The Original Singularity: Mathematicians, Represent!

The original concept was the mathematical singularity: A point at which a given mathematical function’s output is not defined. For example, the asymptotic point in the graph of y = 1/x (the classic hyperbolic curve); when x = 0, y is completely undefined — a literal “divide by zero” error.

This gave rise to the gravitational singularity: A point in space-time where the manifold’s curvature (and hence the gravitational field, and the density of any objects) is either unmeasurable or infinite.

Vernor Vinge’s seminal paper, The Coming Technological Singularity, maintains this idea of “change that becomes too fast to measure”, of graph-lines going asymptotic. Vinge writes: When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale…. Developments that before were thought might only happen in “a million years” (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [Blood Music], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

Marc Stiegler’s 1989 short story “The Gentle Seduction” also uses the term in a rate-of-change sense, with one character introducing the idea as “a time in the future. It’ll occur when the rate of change of technology is very great — so great that the effort to keep up with the change will overwhelm us.”

Variations Abound

But others are using the term in slightly different ways. Wikipedia’s article on the technological singularity describes it as an event where the rate of change is so great that “the future after the singularity becomes qualitatively different and harder to predict.” This isn’t quite the same idea. Instead of saying that the Singularity itself will be too difficult to comprehend, it’s saying that the time after the Singularity will be too different for us to understand. It’s something like the distinction between a singularity and an event horizon (a boundary beyond which we cannot see). Yes, one causes the other, but they’re not the same thing.

This view is echoed in prominent sci-fi blog io9′s backgrounder, “What Is The Singularity And Will You Live To See It?”, which calls a singularity (small s) “the moment when a civilization changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations. Think of it as a point-of-no-return in history.”

In a more mainstream, pop-culture setting, a recent article on Roland Emmerich’s upcoming project describes the Singularity as “the point in time in which technological intelligence finally supersedes that of its human creators.” This is a very different definition; it references only one, single technological advancement, and says absolutely nothing about an increased rate of change, or about unaugmented humans’ inability to keep up.

That story is probably getting its definition from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which blatantly declares that “The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.”

Famed Singularitarian Ray Kurzweil runs a site at www.singularity.com, mostly promoting his book, The Singularity Is Near. In it, he does at one point specifically describe the Singularity as “a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it” — but aside from that, he spends much more time describing things like the run-up to the Singularity:

[N]onbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like The Matrix), “experience beaming” (like Being John Malkovich), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.

On the even more easily-findable “About the Book” page, he describes “the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations” as being “the essence of the Singularity” (emphasis mine). He goes on to describe the Singularity as: “an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today”, and tells us that:

In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

This sounds awfully rosy, a very glowing example of Timothy May’s “Rapture of the Nerds” — there are a lot of people who think the Singularity will actually be a lot more chaotic, if not outright scary or unpleasant. But at least Kurzweil is reasonably specific about his predictions, unlike some other folks…

Futurist web site SingularityHub defines the Singularity, with a distressing lack of rigor or precision, as “the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining.” Of course, “transcending current biological limitations” could easily refer to things like the development of powered flight by the Wright Brothers, or to the discovery of DNA, or the sequencing of the genome… or simply to Roger Bannister’s breaking the four-minute mile barrier. I’ll leave it to your imagination to think of how many things might be described by the fluffy and breathless phrase “an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining”; suffice it to say that I find it no more useful than the first half of the sentence.

Perhaps the most honest definition: a quote from “Godling’s Glossary” by David Victor de Transend describes the Singularity as “A black hole in the Extropian worldview whose gravity is so intense that no light can be shed on what lies beyond it.”

Summing Up

So, depending on who you ask, the Singularity might mean any of:

1. A time when technological progress goes so fast that we (meaning unaugmented humans who are alive at the time) can’t keep up with it;
2. A time when when technological progress goes so fast that we people before it can’t predict it (or what comes after it);
3. A time when machines become smarter than humans (which will probably cause 1 and/or 2);
4. A time when humans merge with machines (which isn’t quite the same thing as 3… but would probably cause it);
5. A time when SingularityHub declares, “Woo-hoo! The Singularity has happened!”

In the writing I plan to do on the topic, I’ll mostly be using senses 1 and 2. If I use “the Singularity” to mean something else, I’ll say so clearly and explicitly.

Hackers* use the word “state” to describe “information being maintained in non-permanent memory”, whether that memory is in a human skull or a computer’s RAM chips. In fact, that ambiguity over exactly where the state is being maintained is one of the word’s strengths — as the browser-tabs example shows, there’s getting to be less of a distinction between the two. The stuff in my browser’s tabs is a reflection of what’s in my own brain, and a nearly-seamless extension of it.

Like every other web developer, I recently got a message from Firefox saying it needed to upgrade. (Because security researchers found yet another hole in Adobe Reader.) Despite the fact that I had over a dozen tabs open, I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about performing the upgrade, because Firefox would remember all my tabs and reopen them after restart. It’s basically a momentary hiccup in my workflow; I can start the upgrade and then use that 30-second break to refill my teacup or go to the bathroom. Come back, sit down, close the spare “You’ve just successfully upgraded Firefox” tab, and just keep working.

Compare that with Windows Update.

For one thing, I can no longer in good conscience advise people to allow Windows Update to automatically install things. Not after Microsoft used it to push “Windows Genuine Advantage”. With Firefox, a security update really is just a security update, not an excuse to push crapware on one’s customers. With Windows Update, I need to scroll through the list of updates and make sure they’re not sending me something I don’t want (but which I can never uninstall if I accept it once).

More importantly, though: You never know when a Microsoft security update will include some component that forces a reboot. Sometimes, you’ll just get a message that your update isn’t complete until you restart, and would you like to do that now? Other times, you get the annoyingly insistent dialog box that pops up every five minutes, nagging at you to restart your machine. And it won’t go away until you restart. Trying to get anything useful accomplished between that thing’s interruptions is like trying to concentrate with a Harrison Bergeron-style mental handicapper on. Which means that before you even start the process, you’d better be ready to save and close all your work in every single application.

Is it any wonder people hate installing Windows security patches?

The problem is that if you make security updates annoying, people will try to avoid them. And one of the biggest annoyances these days is breaking people’s train of thought. Now that half of my train of thought is in the computer — in “state” that the software is maintaining for me — making the software continue to maintain it across sessions turns out to be a big win.

The E Text Editor is another example of an application that makes it really easy to leave state in the computer’s memory instead of cluttering up your own wetware with it. E’s philosophy is to never discard data unless the user explicitly requests it. It takes the concept of an Undo history far beyond what most people are used to.

Back in ’90s, people got used to having an “Undo button”: you could reverse one action. Then we got the “Undo history”: you could work backward through multiple steps of undo. Finally, we got the “Undo/Redo history”, which allowed one to step forward as well as back in that timeline… but it was still just a line. If you went back 50 steps, then did something new — something different from stepping forward — those 50 steps were all immediately discarded.

E doesn’t discard information so casually. If you do something new, you now have a new branch in the history of your document. It has an “Undo/Redo tree”. (This results in a lot of data being maintained on your hard drive. So what? Hard drive space is cheap. Way cheaper than human attention, which means trading off a bunch of disk space in order to maintain some human attention is a very good deal.)

And, of course, it maintains this state across sessions. If I’ve been working on a complicated image in Photoshop for a few hours — or for a week or two, without closing the program (and hence not applying any Windows security updates, because they might force a reboot!) — one of the last things I want to do is close that file unless I’m positive that I won’t ever feel like going back to a previous version of it. (This is why graphic artists get so used to hitting “Save a Copy” a whole lot.) The moment I close the file, even if I leave Photoshop itself open, I’ve lost that history.

Not so in E. I can close the program, apply my Windows patches, then reopen E… and it will reopen the files I had open when I exited it, with all that Undo/Redo tree-history still there.

And this also means that shutting down and restarting E is an easy action. It has no ill effects. I can do it any time, and not have to worry about what I’m losing. Which means that if E ever comes out with any security patches, I won’t be at all worried about applying them.

Having nothing to lose by a shutdown makes your program a lot more likely to be upgraded.

* In case it isn’t already obvious, I’m using the word “hacker” to mean “a computer programmer who loves programming for its own sake, not someone who’s just punching a clock to pay the bills”. This is similar to the programmer-enthusiast culture’s classical definitions that include “A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities” and “A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” It should be very obvious that I don’t mean someone who breaks into computer systems.

It’s a trade-off, and I’m probably missing some aspects of it. What I’m wondering about, simply, is whether the trade is a net gain or a net loss.

Another way to put this — in harshly evolutionary terms, in fact — is: If someone with augmented reality and someone without it were competing for some life-or-death resource, who would win?

Of course, I’m not the first person to wonder this. In 1992, Neal Stephenson wrote about Hiro Protagonist going into battle with a high-tech combat suit and a bad-ass heads-up display:

He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time… a screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?

Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.

The [enemy who's shooting at him] has … whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). [...]

He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

As prophetic as Snow Crash was, though, Stephenson was nowhere near the first to tackle the topic of high- versus low-tech in combat situations. Way back in 1959, Robert Heinlein wrote, in Starship Troopers:

If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone ax — will sneak up on him and bash his head in while he’s trying to read a vernier.

Of course, Heinlein isn’t arguing against giving soldiers high-tech gadgets; this is in the context of the introduction of powered armor as a major sci-fi trope. The important part of the quote above isn’t “a lot of gadgets”; it’s ones “that he has to watch”.

Which is a good way of saying that maybe it was more of a user-interface problem. (And, of course, Stephenson was probably familiar with the Heinlein book, and may have even been deliberately tipping his hat to it.)

Smartphone users today don’t usually have to face life-or-death situations (unless you count crossing the street in a busy city). But it’s worth considering whether we could make our user interfaces any easier to use.

For some people, the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard is a deal-breaker. For me, the smaller-than-standard keyboard on the average netbook is a powerful disincentive: If I had to use one, it would slow down my interaction with the netbook — and if I learned to be fluent and productive with the small keyboard, it might mess up my muscle memory for dealing with full-size keyboards on my “real” computers. It’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

The Palm Prē’s physical keyboard is tiny. I can only key it with my thumbs, and there’s no risk of interference with my pre-existing keyboarding skills. Inputting data with it is achingly slow, but offset by the device’s wonderful portability (it fits into a pocket even easier than an iPhone does). But I can’t really edit text with it, because there’s no D-pad to do precise cursor positioning with. Even the Orange+finger-movement trick is balky and awkward, in my experience; if I want to correct a single-letter typo, getting the cursor after the incorrect character so I can backspace and correct it is such an ordeal, it’s often quicker and easier for me to use Shift+Backspace to delete the entire word and then retype the whole thing.

In effect, even though the phone has the ability to edit text, the interface makes it so difficult that I can’t use the capability. It might as well not be there. What would a better interface mechanism look like?

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, the protagonist starts off with a set of glasses that provide him with a constant Net connection and heads-up displays of whatever he desires: maps, email, people’s vCards, and so on. But Stross (perhaps wisely) doesn’t give much detail about the glasses’ input mechanism. “He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.” How? That part’s left to the reader’s imagination. (A very crafty trick on Stross’ part, and one that writers can pull off and user-interface engineers cannot.)

If I want to do with my phone what Stross’ character did, I have to yank it out of my pocket, press the power switch, then make a swiping gesture that tells the phone its attention has been requested by a real human (rather than simply being jostled in a pocket or handbag). But Stross’ protagonist’s glasses were already powered up and in use, so suppose I were already using my phone and decided I wanted to take a picture of something?

Tap a physical button to escape from whatever app I was already using, then press an on-screen button for the main “launcher” feature. Find the “camera” icon, tap it, wait for the camera to load. Then I can aim and press another on-screen button to capture the image.

Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could write an app for it. And I actually can update my blog from my phone; it has a WebKit-based browser and enough screen real estate to make writing and posting an entry possible, albeit painful.

Stross’ interface has the luxury of not having to be real, of course. But something that already works as a real-life prototype is the Sixth Sense system, built by Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab. It senses the user’s hands, and you can take a picture simply by framing whatever-it-is you want to capture with your fingers and thumbs. (It does a whole lot of other things, too, and I highly recommend the entire video.)