HOISTED FROM THE INTERNET OF LONG AGO: Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone
What Cosma Shalizi calls "yet another semi-crank pet notion, nursed quietly for many years, now posted...
<http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html>
The Singularity has happened; we call it "the industrial revolution" or "the long nineteenth century". It was over by the close of 1918:
Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.
Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.
Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.
Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.
Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies" (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.
An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. ("Drive" is the best I can do; words like "agenda" or "purpose" are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)
Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out.
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My Comment: Without a doubt, the life of the typical human being did indeed go through a Singularity, although for most of the world, it was sometime after 1918. The shift to today’s world from the illiterate agrarian world, with infant and early childhood mortality at 40%, and most people spending most of their lives seeing the same hundred people in the village—that was a huge transformation.
But can we say the same thing about élite, urban, literate culture? Are the lives of those of us who when young go to places like Harvard after 1950 so qualitatively different from the lives of those who went to Oxford in 1850 or 1550 or 1250, or those who were sent off from Rome to Athens or Rhodes in -100 to gain a little polish, or those who were trained to be scribes under Ramesses II, Sargon of Akkad, or Gilgamesh? And how different was the life of the non-literati élite—those who were not tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists living off of the surplus extracted by the domination-and-exploitation machine that made agrarian-age societies nearly as unequal as possible, but the thugs with spears, specialists in coercive violence, and givers of commands themselves?
Once people learn to read and stories start being told, I see great continuity from Gilgamesh all the way up to Gutenberg. That great continuity in élite material life and mental world does go along with increasing élite wealth, comfort, and sophistication: there are so many more things you can read in 1400 than there were in -2500, after all. There was a four-fold amplification of my H, my crude value of the stock of useful and productive human ideas index.
Was Gutenberg a singularity for the literati? And for the non-literati élite? I need to think about this more. And I need to think about the material and mental worlds of the non-literati élite as well…
Oh my oh my the exponential error is old. Malthus said population would outstrip production because it grew exponentially. In fact, since about then, output has grown exponentially (except for world wars, depressions, and growth miracles).
But the more important point is that the exponent in population can be zero*t . It can also be lower as it is here in Italy. Exponential can be constant or shrinking.
I am actually sincerely disappointed that the genuinely brilliant Cosmos Shalizi misused the word “exponential” to mean “very rapid”. 1% per billion years is exponential. Real GDP increasing by 1000000000000000000 a second is linear.
The idea that exponential means faster is the idea that T has gone to infinity. Asymptotically we will all be dead.
Also exponential growth is highly predictable. One of the gross errors of macroeconomists (noted just as I arrived) was assuming that macro variables were stationary around an exponential trend.
This was partly due to Anglophone hegemony no pre- eminence no, oh hell, there must be an Anglo Saxon word for it. The US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK are the only OECD countries with merely exponential growth. The others all had exponential usually and also a growth miracle with higher than ordinary growth rates.
I would have hoped that de expert on DeLong run would have noted this. There has never been an exponential revolution - it is roughly a contradiction in terms.
Also T is not infinity yet and another (appropriately) persistent error of macro is assuming it is