The Church of the Singularity

A new religion has taken hold of the digerati of the world. According to believers in the Singularity, technology is on an ever-accelerating trajectory, with new advances happening in shorter and shorter intervals of time. Within a few more decades, they claim, the world will be changing so quickly that society will not be able to keep up. According to this theory, as soon as we develop a machine that is more intelligent than we are, it will develop even smarter machines, which will develop even smarter machines, which will solve all of our problems and endow us all with godlike powers.

As strange as it sounds, this is an accurate description of the beliefs of Singularity enthusiasts. If this sounds goofy to you, you are certainly not alone. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier describes it as “the tech world’s new religion.” Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Software (now a part of IBM), describes it as “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people.” I completely agree with them. The Singularity has all of the elements of a religious rapture: If we as a society behave ourselves, there will be one instant at some point in the next few decades that will transform the world and we will live forever in paradise. As Lanier notes, “books on the Singularity are at least as common in computer science departments as books on the rapture are in Christian bookstores.” The Singularity has many prominent adherents, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

If this religion has a high priest, it is futurist Ray Kurzweil. Its bible is Kurzweil’s 2005 tome, The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil claims that the concept of the Singularity can be extrapolated from current technological trends. He completely rejects the idea that the ideas of the Singularity are motivated by any religious impulse, claiming that this is a veiled criticism to make it seem unscientific. He observes that computers have become much more powerful in recent decades, extrapolates that trend out a few more decades, and concludes that computers will soon leave us in the dust intellectually. He predicts the Singularity will occur around 2045.

Color me skeptical. While Kurzweil is quite right that merely labeling it a religion is insufficient to show that it’s inaccurate, I can see a number of very substantial problems with this belief. First of all, it is not reasonable to extrapolate current computing trends into the distant future. As Kurzweil himself notes, we are nearing the point in time (probably around 2019) when it will be impossible to shrink transistors anymore, and Moore’s Law will come to an end. Kurzweil then assumes (based on absolutely no evidence) that we will continue to double our computing power at approximately the same rate as before, by using three-dimensional computing chips. While this is possible, it is by no means guaranteed. The rapid increase in computing power that we’ve grown to expect could slow dramatically in the 2020s. If this happens, we almost certainly will not have truly intelligent artificial intelligence as soon as Kurzweil predicts.

Second, there is a very large difference between having the raw computing hardware to emulate a human brain, and actually having the software to create a program as complex as the human brain. This is not a minor problem. One rule of computer science is that as computer programs become more complex, it becomes evermore difficult to increase their complexity further. To make a program twice as smart requires drastically more than a twofold increase in the program’s complexity. It could be many, many decades (or longer) before we have any programs able to compete with humans intellectually.

Finally, Kurzweil makes a huge leap of faith by assuming to know the motives of beings more intelligent than we. If we create true artificial intelligence, what is to stop them from killing us all, or worse? Kurzweil claims that this will not happen because we will program them to respect us…but if they are more intelligent than we are, they could easily reprogram themselves if they wanted to. Or even if artificial intelligence is benign and wants nothing but to shower us with free goodies, there is absolutely no reason to think that they would want to create intelligence smarter than themselves, leading to a technological Singularity. Maybe their increased intelligence would allow them to see what Kurzweil apparently cannot: Creating entities smarter than themselves could pose a threat to their continued existence.

I think my previous entries have made clear that I am mostly a technological optimist. I share Ray Kurzweil’s belief that we will overcome many of the problems facing the world in the coming decades, including hunger, extreme poverty, naturally-occurring disease, environmental degradation, and aging. I will even grant that at some point in the future, we will probably create artificial intelligence that is smarter than we are and radically redefine our concept of what a human is. Despite all of this, the concept of a technological Singularity remains a completely irrational idea. It cloaks itself in the language of science and uses elegant graphs of past technological development to rationalize its predictions of future technological development, but ultimately it requires the same leaps of faith that are more characteristic of apocalyptic religious raptures than of science.

Book Review - "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" by Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, is a criticism of many emerging technologies and beliefs which Lanier finds dehumanizing. In this long, rambling critique, Lanier’s targets include open-source projects, crowd-sourcing mechanisms such as wikis and prediction markets, and “cybernetic totalism.” If Lanier was not one of the founding fathers of virtual reality, it would be easy to label him a luddite, but he insists that he merely wants to help steer the course of technological development rather than inhibit it. But compared to the vast majority of third culture futurists, Lanier comes across as extremely conservative and reactionary. While I knew before I picked up the book that I would disagree with almost everything Lanier had to say, I think it is important to give a fair hearing to contrary ideas from intelligent people to avoid the echo chamber effect. The world always needs gadflies.

Lanier believes that crowd-sourcing tools are causing people to rely too much on the hive mind. He rejects the notion of the “wisdom of the crowds,” viewing wikis as error-prone and bias-prone compared to more scholarly texts. This may or may not be true (the empirical evidence is mixed), but ultimately it is irrelevant. While Lanier laments the fact that Wikipedia has become the central repository for human knowledge, he offers no convincing solution. “Stop relying on Wikipedia” is a poor excuse for a solution. If it were that simple, Wikipedia would never have become so popular in the first place. It’s no accident that people prefer Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica.

He criticizes “cybernetic totalism,” which he defines as the belief that human brains are nothing more than complex computer programs, and will one day merge with computer technology. This seems like a thinly veiled swipe at transhumanism in general, and specifically the Singularity (the belief that one day soon we will create a computer smarter than we are, which will create an even smarter computer, which will endow us all with godlike powers), which is the dominant mindset among most computer scientists. I have my own criticisms of the Singularity, so I really wanted to root for Lanier in this section of the book. But ultimately, I think that Lanier’s conclusions are just as irrational as some of the more wild claims of Singularity enthusiasts. Rather than question the plausibility of this worldview, Lanier attacks the desirability of a man-machine merger. I think he is barking up the wrong tree here. If this is plausible and most people view it as beneficial, it will almost certainly occur eventually regardless of whether Lanier thinks it dehumanizes us or not. Once again, Lanier offers no solution as to how to avert this technological outcome, or suggestions on how we could steer technological progress toward a goal he views as more desirable.

On the rare occasions when Lanier does suggest an alternative solution, his recommendations are so laughably impractical that they are difficult to take seriously. For example, he considers the evolution of music from a physical product (e.g. a record, tape, or CD) to a digital file as a small tragedy. He believes that this encourages piracy and destroys the incentive to create songs, and that as a consequence we have entered a musical dark age. That’s a perfectly valid opinion, but what is his solution? For us all to go back to physical music products! He suggests “songles” – little trinkets like bracelets, necklaces, or coffee mugs that could unlock our music when they are physically near a computer. Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of this, Lanier seems oblivious to the fact that we moved away from physical music products because people didn’t WANT physical music products. They simply want to be able to listen to their music whenever they want to, with as little hassle as possible.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with this book is Lanier’s presumption that we can simply choose to not walk down a certain path of technological development if most of us agree it is detrimental. He is clearly a technological determinist, whereas I’m more of a technological fatalist. In my view, anything that CAN be developed WILL be developed, provided that enough people view it as beneficial, the technology is diffused enough to make it impossible to ban, and the economic incentives exist for its development. Ultimately, Lanier falls victim to what my good friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “the illusion of control.” While it may be comforting to Lanier to believe that we can guide technological development so directly, this seems to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong; we absolutely need to have ethical debates about technological progress. But ultimately the naysayers will need to propose actual solutions instead of merely lamenting about the undesirable consequences of technology.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto is only 192 pages but feels much longer, given the disjointed, rambling nature of the chapters. It’s worth a read for anyone interested in futurism, for the simple reason that Lanier is one of the few contrarian voices in the third culture. But don’t expect to be convinced by many of his arguments.

3/5 stars

Rebuttal to the Simulation Hypothesis

According to Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, every universe’s inhabitants would be equally likely to be living in a simulation, even if they were running simulations of their own. This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that our universe is much more likely to be one of a huge number of simulations, rather than the one parent universe.

From a logical standpoint, this argument makes sense to me. But I’m always eager to poke holes in philosophical arguments, so here’s my best rebuttal as devil’s advocate. It doesn’t directly attack the logic of Bostrom’s philosophy; rather, it creates a probabilistic argument that we are NOT a simulation.

Let’s assume that simulations can be “turned off” by the parent universe at any time. Perhaps the inhabitants decide that the simulation is no longer needed for whatever reason, or perhaps the simulation is accidentally destroyed, or perhaps they are in a simulation themselves which is turned off by their parent universe. If this is the case, it would break the simulation chain. If Simulation A was the parent of Simulation B, which was the parent of the Simulation C, which was the parent of Simulation D, the inhabitants of Simulation A would be able to break this chain and destroy all of the simulations in this chain by turning off Simulation B.

The simulation hypothesis concludes that we are in a simulation in all probability, and that every universe is equally likely to be a simulation. This means that the universe that begat ours is also probably a simulation, as is the universe that begat our parent universe. If this is the case, it would be very likely that our own universe is merely one node in a huge chain of parent universes.

But this creates an interesting question. If any of those universes could break the chain at any time by turning off their simulation, the probability that not a single one of them would do so must be extraordinarily low. This strongly suggests that we are not in a simulation.

There are a couple of responses to this argument which I can foresee, so allow me to preemptively address them. Some might invoke the Anthropic Principle. It doesn’t make sense to marvel at the unlikelihood of our own existence, they will reason, because if our universe had been turned off we wouldn’t be here to speculate about it. In my opinion, this is a flawed application of the Anthropic Principle because there is another plausible explanation for our existence: Our simulated universe hasn’t been “turned off” by any of its parents because they don’t exist. We are the original universe.

So we have two possible explanations for our own universe. Either we are in a simulation, and are here due to the infinitesimally unlikely whims of an unimaginably vast chain of parent universes…or we are simply not a simulation. If these are the two possibilities, the latter seems much more likely from this probabilistic standpoint. It also has the advantage of surviving Ockham’s Razor.

What do you think? Is my probabilistic argument for our actual reality as strong as Bostrom’s argument for our simulated reality? What flaws do you see in my logic?

Are we living in a simulation?

Are we living in a simulated reality? Transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom thinks so. He puts forth the following argument. One of the following three statements must logically be true: 1) Advanced civilizations can never develop simulated realities; 2) No advanced civilization would ever choose to develop simulated realities; or 3) Our own reality is almost certainly simulated.

There are a few circumstances in which Statement #1 could theoretically be true. Perhaps there are no other advanced civilizations in the universe. Perhaps advanced civilizations exist, but simulations are simply impossible. Or perhaps they are possible, but beyond the technological capacity of any species. I think Statement #1 is the least plausible of the three. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, even extremely pessimistic interpretations of the Drake Equation should have yielded at least one other advanced civilization somewhere in our universe. The technological barriers to creating a simulation seem very small. We already have rudimentary virtual reality technology, and there is no fundamental reason why we shouldn’t be able to create all-encompassing simulations within a few decades. Since we’re nearly able to create them already, it seems unlikely that there are no other civilizations in the entire universe that are a few mere decades ahead of us.

Statement #2 involves speculation into the motives of other civilizations, of which we can’t possibly know anything. However, we do know about our own civilization and what motivates us. If humans develop this technology within a few decades, we will almost certainly make use of it, creating thousands upon thousands of simulations for entertainment or research. Therefore it seems very likely to me that Statement #2 is false.

This leaves Statement #3. If we have concluded that Statements #1 and #2 are false, Bostrom reasons that Statement #3 must be true. Why? Because there will be an enormous number of simulated realities. The probability that we find ourselves in the one parent universe, as opposed to one of the many simulations, must be vanishingly small.

The Simulation Hypothesis fascinates me, because it is one of the few rationales for the existence of some form of a god which I, an agnostic, do not think is easily refutable. Let’s examine the common rebuttals of the simulation hypothesis to see how much merit they hold.

Some have questioned the assumption that there is one parent universe and many simulations. If there are many parent universes and many simulated universes, critics reason, then the probability that we are in a simulation would not necessarily be quite so high. But I disagree. What are the implications of many parent universes capable of sustaining life and technology? Presumably EACH of them would be running many simulations, and thus it would not affect the probability of our being in a simulation much at all.

The most serious problem I see with the Simulation Hypothesis is that it has no empirical basis, and falls apart under the scrutiny of Ockham’s Razor. There is absolutely no conclusive evidence that we are living in a simulation. There may be a few teasing clues (e.g. the quantum world behaves suspiciously differently when we aren’t watching), but nothing substantive. However, I can see no obvious flaw in the logic of the Simulation Hypothesis. This leads back to an old philosophical debate between empiricists and rationalists: Can we determine reality through sound logic, without empirical evidence? I tentatively plant my flag on the side of the rationalists. Scientists frequently adopt a rationalist mindset when interpreting the Drake Equation or formulating string theory (despite absolutely no evidence for extraterrestrials or strings), but switch over to empiricist mode for topics like philosophy or theology. This seems to be a product of cultural bias. In my view, while we should always seek out evidence wherever possible, sound logic is often a sufficient (if inferior) substitute.

At the end of the day, I tend to lean toward the conclusion that Bostrom is correct: We are probably in a simulation. What do you think? Let me know if/where you think the logic of the Simulation Hypothesis is flawed, or any other examples of clues that would suggest a simulated reality.