be completely replaced by the much faster process of intelligence mediated cultural and technological evolution." Considering the future of computer-human coevolution, Moravec concludes we are rapidly headed for a "post-biological form" for all local, living intelligence: "In the long run the sheer physical inability of humans to keep up with these rapidly evolving progeny of our minds will ensure that the ratio of people to machines approaches zero, and that a direct descendant of our culture, but not our genes, inherits the universe." Many today would consider this proposal unsound, and several social theorists have predicted that the breathtaking acceleration of change that we have seen in modern human civilization cannot continue indefinitely. Arguing in this favor is the apparent "stair step" dyamics of technological change, often involving long periods of apparent stasis or regression (as in the fall of the Roman Empire). Yet when viewed from the macroscopic perspective of the network of global actors, the more one sees the intrinsic smoothness of accelerating technological change, as we discuss in Acceleration and Punctuated Equilibrium in Technological Development. The Astonishing Lack of Limits To Computational Growth A number of arguments for approaching limits to incessant exponential growth in local computation have periodically been proposed. Four are particularly worth careful consideration: miniaturization limits, resource limits, design limits, and demand limits. We consider each of these in No Apparent Limits: Addressing Common Arguments Against Continuous Computational Acceleration. In our analysis, each surprisingly fails to make a credible case that technological change might slow down in coming decades. Social Response to the Singularity Hypothesis If technological acceleration continues, what kind of social and political response can we expect to the singularity hypothesis in coming decades? How will powerful human interest groups react to the idea of increasingly autonomous technological change? That is a difficult and fascinating question, and we have made some early conjectures in that regard. Take a look at Social Backlash to the Singularity Hypothesis, and see if you agree. You might also enjoy Contrary to Popular Belief, some counterarguments to popular beliefs about social and technological trends in modern culture. Those few scholars who currently study the record of continuously accelerating computation and who seriously expect the emergence of an autonomous intelligence (AI) within the foreseeable future, call this event "the (technological) singularity" for several reasons. This phrase, as introduced by Vernor Vinge in 1981, borrows from the traditional body of work on mathematical and cosmological singularities, a point in space or time at which one's existing models of reality are no longer valid. One place we observe this is within a black hole, where even the equations of relativity break down from our perspective within the system, generating only infinities. A Taxonomy of Singularities: Comparing the Literature on Systems of Accelerating Change As we explore the technological singularity concept from a widely multidisciplinary, systems theory perspective, we should attempt to interrelate, if possible, known physical processes that appear to have similar accelerating dynamics. An early effort in this regard can be found in A Taxonomy of Singularities: Comparing the Literature on Systems of Accelerating Change. A Chain of Singularities: The Evolutionary Development of Hierarchial Substrates (EDHS) As one carefully considers the universal record of accelerating change, one comes to suspect that the process is developmental, in the same way that biological systems engage in both evolutionary and developmental change. Simply put, the developmental features of the universe we inhabit seem very likely be organized for convergence, over time, on ever-increasing rates of environmental learning in a special subset of physical systems. This learning appears to be expressed in hierarchically emergent "computational substrates," platforms which encode a record of their search of local phase space, and which use that record as a stable base upon which to build even more powerful computational forms. In a direct analogy with biological development, some characteristics of these hierarchical emergences appear to be part of a statistically determined physical developmental process. If indeed the process is developmental, many of the "envelope boundaries" of the accelerations would be prespecified in the special initial conditions of the "seed" (Big Bang), that created our universe. We discuss this fascinating topic further in A Chain of Singularities: The Evolutionary Development of Hierarchical Substrates (EDHS). For other developmentally related perspectives, you may also consider the speculative Smart's Laws of Complex Systems in an evolutionary developmental universe. |
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| Just Who is a Acceleration Watcher? | |
Modern futurists can be usefully divided into four camps with regard to acceleration awareness. There are the Unexposed (those who have not yet encountered this fundamental meme), the Ignorers/Deniers (those who have been exposed but either ignore or deny its relevance), the Watchers (those who suspect the topic has real future relevance, but are committed only to seeking more scientific data and insight on this phenomenon) and "Believers" (those whose response is an absolute and often uncritical acceptance, based primarily on faith). As the name Acceleration Watch implies, our goal in coming years is to do our own small part to stimulate a number of technologists, academics, independent scholars, and lay futurists to move from unexposed, ignoring, or denying into watching, critiquing, and modelling the fascinating phenomenon of accelerating and increasingly autonomous computational change. At the same time, we do not seek to push any in our community into true belief in the technological singularity hypothesis, as there is nowhere near enough good science yet available on the subject to justify that option. Nevertheless, we hope our own publications, and the ASF's semi-annual conference, Accelerating Change, are helping to stimulate the development of theory and evidence that will eventually allow such a formal science to emerge. An "Acceleration Watcher" is therefore neither absolutely convinced—nor uncritically happy—that the technological singularity is going to happen, but believes the phenomenon of accelerating change deserves immediate and careful scientific investigation. Rather than professing belief or disbelief in the topic of the technological singularity, it makes more sense for those who presently investigate this phenomenon to consider themselves instead as observers, analysts, students, researchers—or critics of singularity-exhibiting processes in all their forms. Those who study accelerating change understand that there are better and worse paths toward human-machine futures, and they don't want to be caught off guard by the wide-ranging social effects of ever-more-powerful changes in computation. Even if they anticipate that the singularity speculation may be correct, they know that human beings do not easily model exponential change. As Arthur C. Clarke, Francis Crick, Ray Kurzweil and others have proposed, human cognitive (and perhaps, perceptual) systems appear to be built to make quasi-linear models, at least on a first quantitative approximation, whereas the computational elements and systems of our local environment exhibit exponential emergences and other natural non-linearities. So it is that humanity only unevenly—and often unrealistically—incorporates exponential expectations within its psychology, as we now wisely do in our projections for next year's computer products, and much less wisely, for example, in our expectations for the short-term performance of our technology investments. Humans may be wired to directly perceive reality in a nonlinear manner, as some cognitive scientists have proposed. Humans are nonlinear physical systems, so their computational architecture must, on some level, be nonlinear itself. Nevertheless, it is true that exponential systems, before they reach their "blowup" phase of growth, always appear to be linear systems, and thus human beings, as slow modelers of fast systems, are continually taken by surprise in the ferocity of their emergence. As one famous example, recall the chessboard metaphor, involving 64 doublings of rice grains, with only one grain placed on the first square. This system appears quite tame until just a bit past the middle of the board, when it suddenly produces an entirely unexpected and overwhelming effect, bankrupting the King, and blanketing the entire surface of the Earth in a sea of rice several inches thick. Kurzweil calls this runaway effect "entering the second half" of the board. So it will apparently soon be with local computation. Therefore, as we continually refine our models of the future we will need to work together closely to help each other understand the forces at work, and to make better personal and societal decisions as we manage the coming transition, in the most moral and human-friendly manner possible. Technology, tools, and computation are apparently not neutral phenomena. First, we have long realized that technology amplifies human tendencies, both for better and worse, depending on the tool and context. Therefore where, when, and how a technology is introduced becomes a powerful social and personal choice. Furthermore, we are finally beginning to understand that computation, through a succession of technologies and tools, is apparently rigged by universal developmental 'design' to create local complexity at an ever-accelerating pace. This new complexity in turn brings its own self-balancing, integrative, and convergent properties to the local environment, emergent properties that are still in the early stages of scientific description. See our introductory page on convergent evolution(ary development) for a better understanding of convergent universal developmental processes. Finally, in what may be a hidden law of development, we may be approaching limits to the local knowledge that can be gained about the universe with our existing and finite computational tools. This very interesting and controversial topic, sometimes called ergodicity or "computational closure", argues that not only physical structure but our maps of physical reality undergo massive unifying convergence the more complex they become. As Phil Nelson has said, perhaps we might we relabel "the Singularity as" "the Unity." The latter name may better convey its personal, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions in the decades ahead. If the general public were able to understand that our approaching technological singularity is simultaneously creating a highly convergent mental framework from which to understand the universe, a simple name change from singularity to unity would evoke interest and joining, rather than fear and resistance, especially from the religious. Yet being able to make the claim that progressive computational closure and unity are presently occurring, while it seems intuitively obvious to me from an anecdotal perspective, is no easy task at this early stage of our understanding. I look forward to significantly more scientific investigation of such issues as the universal limits of computation, computational closure, and the unifying nature of convergent models of reality in coming years. Acceleration Watch aims to do its own small part to help us all educate ourselves on the relevant issues, as the winds of change continue to rush at us ever faster each day for the rest of our lives. Due to inherent universal processes related to the nature of growth in complexity, computation, and information, ours is the first generation to experience continual "Future Shock" (Alvin Toffler, 1970). It is the essence of twenty first century existence to be utterly and constantly overwhelmed by technological and informational change. The resources at this website seek to help you understand this apparently natural developmental process, and to provide balance and perspective as you navigate the storm. For introductory information on communities discussing these issues, as well as a range of early, prescientific predictions for when the technological singularity will occur, see our overview of Singularity Timing Predictions, Discussion Groups, and Introductory Links. |
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| The Watcher (Intrigued Skeptic) Behind This Site | |
My name is John Smart, and I research and write about accelerating change. More. |
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| Increasingly Autonomous Technological Evolutionary Development Will Lead to the Tech Singularity | |
Increasing technological autonomy, however we choose to measure it, is one key assumption behind the singularity hypothesis. Were it to be proven incorrect in coming years, singularity models would have to be fundamentally revised. However, data to date give every indication that autonomy is dramatically increasing every year. Writers on the singularity topic now suggest that progressively more human-independent computer evolution must eventually transition to a "runaway positive feedback loop" in high-level machine computation, from our perspective. We are well on the way down the autonomy path within the computer hardware domain. Since the 1950's, every new generation of computer chip (integrated circuit) has been designed to a greater and greater degree not by human beings but by computer software. In other words, an ever-decreasing fraction of human (vs. machine) effort is involved in the hardware design process every year, to produce any fixed amount of computer complexity, however we choose to define that complexity. In fact, the late 1970's was the last time entirely human designed (non-software aided) chips were routinely attempted. The 1980's saw the rise of powerful chip design software, the 1990's the emergence of electronic design automation (EDA) software, and recently, evolvable hardware approaches have produced a few specialized chips that are "grown" entirely in silico, without any human intervention whatsoever, beyond initial configuration of the design space. Such systems discover useful algorithms that are often incomprehensible to human designers. Self-replicating robots, while also still quite primitive, have recently passed the proof-of-concept stage, and are now benefiting from powerful advances in simulation and rapid prototyping technologies. It is now well known that software follows a slower complexity/ performance doubling rate than the hardware substrate. Commonly cited measures are six years, vs. 18 months, for a doubling in price performance, a figure that must vary widely with algorithm, development approach, and software class. But even here, we have seen surprising autonomy advances in recent years. In an accelerating emergence since the 1980's, we have seen several new sciences of emergent, evolutionary, and "biologically-inspired" computation, such as artificial life, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, neural nets, parallel distributed processing, and connectionist modeling. These new computer sciences, though still limited, have created a range of useful commercial applications, from pattern recognition networks in astronomy that seek out supernovas, to credit card fraud-detection algorithms which substantially outperform classical programs. These industries, while still underdeveloped and of limited scalability, now employ tens of thousands of programmers in a new, primarily "bottom up (self-guiding), and only secondarily top down (human coded) approach to software design. Perhaps even more importantly, biologically-inspired approaches have demonstrated that they can increase their own adaptive complexity in real-world environments entirely independent of human aid, when given adequate hardware evolutionary space. And it is clear that the hardware space, or "digital soil" for growing these new systems will become exponentially cheaper and more plentiful in coming decades. Both Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) and Hans Moravec (Robot) have recently proposed that perhaps even as early as 2020 to 2030 we will have sufficient hardware complexity, as well as sufficient insights from cognitive neuroscience (reverse engineering salient neural structure of the mammalian brain), to create silicon evolutionary spaces that will develop higher-level intelligence. But in what may be the most interesting and profound observation, there is now good evidence that technological systems enjoy a multi-millionfold increase in their speeds of replication, variation, operation (interaction/selection), and evolutionary development by comparison to their biological progenitors. Many of these speedup factors appear to range between 1-30 million for higher order processes, with a proposed "average" of 10 million (electrochemical vs. electronic communication speeds). Therefore, if it is true that accelerating autonomy is an intrinsic feature of any learning system, as some systems theorists have proposed, and if it is also true that today's technological systems are learning on average ten million times faster than the genetic systems which preceded them, and thousands of times faster than the human beings who catalyze them, then we can expect substantial increases in machine autonomy in coming years. This speed differential has been measured by a number of different approaches, and it is not yet clear which is the most important learning metric. Commonly used genetic-technologic comparisons are data input rates, output rates, communication speed, computation speed at the logic gate and in the entire system, memory storage and erasure speed, and cognitive architectural replication speed, among others. If this multi-millionfold learning differential truly exists, and if today's most complex computers are roughly as intelligent as differentiated cells or simple insects, each of which emerged between 400-600 million years ago, this implies that the evolutionary computational systems of coming decades may be engaged in rediscovering the entire metazoan evolutionary developmental learning curve within a period of perhaps 40-60 years. That idea alone is breathtaking to contemplate. Even the evolutionary developmental history which allowed australopithecus to advance very quickly, in evolutionary timescales, through homo habilis and homo erectus to modern homo sapiens, over a span of 8-10 million years, represents less than one year in hyperaccelerated technologic evolutionary developmental time. We thus begin to suspect, incredibly, that even this type of high-level "discovered complexity" will be recapitulated within the coming machine substrate in one very interesting year of future development only a few decades from the present date (2041? 2061?). So it is that many sober and skeptical thinkers now find it plausible that the semi-intelligent systems of the 21st century, as they become truly self-improving and evolutionary, will rapidly reinvent within the technologic substrate at first all of the lower functions of autonomy and intelligence, and in one final brief burst, even the higher functions of the human species. Thus even such functions as high-level language, self-awareness, rational-emotive insight, ethics, and consciousness, complex and carefully-tuned processes that we consider the essence of higher humanity, are likely to become fully accessible to tomorrow's technologic systems. What happens after this occurs must be even more dramatic, as you can well imagine. For a bit more on this apparently inevitable process, see Self-Organizing and Self-Replicating Paths to Autonomous Intelligence (A.I.): An Overview. Top-down interventionist programs in biological systems, as with genetic engineering and biotechnology, always lack technology's bottom-up, self-organizing capability. For this and other reasons, it is now becoming clear that infotech, not biotech, will be the primary pathway for the future of accelerating local intelligence. The fundamental difference between these two paradigms is not yet apparent to some biotech-centric futurists. For more on this interesting issue, see Fundamental Limitations on Twenty-First Century Biotechnology. |
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| Understanding Accelerating Change is Profitable | |
In the period prior to the (technological) singularity, certain human endeavors will experience sustained and unrelenting exponential productivity increases. Studies demonstrate that your long-term (10+ year) capital investment in those areas will substantially outperform all other market sectors. Maintaining a good understanding of the motive forces causing this exponential growth, and ways to measure business productivity using theories of information, computation, and complexity, should significantly improve your business foresight. Furthermore, identifying the developmentally important technologies and well-run companies at the center of the transformation will powerfully affect the performance of your company and your investment assets. Combining this knowledge with a sound and diversified long-term technology investment strategy can stabilize your financial future in a world of accelerating change. More on the Pre-Singularity Economic Environment. These are practical benefits that are worth pursuing, as they pay off immediately, rather than in 2020, 2140, or 2240. After all, the choices we face today are always the most relevant issues of our daily lives. All the rest of the apparent structure of the universe is ultimately context to allow us to make better computational choices, economic, political, personal, moral, logical, emotional, and spiritual choices, in the present moment. If you'd like more perspective on the way one's spiritual choice is a form of computation, consider the following brief speculative piece on that topic. |
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| Why Understanding Accelerating Change Will Improve Balance and Accelerate Compassion — A Humanist/ Transhumanist Perspective | |
Any balance achieved is always a dynamic balance—biologists know this concept as homeostasis. In order to achieve balance in the midst of accelerating change, we must aggressively seek to understand the exponential forces at work in our local environment. One of the great benefits of living in an envirionment where our technology is speeding up and complexifying all around us is that increasing numbers of us can now afford to slow down and simplify our lives in the human space, to attack fundamental social, political and humanitarian injustices worldwide, and to achieve a deeper, better balance between our increasingly "organic" technological environment and our intrinsic human biology and evolutionary psychology. The rapidly changing requirements of the ecologist's worthy call for "environmental sustainability" are just one clear example of this new opportunity. Modern global sustainability literature (i.e., Hawken and Lovins, Natural Capitalism) now incorporates a steadily deeper understanding of technology as a tool to achieve greener futures. Likewise, "product takeback legislation"(PDF) that is now emerging in several European countries, is another excellent sustainability initiative. Such legislation requires manufacturers to be increasingly responsible for recycling and rebuilding the products they produce. In short, the more intelligent our technology becomes, the more we discover that we can economically and politically afford to keep raising the bar for its interface with the human environment. In the process, we minimize the dangers and downsides, hide impacts and irritations from human view, and develop balancing and accountability technologies, capable of deep world modelling and fine gradations of response. In general, we learn to use our technologies to reinforce the primary values of our social and cultural environment. So when we talk about our "environment," we need to realize that we cannot in that analysis ignore our accelerating technological environment, a very important component of the modern natural world. Though it pales next to scale and spectacle of the celestial, geological, and biological worlds, our accelerating technology has its own undeniable beauty, awe, and wonder, and is without a doubt the most continually surprising natural emergent phenomenon of the present day. We say "natural" because it seems the height of our species' arrogance to assume that we are capable of creating anything that is truly "artificial," in other words, not an expected product of natural universal processes. We may create imbalances, pollution, dehumanizing first-generation solutions, and other negative externalities by our lack of social foresight and poor choice of path, but such are our natural mistakes, and as such they may be naturally corrected. Technology and its algorithms are simply the most recently developed natural universal substrate. An inevitable philosophy, morality, and movement toward development of "natural technology," while simultaneously understanding it as a potentially biology-surpassing computational substrate, is presently waiting to be born. In the process, we should realize that our technologies, when inadequately assessed or poorly implemented, can cause as many problems as they create, especially in early developmental iterations. Technological catastrophes also abound, though perhaps for deep universal reasons that we will consider at another time, they have historically always been sharply self-limiting in their destructive effect. At the same time, many deleterious effects may be quite subtle, such as those that unconsciously contribute to what Richard Rhodes (Visions of Technology) calls "structural violence"—products, policies, and infrastructure which, by their inherent design, contribute to division and discrimination more than inclusion, enfranchisement, and access. Primitive automobiles that indirectly contribute to the death of 1.3 million human beings in auto fatalities annually, yet are necessary for economic life, cities without public transportation and computer programs, or products which are unusable by non-technological elites are a few examples of such violence, and there are many others. As we seek to develop ever stronger forms of local balance within our natural environment of accelerating change, we will need to intelligently incorporate the best new technological ideas within our humanistic framework, in order to both preserve and improve our selected values and ideals. Yet amid all the dangers and concerns, some of our most astute observers of technology have noted that an "accelerating compassion" is also emerging. Our political, legal, economic, and social systems are seeking an increasingly global rather than local balance, as we develop ever more integrated and democratizing networks of communications, facilitating progressively more pluralistic oversight, more egalitarian law, and more internationalized trade. Certainly there are short-term setbacks, as are presently occurring in intellectual property law after the internet emergence, and in civil liberties after physical catastrophes, such as 9/11. But these excesses balance themselves out at their earliest opportunity, apparently as a direct function of the learning capacity of our social, political, economic, and technological systems, systems that improve dramatically every year as we approach an apparent technological singularity. This convergence on a ubiquitous, self-balancing, and ever more intelligent web of information and technology is leading us to a place where all human actors are increasingly recognized as important and are being increasingly helped to become self-actualized contributors to the human enterprise. At the same time, our increasing social complexity is moving us toward a world where other living organisms are treated with the care and respect we give to those humans and animals closest to us.Many socially-aware futurists, such as David Brin and his EON proposal, have suggested that culturally appropriate technological development ("uplifting") of those individuals and social systems with less education, infrastructure, and economic resources than ours is becoming a widely prevalent phenomenon. Such uplifting of those less fortunate than us is now coming within the scope and interest of enlightened small groups such as our planet's 100,000+ nongovernmental organizations (NGO's), whose emergence and networking is a recent phenomenon. Uplifting is also beginning to accelerate within the ranks of the individual mega-millionaire altruists, an even more recent emergence. Perhaps especially relevannt is the philanthropy being initiated by those whose net worth is directly due to the recent acceleration of technological systems. We must admit that among the sins of technology as presently deployed have been the creation of a number of frightening global disparities. A few thousand of today's wealthiest individuals possess a net worth equivalent to the bottom three billion of our planet's inhabitants. Yet the very absurdity of some of these imbalances is finally precipitating a situation where a handful of companies, or even single technology- and wealth-aided individuals (e.g., George Soros' economic development efforts with closed societies) are able to solve complex social problems, in communities or across continents. Some early versions of these new technologies, developments, and programs, such as golden rice for vitamin A deficiency, haven't lived up to initial expectations. But other solutions, such as satellite and cellular phone deployments in the third world, or the rate of East German redevelopment after reunification, or of Indian and Chinese development aided by multinational manufacturing, have done surprisingly well. We at ASF predict that our planet is within two decades of era of "Magic Philanthropy," an era that will be rapidly accelerated as our optically-interconnected world becomes increasingly small and precious, and as our computational, bio, nano, and cognitive technologies become truly powerful and ubiquitous in the post-2020 CUI network world. At the same time, we are collectively learning to measure (now) and progressively close (in coming decades) the educational and resources divide between the greatest and the poorest among us. This process is a direct recapitulation of the way we first learned to recognize (1800's) and later control the problem of runaway population growth. As those who have carefully studied this issue know, the third derivative of world population went negative for the planet as a whole circa 1970, and even for such regional holdouts as India and Africa in the 1990's. The world population is now projected to to hit a maximum of 9 to 11 billion circa 2050, and to decline substantially from that point forward. Unbenownst to many, a "technological contraceptive" effect is presently rapidly emerging in every developed nation on Earth. Population sizes are presently declining in every technologically developed country that is not growing through immigration. I believe this is occurring for deep reasons involving our older reproductive drives being superseded by our evolutionarily newer, more powerful drives for learning and self-actualization. Computation always accelerates, wherever it can. Like self-stabilizing population control, our self-stabilizing planetary record of nuclear and biological arms control is similarly encouraging, and even more time compressed. Here, the arms' proliferations occurred in the 1950's and 1960's, the realization of wasteful excess arrived in the 1970's, and the control efforts and substantial reductions began in earnest in the 1980's and continue powerfully to this day. At the present time, our first world intelligence and immunity network finally appears to be on the verge of mandating a new anti-WMD proliferation policy for all global governments. Let's hope it happens more quickly than the skeptics expect. We can also expect and demand that the current imbalance of our international informational divide will itself transition to a broad egalitarianism of access to the planetary information grid in coming decades. This will echo past processes of technological diffusion (vaccines, agriculture, basic infrastructure) but now with even greater time compression in a new, self-balancing process. Such mega philanthropists as Walter Annenberg, Arnold and Mabel Beckman, Eli Broad, Joan Kroc, Bill and Melinda Gates, George Soros, John Templeton and Ted Turner, and philanthropists such as Mark Andreessen, Larry Ellison, Dean Kamen, Ray Kurzweil, John and Catherine MacArthur, Michael Milken, Gordon Moore, Catherine Muther, and many others have distinguished themselves as humanitarians and humanists that promote research and technology to deeply improve human welfare. Their tradition is a long and noble one, mirroring the efforts of Johannes Gutenberg, Louis Pasteur, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Margaret Sanger, Jonas Salk, and many other inventor-visionaries who demonstrated a deep and accelerating compassion in the employment of their own best technologies of the day. Such individuals are all implicitly transhumanist in the way they embrace appropriate science and technology as the great lever of human progress. We should note here that we are using the word "transhumanist" in its most specific and powerful "technological humanist" definition. Thus we refer not only to those individuals who seek to use technology to increase human capabilities, but particularly those who strive to do this while increasing planetary balance and compassion over time. Stated alternatively, a transhumanist, even more so than a humanist, is not only a humanitarian, but an individual who strongly suspects that technological development, when properly directed, managed and balanced against other human needs, is usually the most important, effective, and beneficial pathway for improving the human condition. Finally, the word "transhumanist," more specifically than "futurist," refers to those who expect that the convergent future for biological humanity will be a deep and transformative integration with future versions of the technology we are now engaged in producing. One misperception in some circles is that transhumanists necessarily advocate a range of socially unpopular or controversial technologies. The reality is that the majority of transhumanists, while they are committed to aggressively investigating the feasibility of technology to improve human welfare, do not personally advocate many of the more extreme, potentially dehumanizing, or socially disruptive potential applications. Therefore, transhumanists' views on technologies such as human cloning are widely varied, and you will today find increasing numbers who would advocate banning its high-risk use by reproductive geneticists for the satisfaction of a few wealthy individuals. Instead, you might find them advocating carefully regulated scientific investigation under committee-reviewed protocols, and such humanitarian medical research goals as cloning research for organ regeneration. Transhumanists, in our definition of the term, are any who seek to chart an accelerating, dynamically balanced and ever more compassionate path as they explore an inevitable course of technologically improving and extending our natural human abilities. Increasingly, we will extend those abilities in ways that must progressively change us into something much more than our present biological selves. One organization attempting to responsibly map this emerging space is the World Transhumanist Association. Selectively engaging in transhumanist dialog, while strongly retaining your common sense and humanist ethical intuitions, can be of great benefit to developing personal and social foresight for our accelerating future. |
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Why 'Design' (A Universe Tuned for Life and Intelligence) Does Not Require a Designer, and Teleology (a Theory of Destiny) is Not a Theology — Understanding the Paradigm of Evolutionary Development |
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In recent decades, science has uncovered an impressive and ever-growing list of elements of universal 'design' which appear to be specifically conducive to the emergence of life. This deep and valuable concept, the anthropic principle, exists at the interface between cosmology and theology, and is aiding the growing rapprochement we are observing between science and spirituality. In its most interesting developmental variant, this principle proposes that the fundamental parameters of this universe have somehow become "tuned" for the ever-accelerating local emergence of computational complexity. In considering this proposal, it is important to realize that careful universal design, if true, does not require the embodied existence of a specific universal designer. As an alternative and conceptually simpler explanation, the universe we are in appears more likely to have been self-designed, very probably over many successive cycles, as has occurred with all other known replicating complex adaptive systems within the universe. Fortunately, the new scientific paradigm of evolutionary development may provide powerful insights into this issue. In the biological domain, living organisms have required many successive cycles to develop their own special initial parameters, which are carefully tuned for emergent form and function within the lifecycle of any particular organism. Likewise, if we consider the universe as a developmental process, we can propose that a number of natural phenomena, such as the emergence of life, biological intelligence, or electronic consciousness (the technological singularity), may also be highly predictable future events. We can even testably propose that certain emergences are a "destiny" that the universe must locally (or multi-locally) arrive at, failing developmental catastrophe. Such predictions are not at all equivalent to a theology (a religious faith), though some would attempt this connection. The words "design," "destiny" and "predestination" make some (but fortunately, not all) scientists cringe, for important historical reasons. Let's review those reasons now, and discover the way new theories of self-organization and evolutionary development are allowing us to finally move beyond our historical prejudice. First, those words are occasionally used in religious contexts in somewhat unscientific ways. Indeed, many current "Intelligent Design" (I.D.) theorists of various religions mistakenly assume that design implies designer, and this also has kept some scientists from confronting these important issues—or worse, caused them to dismiss the mounting evidence for carefully tuned universal 'design.' Fortunately, not all I.D. advocates assume an embodied designer. Increasingly, they are beginning to understand the possibility of cyclic self-design, as occurs in biological systems. Second, there has long been a misconception that the idea of predestination of a complex system must somehow oppose the idea of a perceived "free will" within that system. In actuality however, these are nonexclusive concepts. Developmentalists (not chaos theorists, who occasionally muddy the issue) have shown us that complex systems built on special, tuned, and iteratively self-designed initial conditions will utilize evolutionary chaos (strange attractors) in the process of creating a long chain of statistically predetermined developmental events (ordinary attractors). These two parallel perspectives on physical process allow us to understand how human and other complex adaptive systems can simultaneously contain two apparently contradictory qualities. Those qualities are both an irreducible evolutionary "freedom" (essential pseudorandomness to self-observation, of one's own thought and behavior) as well as an inherent developmental "predictability" (statistically predictable psychological and behavioral trajectory, based on physical contraints of the interacting systems). Third, and perhaps most importantly, design- or destiny-averse scientists may have come to their perspective because they have focused on the well-known, well-studied findings of the randomness of evolutionary processes, but have completely overlooked the potential applicability of the deterministic phenomenon of biological development. It is clear, for example, given a permissive environment, that a fertilized human egg is "destined," 13 years later, to become a fully developed adult organism with very specific features, and the ability to pass on its own mature sperm or egg in an iterative evolutionary developmental cycle. It is also clear that such eggs or "seeds" must pass through a whole series of time and structure-specific future events in their unfolding. What is not known to a surprising number of scientists and systems theorists today is that all known developmental processes incorporate countless random, chaotic phases of evolution within their unfolding developmental plan. Discovering the way that chaos is used in self-organizing developmental systems will clearly be one of the keys to the puzzle of growing autonomous adaptive technological systems on silicon substrates in coming years. If you are interested in building biologically inspired computers and are looking for a grand theoretical and experimental challenge, there may not be a better one than understanding developmental biology, at the present time. The predominant randomness seen at low levels (molecular, genetic, cellular, signalling systems, etc.) is productive, is constrained by, and informs the future expression of the overarching developmental program. The paradigm and process of evolutionary development thus incorporates evolution, but in a manner that does not disrupt the larger program of developmental emergence. So it is with any developmental system that a special subset of future events—a small but very significant minority—will be highly "statistically predestined." Perhaps the most important modern proponent of this perspective was the scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who coined the elegant, profound, and still-little-used term, "cosmic embryogenesis," (four Google hits in 2003, ten in 2004) to propose that universal cosmology is apparently developmentally programmed to proceed through a series of inevitable emergent stages of information processing while also searching out a large number of locally unique evolutionary paths in the process. Teilhard's stages, geosphere, to biosphere, to noosphere, remain intuitive and relevant today. Yet like models of human consciousness itself, developmentalist models of universal change are still weak and recently emergent in the scientific community. A nice website for bibliographic updates to Teilhard's developmentalist paradigm is Arthur Fabel's Naturalgenesis.net, an "Annotated Anthology Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe." This collection of annotated reference material suffers only from the perception, also echoed by Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and other ecological thinkers, that humanity and our institutions are entering some kind of "crisis" that will require us to "radically reorganize" our conception of the universe. In fact, it is looking quite likely now that most humans and our institutions may never learn this majestic developmentalist paradigm consciously, yet the transition to a postbiological substrate appears to be going quite well globally, perpetuated in numerous unconscious and partially conscious ways, as we learn how create an progressively cleaner, safer, and more transparent world, and as we facilitate the creation of technologic intelligence systems that far exceed anything biology can do, by apparent universal self-organized developmental design. In Destiny of Species, I propose that our universe exhibits all the features of an evolutionary developmental system as it unfolds within the multiverse. Developmental systems such as biological organisms use the learning they acquire during their lifespan to reorganize (carefully tune, across multiple iterations) their initial developmental parameters less randomly in subsequent cycles. Thus, keeping learning (adaptation) central to our discussion will help us understand the evolutionary value of assigning individual responsibility wherever possible in what also appears to be, not in its evolutionary but in its developmental features, a statistically deterministic universe. It is also worth noting that even though we may find evidence everywhere for intelligent (e.g., anthropic) universal design and apparent "destiny," such as the singularity, any speculations we may have regarding an intelligent designer remain in the realm of our own personal theology. None of this is to denigrate theology, which has its own unique place in the consciousness of humanity and is a computational choice that must be faced by all who contemplate the reasons behind the splendid order we observe. Agnosticism, Humanism, Atheism, Animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, or any of the other myriad perspectives we may consider, even Nihilism, are all personal theological choices, based on faith (even an assessment of the incompleteness of data is still a faith) and ultimately defensible only to ourselves. Some authors (see Kurzweil, Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999) equate spirituality with the evolutionary processes of consciousness itself, thus attempting to capture it within a potentially scientific framework. But theology and spirituality involve not only the paths we choose to take to live better, more "spiritual" lives, but also include beliefs about the otherwise unknowable structure of reality. If, like transcendentalist philosophers, we see conceptions of God as essentially extrapolations of the utilitarian and scientific concept of infinity—defined as an "unending process" in our discrete mathematics—we may suspect that theology will remain with us and our electronic successors indefinitely, as a productive and personal counterpart to scientific investigation. They are two separate domains, the first based on a personally revealed faith in universal process and outcome, and the second perhaps as fundamentally axiomatic, but more restricted in its application, and more rigorously attempting to eliminate those axioms over time. This helps clarify that speculations on the nature of the singularity, in all its forms, are well within the domain of critical and scientific investigation, and must be considered separate and apart from our personal theologies, whatever they may be. |
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| Brief Homework for the Reader | |
At present Ray Kurzweil's, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999, is perhaps the best single book to concisely introduce yourself to mechanisms and implications of the coming technological singularity.
Once you've read Spiritual Machines, you may wish to explore Ray's 60 page precis, "The Law of Accelerating Returns," at his well-organized site on the future, KurzweilAI. This precis is an outline of The Singularity is Near, 2005, a more extended version of his ideas in these areas, and a worthy advancement of the world's lay and scientific attention to acceleration studies issues. If you'd like a more cosmic, philosophical, and teleological take on the meaning and direction of Earth's accelerating evolutionary development, I recommend Teilhard de Chardin, either the briefer Man's Place in Nature, 1956/2000 or the more difficult The Human Phenomenon, 1955/99. Teilhard is challenging to read at times, but his understanding of the emergent importance of consciousness, ethics, emotion, love, and the "psychical" properties of matter, in balance with the simpler, more scientifically tractable physical emergences, has rarely been equalled. Arthur Fabel's edited collection, Teilhard in the 21st Century, 2003, is also recommended. We could give you more homework, but then we wouldn’t be doing our job, which is to educate you on Acceleration and Universal Evolutionary Development Studies concepts in the most high-yield, time-efficient manner possible. |
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The Acceleration Clock — Countdown to Emergence?
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Current Acceleration Watch guesstimate for Emergent A.I.: 2060 (± 20 years) For an overview of prominent singularity timing predictions, see Singularity Timing Predictions, Discussion Groups, and Introductory Links. In the current and quite speculative literature on this topic, a rough average date of 2040 A.D., with a primary range between 2020 and 2060, encompasses the majority of existing predictions on the arrival of electronic consciousness / autonomous intelligence (E.C., or A.I.). My own personal investigations suggest that 2060, with ± 20 year standard deviation for 68% confidence (2040-2080), and ± 40 year standard deviation for 95% confidence (2020-2100), is more realistic early estimate. Be sure to enjoy and cherish what some of our most careful observers expect to be the last 54 (or 14, or 94, depending on your intuition) years left in the Simply Human Era. We should be highly suspicious to find that this date falls within a timeframe so self-servingly and conveniently within several of our own lifespans. Yet there are a number of quite valuable early quantitative estimates that support the 2040 to 2080 timeframe. One thing appears certain, this current prediction will be revised up or down toward greater accuracy as the fields of Acceleration Studies and Evolutionary Development Studies emerge in coming years, and as better acceleration metrics (technometrics, informetrics) and models come into use. Accelerating the development of these academic disciplines is one of the primary goals of our ASF community. The Acceleration Clock is intended as an optimistic complement and successor to the infamous (and still valuable) Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We would do well to keep one eye on the clock! |
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| Further Exploring | |
If you can spare the time—perhaps the key question for all of us in this accelerated age—you might enjoy Vernor Vinge’s brief (8 page) and illuminating essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," (1993) which began the rapid spread of discussion of these concepts in recent years. Consider also skimming Damien Broderick’s accessible The Spike, 2000 (home page), the first generalist work on the topic of the singularity. Broderick’s book is more of a survey than a thesis work, so if you are looking for a general history and overview of singularity-related ideas, this is a good start. Especially insightful is his new addendum to the 2nd edition, available online as "Tearing Toward the Spike." (2000). Ray's new book, The Singularity is Near, 2005, is the latest major work that has been published on this still-neglected topic. As developed in his 60 page precis, it does not directly discuss universal mechanisms or propose a specific longer term trajectory for accelerating change, though it does an excellent job in providing broad evidence for this change, and in exploring its pre-singularity implications beyond the Broderick book. Another informative short treatise is Francis Heylighen's Socio-Technological Singularity, part of the impressive Principia Cybernetica Web project. My own forthcoming work, Destiny of Species, builds on the insights of Vinge, Broderick, Kurzweil, and Heylighen, and goes further to suggest universal developmental mechanisms for accelerating change, and specifically how these mechanisms appear to be rapidly leading us toward a particular universal endpoint. This developmental singularity hypothesis is a speculative extension of work by Edward Harrison, Lee Smolin, Bela Balazs, James Gardner, and other physicist-cosmologists and complexity theorists in recent decades. Destiny is an expansion of my thesis essay, "White Hole Destiny?" originally presented at the May and September 2000 Foresight conferences in Palo Alto, CA, and the formalization of ideas I first developed as a middle school student in 1972. For a brief, accessible background paper to the developmental singularity hypothesis, you might wish to read Bela Balazs' "The Role of Life in the Cosmological Replication Cycle," 2001. James Gardner's Biocosm, 2003, is an excellent book-length exploration of the same idea. While Vinge, Broderick, Kurzweil, and I all agree on the imminence of the singularity and importance of physical mechanisms, we each suggest clearly different post-singularity futures, with Destiny predicting the most specific kind of future yet proposed. Whether the developmental singularity model is essentially correct, or whether some new model yet to be proposed will supercede it, is a topic for future scientific debate. KurzweilAI.net, Edge.org, Foresight.org, Extropy.org, Transhumanism.org, and Principia Cybernetica, are all important nonspecialist web communities that have extensively discussed accelerating technological change and the technological singularity from their own philosophical perspectives. A visit to any of these sites can be quite informative. Other important futures organizations, like the Long Now Foundation (Long Bets, The Clock of the Long Now, 2000) and WorldChanging.org, seek to help people develop longer range and global perspectives, while still paying attention to growing technological intelligence. Groups like our Acceleration Studies Foundation can be considered the transformation/tech automation "yin" to the sustainability/human responsibility "yang" of Long Now. I'm sure all of these organizations are very interested in a balanced approach to both technology automation and human responsibility. Nevertheless, ASF's focus on better navigation of our accelerating technological environment tends to be off to one side of this spectrum, while Long Now's emphasis on the sustainable human environment is off to the other side. Note that these are a complementary pairing: studying each will help you gain a deeper understanding both of the big picture and of the best course we can chart through it, day by day. There are also a small number of "singularitarians" who profess a conditional belief in the concept of the technological singularity, and who propose that striving to create as rapid and safe a singularity as possible should be primary goals. SIAI, the Singularity Resource Center, and the Imminent Singularity are websites of such individuals. Furthermore, there are a number of thought-provoking "posthumanist" sites, such as Posthuman.com and IncipientPosthuman.com, that explore issues of the coming transition. Finally, there exist several extremist and/or elitist groups who are not typical singularitarians, and are not deserving of further mention here. Significant insights can be found on singularitarian, transhumanist, and posthumanist sites, but be wary. It is the present position of the Acceleration Studies Foundation that not enough good scientific information yet exists for belief or disbelief to be a relevant issue with regard to the singularity. Therefore, our activism in regard to this meme is primarily focused on expanding public dialog, informed speculation, education and scientific inquiry regarding the phenomenon of continuously accelerating change, and networking those lay and academic thinkers who have interests in advancing the study and critique of accelerating change from a variety of disciplines. If you are investigating singularitarian or "posthumanist" literature, you may appreciate our position statement on Singularitarians and Singularity Belief. General Reading If you can engage in further reading to get a broader and deeper understanding of the cultural, technological, and universal computational events that are leading us to the singularity, here are a few more illuminating works to consider. Some are accompanied by online references. Books are linked to often insightful Amazon reviews.
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