A Need for Public Dialog, Education, and Scientific Inquiry in Accelerating Change—
Not Singularity Belief or Expectations that We Can Personally Create the Singularity

It is the present position of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) 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, education and scientific inquiry regarding the phenomenon of continuously accelerating change, and on networking those lay and academic scholars who have interests in advancing the study and critique of accelerating change from a variety of disciplines.

We share the singularitarians desire for a safe singularity, but see no evidence for several of their self-servingly dramatic nightmare or failure scenarios—the universe has a long, proven history of facilitating successful emergences, while carefully preserving ancestor substrates in the process. It is heartening that there are groups who are thinking of how to chart a careful, considered approach in AI development, as that ethic should help ensure a transition with minimal negative effects on humanity. SIAI, for example, is doing good work in this area.

At the same time, expect such work to be progressively co-opted by the much larger and more AI-productive traditional AI community. Weld and Etzioni's presentation, "The First Law of Robotics" at AAAI 1994 was perhaps the first modern discussion of safe AI. AAAI 2002 has already had a special symposium dedicated to Safe Learning Agents, and all this while we remain at least a decade or more away from agents or robots that are intelligent enough to even begin being considered as "intentionally" harmful. Such work demonstrates that human foresight on these issues is progressing actively, and will grow steadily as evolvable robotics and agents continue to add new capacities in an accelerating and increasingly noteworthy manner in coming years.

With regard to accelerating the speed of the coming transition, another core singularitarian principle, it is our intuition that this process is already occurring quite rapidly (it now appears to be only decades away) in the human future, and that this will be a global, collective transition, a story of I.A. (species intelligence amplification, via science and technology) much more than A.I. (artificial/autonomous intelligence). For more on this, please see our outline of what we consider to be the next great computational attractor for our local environment, the Conversational User Interface Network (CUI). The CUI network appears to be a developmentally necessary transition, an emergence that will likely occur several decades prior to fully autonomous A.I.. Intelligence amplification (I.A.) systems like the CUI network are highly collectivist in their construction, and will be tested and refined by an entire planet's worth of users. They are also highly symbiotic, and will intrinsically engage in extensive profiling, simulation, and "personality capture" (first generation uploading) of their users' behaviors, habits, goals, limits, and rational and emotive states in the process of their refinement.

Yet while the CUI is a hard and noble problem, it's complexity pales by comparison to the creation of biologically-inspired hardware systems that are capable of indeterminate self-guided evolutionary developmental improvement (e.g., full autonomy). Artificial life, one of the fields where such efforts have made an early, halting progress to date, has demonstrated itself to be a highly collectivist undertaking, involving large swarms of human beings each incrementally improving the replicating systems and development environment. That environment is itself very hardware dependent in its scalability, requiring further legions of highly differentiated human beings to provide incrementally better "digital soil" for new organisms. Furthermore, any success that does occur with these architectures, as it becomes both scalable and widely demonstrated (a condition not yet attained for A-Life systems in general), will be first applied to such collectively important and commercially rewarding developmental goals as the CUI network. Thus precipitation of the singularity, in our present estimation, will not be significantly dependent on any one group of individual AI design efforts. If we imagine we can do anything other than very incrementally accelerate it by our own individual action, we are highly likely to be giving into romantic idealism.

While such dreams are fundamental to our humanity and certainly have their own motivational value, a potentially far more important social issue is the ethical path we take in the last days of the human era—the manner in which we continue to develop our own personal responsibility and accountability in a world of inexorable accelerating technological change. In an evolutionary developmental universe apparently equipped with a deep immunity to informational destruction, what human actors can strongly effect, on personal, cultural, national, and global levels, is the quality of our evolutionary path, rather than the timing and trajectory of our developmental destination.

There are many paths to the singularity that we may choose, and some will be far more human-affirming than others in the present moment, using our existing imperfect technologies, rather than in some utopian, unrealized future. As the storm of change races ever faster, we need to be thinking more about core human values in the transition, not less. To do so will require both enlarging the dialog to encompass more than the current privileged few, and bringing significant new analytical attention and understanding to the the nature and trajectory of accelerating change, so that we may continue to make more informed technological, sociopolitical, and personal decisions in the process.