X-Message-Number: 20548 Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 11:11:37 -0800 Subject: Chuang Tse's Singularity From: Peter Merel <> Yvan writes, > A last comment: I was 5 years old when I was told: You speak too much. > At 18 > I had my entry in the file of the french political police, the > "renseignements generaux". I have got last week my third criminal fire > on one > of my properties. I wait with confidence the next bullet. :-( We all experience violence and terror from time to time. Nor is this a new thing - humans have been the scourge of humans for as long as there have been humans. As folks intending to live long, however, we need to create responses to violence and terror that are a little different from the three standards (a) not my problem, (b) eye for an eye, & (c) nuke 'em from orbit. The optimists among us, observing Moore's Law, expect the techno-apotheosis to save us from these other humans that hellishly surround us. And they expect it to arrive any day now. So why trouble ourselves with new solutions to the social ills of this present hell? Here's why: The engineers among us know Karr's Law: "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose". For all the exponential drop in speed and component cost, the systems we're building are qualitatively unchanged. Silk purse from sow's ear, you don't get Godhead by networking a few trillion 4-function calculators. What you get instead is Babel. What do I mean by this? I mean that all the systems we've built suffer from the same self-limiting problem: combinatorial explosion. That's why it's 2002 and I'm telling you this instead of HAL. Moore's law is a furphy, a marketing statistic that hides the truth of our engineering efforts: stagnation. How can this be? It breaks out like this: 10% of all our engineering money these days is spent on procedurally parameterizing a very few standard pipes, filters, and sprockets. These sprockets are growing exponentially smaller and cheaper, and there are a lot more of them deployed, but they're still sprockets - no different in fundamental architecture from the stuff of 50 years ago. 89.9999% of our engineering money is spent hooking new procedural parameterizations up to legacy systems and to each other. This isn't really engineering at all; it's plumbing. 10 years ago plumbing was only 80% of the enginees' job, but every system we deploy is another requirement for more plumbing - the necessary combinations of them grow exponentially, and don't happen automatically. So plumbing is expanding to fill our time; in another 10 years, 95% of the work will be plumbing. In 20 years, 99%. But even now only 0.0001% of our engineering money is spent on qualitative improvements in technology - on new sprockets. This is true even in such relatively dynamic fields as bioinformatics. The stuff the great engineers of the past did for a living - Watt, Tesla, Fermi, Crick, Taylor - we don't fund that. If we're lucky these types find a way to do their work in the absence of funds. If we're unlucky they perish without ever making their work realizable. This is why, in software, we've been engineering in a cul de sac called the Turing/Von Neumann architecture - and if there is a road to the apotheosis, it doesn't come through here. Without fundamental changes in our mindset and toolset, the singularity ain't coming soon. Heck, unless we come up with new ways to deal with terror, violence, and waste, it ain't coming at all. So we who intend long life are going to have to find ways to get terrestrial industrial civilization to survive for at least the next century. And we'll need to find ways to work with it that both dramatically improve it and carefully preserve us. Calling for nukes isn't one of those ways. Nurturing and cultivating invention and technological iconoclasm is one of those ways. Finding ways to improve the harmony of our interactions with others is one of those ways. And learning to listen with an open mind to people telling you the world can be made different, if we set out to make it different, is one of those ways. So, Yvan, I'm trying to say that there are real benefits to be had in our learning the discipline of diplomacy. This is not to tell you to shut up! It is to suggest you choose words that increase harmony and goodwill, and focus on constructive work, rather than words that can create the very hell you so desperately want to escape. Indeed there's an old Chuang-Tse story about a farmer receiving a traveller on the way to a big city. "What are they like there?" asks the traveller. "Well, what were they like where you came from?" asks the farmer. "Oh, they're a mean bunch. I mean, violent, ignorant, and unfriendly." The farmer says, "well, the people in that city up ahead are pretty much the same." The traveller makes a sour face and heads down the road. A few days later another traveller turns up on the way to the city. "What are they like there?" asks this traveller too. "Well, what were they like where you came from?" asks the farmer. "Oh, they're wonderful people! Peaceful, clever, and loving." The farmer says, "well, the people in that city up ahead are pretty much the same." Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20548