The UFO Singularity (5 page)

Despite how this time frame provided is entirely based on guesswork by
New York Times
readers, it remains arguable that at least a good majority of these predictions will come to fruition sometime in our future. This is based, in part, on the consistency of these expectations among not just the general public, but also factions of
the scientific establishment. Such a collection of proposed futuristic milestones may indeed serve in helping us formulate at least a rough idea of what the coming years and decades may look like; whatever the case, these sorts of technological achievements are on many people’s minds, and virtually all of the notions expressed in the time frame have appeared with minimal variation elsewhere in various scientific journals, popular television shows and documentaries, and even in science fiction. It stands to reason that even the public’s mere
expectation
that such technologies will eventually become a reality, paired with the benefit they would likely incur once they are finally achieved, will cause a number of scientific fields to continue steering toward research and development conducive to their ultimate realization.

One area that remains key to the overall furtherance of human technology has to do with the way that brain science is evolving. A better understanding of how the human mind works, after all, when paired with technological applications that can replicate or improve those processes, will likely also lead to the eventual creation of artificial intelligence, or A.I. True, the development of intelligence greater than our own may one day help improve our lives, but of equal interest regarding studies of the mind is the fact that, though we are getting close to revealing the brain’s inner workings on some levels, existing technology that surrounds us every day has also begun to cause perceptible changes in how our minds function
right now.
In short, we are changing with every passing day and are already a very different humanity from that which existed a century ago. If such trends continue, one can only imagine what our species could be like, for instance, in the year 2112; one more century could bring with it unimaginable amounts of change, as we will soon begin to see.

In January 2012, OnlineCollege.org featured an article titled “15 Big Ways the Internet Is Changing Our Brain.” These changes are becoming particularly obvious among those in parts of the world where technology and widespread accessibility to computers are prolific; they include trends showing IQ increases through time, as well as increased overall brain function and activity. Problem-solving capabilities seem to be showing improvement also, based on the way the minds of those involved heavily in the use of computers and the Internet each day “constantly seek out incoming information.”
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There are other changes occurring that, although some may consider them to be negative or even detrimental to our accepted norms, have nonetheless begun to illuminate the complex relationship computers and the Internet are shaping for themselves within our lives. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” according to a May 2011 study that appeared in
Science Magazine.
“When faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers,” the study’s
abstract states, “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.”
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In other words, Internet use is showing a tendency to cause reduced ability to remember specific details, favoring processes within the brain that focus instead on how to access the information online at a later time. A Columbia University study found that the use of search engines and similar Internet tools are literally “reorganizing the way we remember things,” and the study’s lead researcher, Betsy Sparrow, subsequently told the British
Daily Mail Online
that “our brains rely on the internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”
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Perhaps the most fascinating element to this kind of research is that it points to how our brains are beginning to outsource certain learning processes and other functions to computers and the Internet. When stopping to consider all the vast potentials within the field of computer science, it also becomes easy to forget just how recent this technology, which has allowed innovations like the Web, really is. Internet use and accessibility had only become widespread by the mid-1990s, at which time the rate of annual growth among Web users was believed to have reached 100 percent for a number of consecutive years.
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Although our reliance on outsourcing information
to an intangible “data cloud” has yet to lose the luster of modernity, on the other hand, concepts that involve the way human ideas could migrate into some form of a “collective” are indeed familiar to us already. Psychologist Carl Jung believed that there was a literal “collective unconsciousness,” and one that was inherited rather than being learned by individuals, which united certain thoughts and subconscious traits among all humans. He writes:

In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche…there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.
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What Jung illustrates here is reminiscent, in a sense, of the technological trends we have begun to see in society today. Much like the famous psychologist believed that there were intangible elements that linked aspects of the human psyche, our minds are becoming interlinked in similar ways thanks to the Internet, which is quickly becoming a repository for all existing human knowledge. What we once kept in our minds, if not within the pages of countless volumes of books, is now migrating steadily toward the ever-growing database that is the World Wide Web.

It becomes staggering when we stop to consider
just how much
knowledge is being housed within the complex network of sites and servers that comprise the Internet. Furthermore, the majority of that information is made directly available to the greater masses, at little or no cost. Ranging from vast and complex scientific data, to the mundane socio-cultural memes and mainstays of humor in our daily lives, the Internet is becoming the literal summation of all human intelligence, stored within an equally complex electronic subspace that, by all accounts, could be likened to being a single, colossal representation of all human minds—and one with intelligence and capabilities far exceeding that of any single living person on Earth.

But just how much does the Internet really resemble the workings of a conscious mind? To be certain, there are many similarities, ranging from the way that data is collected and stored, to the way that processes existing within the Web are able to recall and utilize that information. “Many scientists believe that consciousness is a property that will inevitably emerge from any complex system that has the right sort of internal dynamics, and the right sort of interaction with its environment,” says Ben Goertzel, PhD, an artificial intelligence expert and computer scientist.
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Goertzel further expounded on the potential likelihood of this idea in his article “When the Net Becomes Conscious”:

The Internet perceives and acts on the world; it stores declarative, episodic and procedural memories; it recalls some information and forgets
others; etc. In short it behaves a fair bit like a human mind.… According to this perspective, the Internet might
already
have a degree of consciousness, though of a type quite different from human consciousness.
¹¹

Futurist Dick Pelletier guesses that by the “mid-2030s, when artificial intelligence is expected to surpass human intelligence…the Internet will become fully conscious as it guides humanity through this incredible ‘magical future’ time.”
¹²
But despite
when
this may occur, the question remains as to whether or not the emergence of anything resembling consciousness within the Web would be the result of intentional action on our part. Robert Heinlein’s classic novel of lunar libertarianism,
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,
deals in part with an IBM-designed supercomputer installed on a lunar base, which attains consciousness as a result of constantly being fed more and more complex information over time:

They kept hooking hardware into him—decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors.

And woke up.
¹³

Mannie, the narrator, eventually goes on to frame the circumstances, noting that this sort of “awakening” might be a natural process that occurs when any system is fed large amounts of information, and whether the paths used to do so “are protein or platinum.”
¹⁴

Although discussion of the Internet or a supercomputer “waking up” like this is fascinating unto itself, the greater question here has to do with what this could mean for humanity, should it ever actually happen. No doubt, at that stage the Web would effectively comprise what could be called a sort of “mother brain,” capable of uniting and bridging digital systems that oversee, for instance, the delivery of different forms of communication worldwide. This, along with the scores of other long-reaching potentials such a circumstance might entail, perhaps represents something far too complex to recognize and appreciate to its fullest extent, at least in the present. However, one obvious implication is indeed clear to us here and now: The emergence of consciousness from within the Internet is one of many ways—and perhaps even the
most likely
scenario—in which a future intelligence capable of surpassing human thinking might come to exist.

In addition to vastly changing or nullifying the importance of much of our existent technology, this concept yields strong potential for changing the role of humanity as a species on Earth, just as well. After all, what relevance might humans have in a world where artificial intelligence has not only been created already, but might also
be capable of creating an
even greater
intelligence, capable of more possibilities than the limitations of their own design would allow? Some people would think of this as a virtual doomsday for humanity, where a highly advanced intelligence far surpassing our own may begin to view us as a primitive, irrelevant presence in their midst. Those same individuals might liken the coming of advanced A.I. to being the end of the world, at least as far as humanity knows it.

But contrary to the brand of gloom and doom so many among the aforementioned futurist ilk have come to recognize (stemming mostly from plot-driven fictional portrayals of A.I. on the silver screen), optimistic futurists recognize the emergence of A.I. by a different name; they see it as representative of opportunities and new understanding that can only be afforded humanity in a period where we exist alongside conscious, intelligent machines capable of interpreting aspects of existence in ways the humans simply cannot.

We call this the Singularity.

The concept of a technological Singularity occurring at some point in our future is nothing particularly new, much like the concept of intelligent machines and advanced A.I. themselves. By 1965, British cryptologist and mathematician Irving J. Good had begun using the expression
intelligence explosion,
which specifically entails a rapid increase in technological innovation, following the emergence of either some form of A.I., or of brain-computer interfaces that would allow the human mind to exceed natural levels
of intelligence. Thus, a positive feedback loop would be created, in which the growth rate of technology, now in the hands of intelligence that surpasses natural human abilities, would literally seem to “explode.” The modern use of the term
Singularity
in reference to such an intelligence explosion came much later in 1983; mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge coined the term by likening the result of an intelligence explosion to standard models of physics breaking down in midst of observing the event horizon of a black hole:

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
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Ideas pertaining to nuclear war or some other pending disaster were common themes amidst Vinge’s interpretations of a future intelligence explosion. Paired alongside his first specific mention of
technological Singularity
in a print publication, Vinge had noted:

Barring a worldwide catastrophe, I believe that technology will achieve our wildest dreams, and soon. When we raise our own intelligence and that of our creations, we are no longer in a world of human-sized characters. At that point we have fallen into a technological “black hole,” a technological singularity.
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Sentiments of pending disaster similar to those Vinge expressed had appeared a few years earlier in the work of ufologist Jacques Vallee, who, by the late 1970s, had expounded on ideas quite relevant to a technological Singularity in a handful of scientific journals. Specifically, this culminated in an essay he coauthored with Professor Francois Meyer that appeared in the journal
Technological Forecasting and Social Change
in 1975, titled “The Dynamics of Long-Term Growth.” Though the term
Singularity
was never used specifically, Vallee and Meyer discussed an observable trend where technology appears to grow rapidly enough to exceed mere exponential growth, instead representing a greater-than-exponential hyperbolic rate. Eventually, the rate of technological growth, paired with the expansion of population the world over, would reach a similar point of “Singularity,” beyond which the predictable outcomes would become difficult to determine. “The forecast of infinite growth in a finite time interval is absurd,” the authors write. “All we can expect of these developments is that some damping effect will take place very soon. The only question is whether this will be accomplished through ‘soft regulation’ or catastrophe.”
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We might note here, of course, that such perceptions of eventual demise likely reflected the cultural sentiments of the day—namely fears of mutually assured destruction that had been rife throughout the Cold War era.