It seems pretty clear that technological change has accelerated over the last few decades or centuries—most metrics of human technical ability, from generalizations of Moore’s Law to measures of maximum speed and motive power, show a choppy but clear exponential curve over time. But to prove or disprove the singularity concept, it additionally seems necessary to identify the factors driving this acceleration.
Kurzweil, among other singularitarian writers of the accelerating change school, is of the opinion that technical sophistication itself drives further sophistication: technology feeds on itself, allowing smart people to do exponentially more with their hitherto more or less constant brainpower. This isn’t a bad model. But while it’s more or less inarguable that sophisticated tools are often a precondition for further sophistication, and it seems likely that certain types of tools (information storage and retrieval, communication, design, theory, etc.) do contribute to accelerating change, convincingly demonstrating that they contribute an exponential term is much tougher.
Offhand, the best alternative explanation I can come up with is that the dominant term for technological change is population: more people means more geniuses, and larger and more complex civilizations provide opportunities for specialization which allow smart people to innovate more effectively within their fields. If this is the case, we’d expect technological improvement to appear exponential up to the present, but to stagnate when the most populous regions of the world hit their demographic transition a few decades out.
I’m not immediately sure how you’d tell the difference between this hypothesis and Kurzweil’s tech-driven model, although the existence of large but technologically stagnant civilizations (like China from the 15th to the 19th centuries) seems to imply that it’s incomplete.
It seems pretty clear that technological change has accelerated over the last few decades or centuries—most metrics of human technical ability, from generalizations of Moore’s Law to measures of maximum speed and motive power, show a choppy but clear exponential curve over time. But to prove or disprove the singularity concept, it additionally seems necessary to identify the factors driving this acceleration.
Kurzweil, among other singularitarian writers of the accelerating change school, is of the opinion that technical sophistication itself drives further sophistication: technology feeds on itself, allowing smart people to do exponentially more with their hitherto more or less constant brainpower. This isn’t a bad model. But while it’s more or less inarguable that sophisticated tools are often a precondition for further sophistication, and it seems likely that certain types of tools (information storage and retrieval, communication, design, theory, etc.) do contribute to accelerating change, convincingly demonstrating that they contribute an exponential term is much tougher.
Offhand, the best alternative explanation I can come up with is that the dominant term for technological change is population: more people means more geniuses, and larger and more complex civilizations provide opportunities for specialization which allow smart people to innovate more effectively within their fields. If this is the case, we’d expect technological improvement to appear exponential up to the present, but to stagnate when the most populous regions of the world hit their demographic transition a few decades out.
I’m not immediately sure how you’d tell the difference between this hypothesis and Kurzweil’s tech-driven model, although the existence of large but technologically stagnant civilizations (like China from the 15th to the 19th centuries) seems to imply that it’s incomplete.