Greg Adamson
In his Peace War series, science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge suggested that we are approaching a technology singularity, a point at which the rate of technological development is so great that humanity is no longer recognisable.
Vinge is widely respected within technical circles. He invented what later became the "avatar", a persona that people adopt when participating in online gaming. Inspired by his 1987 novel True Names, today hundreds of thousands of people spend much of their lives playing games such as Everquest, building fantasy worlds that they find more attractive than the real one.
He has also developed many of the concepts of "nanotechnology", a technology based on small, including microscopic and sub-miroscopic, technology components. He invented the concept of "smart dust", the use of many tiny primitive machines that combine to form complex ones.
In Vinge's fiction writing, technology is both a threat and a promise. In the hands of ruling minorities, it is the means for maintaining power and privilege. However, these minorities are unable to provide the creativity needed to advance their technologies further. Technologists on the margins of society are able to overthrow these rulers using their superior modified technologies.
Through this process of control and revolt, technology moves forward to a point where every person in the world has more technology at hand than the single most technically endowed individual today. (He refrains from describing the subsequent society.)
So are we approaching a technological singularity? Media representation suggests that the rate of technical discovery and change is increasing. Assuming that the many aspects of technology that already exist are being continually developed, common sense says that the pace of technology development must be speeding up.
Research by physicist Jonathan Huebner from the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center suggests otherwise. Huebner has examined 7200 major innovations cited in a recent history of science and technology, and mapped these against time and population to produce an index: the number of innovations per billion people each year. This figure peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. We are now back to 1600 and Huebner estimates that by 2024 we will have reached the innovation level of the "Dark Ages".
Critic and futurologist Ray Kurzweil points to the increasing rate of data transmission and reducing cost of computing as evidence that this isn't so. Huebner responds that some innovation is still occurring, just not as much. Huebner explains this by suggesting that we are approaching a discovery limit: "My feeling is we've discovered most of the major branches on the tree of technology."
An alternative explanation is that since the late 19th century the capitalist market hasn't been very good at encouraging technology innovation. For capitalism, profit provides the motive for technical development. This leads to a dilemma: often it is more profitable to suppress or delay the development of a technology than to develop it.
Business theorist Michael Porter has summarised this in his theory of "competitive advantage". Porter explains that for capitalists it isn't sufficient to develop a technology that lots of people want. In order to maximise profits you have to ensure that others can't quickly implement the same solution, using a combination of patents, business secrecy and other means.
For those who see technology as a means to provide the necessities of life (including food, shelter, health, education and communication), the technical singularity could be considered the point when everyone in the world has achieved these benefits. Historical evidence suggests that market-based development of technology will never get us there.
From Green Left Weekly, May 10, 2006.
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