Jim Baen's Universe

Nonfiction articles

The Other Singularity: The Singularity of Connectedness

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Many people do not believe there will ever be a Technological Singularity. The notion is controversial. Vernor Vinge stirred controversy by predicted that it might occur, and Ray Kurzweil stirred controversy by predicted when. The source of the controversy is a single task. Those who doubt the Singularity believe the task will always remain impossible. Those who anticipate the Singularity believe the task is possible. Few take the middle ground, so it's pretty much that simple.

The task in question concerns artificial intelligence and can be stated in a single sentence: Can AI ever be made smarter than humans? If it is possible then the Singularity is possible. If it is not, then the Singularity is equally not. And if it is easy, then the Singularity may well be inevitable.

But this article is not about that Singularity. This article is about a different Singularity: a Singularity that can not be disproved or shown to be impossible. The best, and indeed the only, rhetorical defense against it will be to make fun of it. An important consideration since many will likely find it unpalatable and need some way to discredit it in the hope of slowing its eventual success. Here’s wishing them all the luck in the world—but it’s not going to be enough.

This Other Singularity might occur at the same time as the better known Singularity of Vinge and Kurzweil, or it might occur a little before or anytime after. If it happens about the same time the natural perception will be that it was not a separate singularity, just an unavoidable aspect of the first; which might suggest that describing it here is not needed. But that would be wrong. Because even if we never see the famed Technological Singularity we will not be safe from this one. While the task of creating an AI with greater than human intelligence may be impossible, the task involved in this one is not. Technological impossibility can not be used to protect us.

Whether you call this one the Other Singularity, or Singularity Two or even Singularity Plan-B, it will be just as disruptive to our economies, just as transformative to our civilization and grow to dominance just as exponentially rapid as its better known sibling. However, since it will be the product of a completely different task—one that has nothing to do with AI—it might be best to name it after that task. If so, then this is the Singularity of Connectedness.

For thousands of years we have been riding its gently-rising curve. This curve is the cumulative product of a large number of diverse actions and activities which may seem unrelated, but all boil down to only one thing: better connecting human minds to one another. The sharing of our ideas and thoughts with one another with greater ease, accuracy, and speed can be translated into computer terms as: increasing the bandwidth between human minds.

Speech is our oldest method of sharing thoughts, and still one of our best. Long before the invention of writing, it was unimaginably old. Speech connected human minds using words launched into the air. A powerful tool, but the words that were launched were limited in range and in how long they could linger between us. Few people conversed with anyone more than a hundred feet from their mouth; and once spoken, the words disappeared from the air and were lost forever.

Using words in the air, the spread of news and knowledge was fast to those nearby, but slow to those far away. It allowed the spread of culture in the form of songs and poems, but only slowly and generally only so far. Since these things could not be written down they had to be memorized and repeated to the next small group of listeners, and then the next, and then the next, and so on.

This situation, of course, did not last. Roughly 50 centuries ago methods were devised to freeze words from the air and lock them permanently onto the surface of an object. Clay tablets were popular at first but other materials were tried and eventually thin sheets of lightweight material were developed specifically for the task of holding words.

With the invention of writing, songs and stories and ideas and news and knowledge which had been launched temporarily into the air over and over many times could finally be captured. And by being captured could be enjoyed repeatedly, even if the individual whose words were captured passed away and existed no more. Even better, the words could be protected from the endless series of changes and embellishments and errors that had previously crept in with each and every retelling.

Of course there were downsides too. Most people could not read the words and every copy had to be created through the painstakingly slow process of writing it over by hand one character at a time. If you needed a hundred copies, the cost would be high and you were in for a long wait.

But this did not last either. Literacy increased, and eventually the printing press was invented, and then later, movable type. The industrial revolution brought continuous feed presses, and mass production of books, newspapers and magazines, as well as a greater need for public libraries and a more universally available technical education. Widespread electrical use brought the telegraph, telephone, radio, movies and then television. When electricity went digital we got the computer revolution, cell phones and the internet. And the internet brought websites, email, blogs, online catalogs, e-books, Project Gutenberg, Google searches, Wikipedia and instant messaging (IM).

To make better sense of it all, the temptation is to divide these things into two categories: information storage (and, of course, retrieval since it’s useless if you can’t get what’s stored) verses information processing. An example of the two categories might be: telling someone your memories of childhood, verses pondering your childhood memories to figure out why you did them. Clearly these are two different activities, but while the human brain incorporates them in ways that we perceive to be separate, it is possible that they may be inseparable to the tissues and neurons involved in each. Evolution seems to treat data storage and data processing as integral parts of the same goal since each is meaningless without the other.

The trend we’ve seen so far—through all of human history—is that our inventions allow us to share our thoughts and ideas faster, farther, clearer, and to more people with less effort and less cost. We do this more and better every year. The effect is cumulative, and it's accelerating. There is no slowing of it. The desire to share our thoughts and feelings is powerful, universal and deeply rooted. Sharing our thoughts is much more than what holds civilization together. It is what caused civilization. (That civilization has a cause, and that the cause is a personality trait universal to all humans, would suggest that civilization may have been inevitable once populations became large enough. If so, this would help explain why civilization appeared independently on at least three, some would say four, continents.)

The ongoing increase in bandwidth between human minds can continue for many years, but not forever. Not at its current pace, nor at any pace. It is mathematically impossible. It must change to one of three possible states. It can either reverse or plateau or reach maximum.

To reverse would mean that it decreases for some reason. This would require that inventions that are already popular (such as cell phones or the internet) be abandoned and fall into disuse, and that any newly invented devices do not become popular. A reverse would seem impossible since it flies in the face of human nature, however Amish and Mennonite cultures successfully resist the encroachment of technologies they deem to reduce quality of life, so a reversal must be considered at least theoretically possible.

To plateau would mean a limit is reached in the connectedness of human minds. This could be caused by the limits of technology, or the inhibitions of individuals over sharing their most personal thoughts and memories, or some kind of limit based on social acceptability, or some other reason that can only be understood by those in the future who are far more intimately connected to one another than we are.

To reach maximum would mean that all (or nearly all) human minds become connected to the fullest extent possible. This would be an incremental process achieved over many years or decades, and would be just as difficult to observe without bias at each future stage of its completion as it is now. The difficulty exists because we are viewing it from inside the process itself. We are in one of its stages of completion now.

Our current level of thought-sharing is based on feeding information to the mind through the natural senses—primarily the eyes and ears. During the next decade or two we will dramatically improve how we deliver data to these natural senses; and we will do this by wearing computers on our exterior. Eyeglasses, for example, and then contact lenses will feature computer displays which will be able to overlay or replace part or all of our field of view. These will become so useful, popular and indispensable that people who have no need for corrective lenses will wear them too. Personal head-up displays like this will at first supplement, and then replace, traditional computer screens. As the computers we wear increase in complexity and sophistication over time, they will transform our lives as well as our civilization.

But external systems will run up against a hard limit in the data-rate of the natural senses. To increase bandwidth will require bypassing the natural senses and feeding other people’s words, pictures and eventually sensations directly into the mind. Simple examples might include: the ability to search the internet in your mind’s eye by imagining that you are doing so, to show someone the dream you had last night which still lingers in your thoughts, to view in real-time what your friend is looking at on the other side town by looking at it through his eyes, to let your doctor feel your headache by sending your sensations of pain directly into his mind so he can feel them in his own head. Experiences, pre-packaged and ready for your enjoyment, might become popular downloads. These might offer the complete sights, sounds and tactile sensations of dangerous activities like skydiving, mountain climbing, bungee jumping, and of course sex. The porn industry will once again reinvent itself.

While this period will include a much more intimate sharing of thoughts, sensations and imaginings, it is not the maximum limit since it will also see restrictions, firewalls and read-write protected areas of the individual minds. Eventually, however, the bandwidth may progress to lower levels of the brain with a sharing of emotions and feelings and moods, and might only reach maximum when the full content of every mind was openly available to every other mind without restriction—a complete sharing of memories, experience, learning and of all incoming information from all the senses of all the participants.

The boundaries that exist today between individual minds would then begin to fade. The process of fading would take many years, but eventually the boundaries would become impossible to locate. The mind of the human race and of the human civilization would become a single living thing with an uncountable number of thoughts all running at the same time. This unified mind would know all we ever knew, feel all that we ever felt, and remember everything that we have ever done. We would have no secrets from it, because it would be us. Not just us as individuals, it would be all of us.

Mind you, this does not require mind uploading or life extension or any form of AI. Those may happen too but this has nothing to do with them. This can occur even if human brains remain forever as organic as they are now.

Also, while all this may sound strange and perhaps a bit scary to us today, to those in the future who are closer to it and far more intimately connected to one another, it may seem perfectly natural, marvelously desirable, maybe even fun. The perceptions of people in each age of history are based on what they live with. We are unconnected and think it normal. If they are connected, they will think that normal. Neither is wrong.

If the trends we see going on today are a good indication, this Connectedness Singularity is not far off. Our century, which is ten percent over, will not end before the transition is complete; and by the middle of this century we will be deep into its intermediate stages, well past the time when computers are worn only on our exterior.

As unpalatable as it may seem, there may be no preventing it. This may be the quick and ultimate fate of all information based civilizations, not just humanity. If so, it could be why the sky is silent. It could be the cause of the Fermi Paradox. It happened to all of them; and it's going to happen to us too.

Keep your thoughts pure. They may not remain secret. Someday billions may know them all.

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You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here, or here.

And more about his podcast: The Future And You here, or here, or even here.