The Singularity Has Arrived

of stuff. So all you people at home, as you probably know from the news reports, last night, at to fourteen am Eastern time, the Singularity arrived. Yeah, I mean, who would have predicted right in the morning. Yeah, what an exciting time to be alive. So we decided to do sort of a brief explainer on the Singularity's arrival and then look back at some of the predictions that Singularity thinkers had made over the years, and then even ourselves, and and just see how they stack up against the

real thing now that it's here. Yeah yeah, So, I mean it seems weird to talk about what is it since you know we're in it now, But clearly, we do need to have this conversation to clear up what we thought it was going to be versus what it actually is. You know, we gotta we gotta clear things up because I know a lot of people out there are excited but confused. I mean, I was going down the street and all the garages all the way down my street the doors were just opening and closing. So clearly, uh,

that was sneezing. We now know that, but at the time we had not made that connection between sneezing and automatic garage door openers. I understand there's gonna be a patch for that, but we'll get to that. Right. So what is the singularity, or at least what did we

think it was before we got here. So the way I always hear it explained is it's a moment moment in our technological development where we reach a point where is there some form of superhuman intelligence, whether that would have been from um machine intelligence or a biological enhanced intelligence, whatever.

That means. We would get to a point where we would be so intelligent that the old versions of ourselves would be unable to describe what the present would be like moment to moment, because it would be changing so quickly, right, it's it's this sudden rapid advance in intelligence, usually thought of as artificial intelligence or machine intelligence, leading to extremely fast advances where our capabilities are basically we can't even

track them anymore. Right, Like remember when you used to say I was going to the store and I bought a new computer and by the time I got at home and now the box it was obsolete. That is super slow compared to the time of the singularity. Yeah, that's true of everything we do now. So where did this idea first come from? Like who was the first person to see that this was going to happen? Well, I do want to point out that we did a full episode on this that published back in April, back

when time had real meaning. Yeah, I mean I I recall that. Remember, just doesn't seem like the right word now, right, Um, but you know, let's review just in case anyone is having a little bit of trouble accessing this particular information. So John von Neuben coined the term singularity in nineteen by which he meant a point beyond which humanity as we know it will change. Oh boy, that one really. The term technological singularity comes from the science fiction writer

Werner Vinge. In the early nineteen eighties, he he wrote this article for Omni magazine, predicting that humanity would create superhuman intelligence that would transform our world in unthinkable ways. Uh and and soon like by, he said, And of course Ray Hurtswile's book The Singularity Is Near, published in two thousand five, did a whole lot to popularize the idea. He even gave an even more generous date. But you

can't convolve, right, Howeverner? Hey, yeah, it's crazy. So Ray hurtswhile back in the day he made so many technological predictions that came true. He was one of the great technology predictors. And the funny thing is, lots of people at the time criticized Ray Hurtswhile for being too hasty and optimistic with his predictions. But like like ends to

a hobbit. They people were criticizing him all over the place, But an excellent an excellent comparison, we now know he was being way too conservative, not hasty enough, as it turns out. Yeah, so I think it's surprised a lot of people that the Singularity would arrive at the beginning of April. Then again, this is the year of Back to the Future Part two, Right, and we did a full episode on that. Yeah, and I just watched it inside my brain this morning several times. It was pretty cool.

I was doing that every time I was blinking. It took a while to find the actual feature to switch that from default, but that was probably because I never read the terms of service. Sure, So why were people

such doubters back then? Well, uh, you know, people doubted our ability to to build and program machines at the level of complexities that that mirror our own, let alone to outdo ourselves, right right, Yeah, the the human brain was thought of to be so complex that the machines we build would never really match up to that, not in not in any foreseeable future. At least that was the thought. Sure, other people pointed out the inherent differences in the way that human minds work versus the way

that computers process information. Sure, and we know that they are pretty different, right, although you know, not so different that turns out? Yeah, that just shows again the limit of what we knew. Right. Yeah, Well, I I never would have predicted at a just a hard power cycle on my brain would cure so many of my problems. Yeah, Well, I kept on hoping you'd find that control all of

the lead, and now you can. People also argued about the the role of emergence in intelligence and whether and whether anything can really be greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah. So, like this idea of emergence and intelligence where things add up an unexpected properties evolved from

very complex systems right right where. You know, you never would have been able to predict that you would actually get this output from the input, because if you look at all the component parts, it seems like such output would be impossible. But as we now know, given the right amount of complexity, that is entirely possible. You know, I have to admit I was a Singularity skeptic back in the day, and I fully admit now I was

totally wrong. I I never thought all this stuff would happen, that I would wake up with nano robots doing stuff to my body. I mean, we can talk about that in a bit. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm really glad that I'm not allergic to onions anymore. You guys, it's a been a beautiful morning full of onions, in fact, and the raw onions eating them like apples. Yeah, it's fantastic for that. It's all right, because now that we have complete control of our old factory system, I'm not detecting

anything other than the sweet smell of peppermint. Huh. You got that old factory and plant high. Yeah, the machines determined I wouldn't want one of those for me, so I didn't get one. But maybe I can, Maybe I can, like actually request one. I'm sure you can. I hear there's like a lot of things on back order right now, but from what I understand, time has very little meaning these days, so you won't have to wait long. By back order. They probably mean and you know, seven or

eight nanoseconds. Yeah, you might actually already have it now. No, I was a doubter too, and I have to I have to apologize. You know, Ray, I already sent you like forty emails, so you've probably gotten them. And I think that we really grock each other now. But I do have to personally apologize for the number of times on the show that I mockingly said twenty to forty

years is probably what it's gonna happen. Um, my face would be read if I blushed anymore, But I don't seem to be in that odd side effect was that intended or yeah, I used to do that, like whole head blush familiar and that that scalp. Yeah, you you should really think about that. No, I didn't even think about that. You didn't get the blood pressure control over. No, No, I still blush. You should have seen me when I

was walking by the coffee machine today. It was just it was it was a social full It's so it's so old fashioned, it's so quaint, it's cute. Well maybe

I'll keep it just for nostalgia's sake, yeh. But but along with me, you know, some people were really really harsh about this virtual reality Pioneer Jarren Linear even called it and I quote cybernetic totally is him and said that it was a fanatic ideology along the lines of Marxism in the it denied scientific skepticism and and stoked the computer science industries ego with these inflated views of

their own importance to the to the future of humanity. Right, This idea that that somehow, this uh, this this small niche science was going to end up totally transforming what we as a species are all about. That did seem like it was you know, a pretty outlandish prediction. Of course, we all have to eat our words. Now. Well, now that the singularity has occurred, let's take a look back and and explain what actually happened to kick it into place.

I thought this was interesting. It turns out that the first superhuman AI that came online last night, it was created by a team at the Setimentation Lab of balt Our University, and that was led by a guy we've talked about on the show before, Dr how Space, So in the department of ultron Studies. He's actually really cool. If you see any videos of interviews with him. Yeah, he's got this very sonorous, commanding voice, and it is kind of odd though his his his appearance can change

dramatically from one video to the next. So it's possible that you've seen a video of this guy and not recognized him because his appearance can change so much between appearances. Yeah, but what is it that actually happened. Well, there was a couple of phases of this, the first phase of which was the integration of machine intelligence with our own to create superhuman intelligence. It turned out to be much

simpler than we anticipated. Like Lauren was saying, we had worried that artificial networks and biological material operated so differently that there'd be compatibility issues that we would have to work out for decades before this could ever become a reality. But as it turns out, if you just pull out the circuit board for an atari, not an atari. Cannot stress that enough playing in the big leagues, now, yeah

you don't. You don't want to know what happens if you if you obstitute it, no but an Atari, and you wire that to your cerebral cortex. You have to use a headset from this this toy called mind Flex that was the one that had a little headset. You would wear it and you would concentrate really hard and move essentially a little ping pong ball like thing through in amaze, just using your thoughts. Who knew this would

change the world? Yeah you well, I mean, no one had really experimented with this particular combination until Dr Spates so had really hit upon the nub of it. But it turns out that if you do that, you can actually merge machine and human intelligence together, which is what happened to all of us last night. Uh, well a lot of us anyway, Maybe you too, dear listener, it was a super secret operation that happened while most of

us were sleeping in the morning. Well, that's the thing is that not all of us on your time zone, if you were asleep with the when the nano robots arrived at your house, if you were awake, they would just be nice and move on to the next house,

right right. So I can tell you that those of us who were conscious during this machine intelligence conversion can report that it did tingle, and we detected some strange odors uh Pepperman in my case, which is why I had that old factory thing put in so that it was just a pleasant experience. But I understand other people had different smells, like espresso, and uh mine was more like jasmine. Oh excellent, all right, that's that's a very nice, soothing smell. And so also we can all play river

rate in our minds whenever we want to. I've gotten pretty good, although there's like this one bridge that when I get to it, time is nearly out and I haven't figured that part out yet, but I am sure that I will get through it before the end of the day. How did you get river rate? I just

got Pitfall and that Texas Chainsaw massacre game. Oh wow, GOLLI to be fair, I did live through the era of River Raid, so perhaps it was given preferential treatment for the people who are actually alive when the games came out the first time. Do I get to keep making fun of you for being old anymore? I'm you could, but doesn't mean anything. Yeah, Now, this was, of course the first step, Joe, you were talking about there are downsides to the singularity. Sorry, you were talking about the

cyber nanosurgery which followed in the second way. Sure, yeah, well, the machine intelligence integration that that was just the first step. We had to get a lot of implants. Of course, you want your specific implants to upgrade particular parts of your brain, all your particular brain organs. Uh. And then of course the organs of your body. You want these

bionic implants for strength enhancement and so forth. So it was kind of cool waking up a cyboard when I didn't expect to, And frankly, I had always imagined I'd have to pay lots of money and go in for multiple surgeries to get all these brain implants and bionic strength enhancements. But according to reports, it was actually at

about four am last night that the overmind solved world scarcity. Uh, and by dawn it had limitated money, automated mass production of all the material goods to you know, match projected demand, and the overnight nanosurgical implantation of all these cool gadgets was sort of just a bonus for the people who slept in today. I read this morning that all of the early risers who were already awake at the time the nano robots made their house calls, they're going to

get their implants tonight. So that's kind of a bummer for them. But then again, they're gonna get all the newer models, and I'm going to be stuck with these old pieces of junk from last night, right. And one of the issues that those of us who were asleep are now encountering is that we are technically early adopters, and sometimes the when you are an early adopter, the technology works in ways that were unintended, or perhaps doesn't work in the proper way, or there's exactly exactly I've

discovered this my own. I mean, we saw the sneezy and garage doors. That was an issue. I've also discovered that if I pressed the unlock function on my key fob, which technically I don't even need to use now. It's just kind of a habit that as I could just think about the car being unlocked, and it is. But if I press that button, it causes me to experience the film's leprechn lepre Con four in Space and lepre Con Back to the Hood within the span of five milliseconds,

but none of the others in the series. It knows your needs better than you do. Yeah, and that's really the thing I mean. I mean, now you have everything that you need, including Leprechaun back to the Hood. Yeah. What's interesting is I did press that button like seventeen more times after I found out what it was doing. What did I tell you? Yeah, I don't. That's a personal issue, though we shouldn't. We can go into other things,

you know. Another thing I did not anticipate, though, and this might be one of my only gripes, is the near crippling effect of constant software updates. I mean, I can barely use my computer these days. I mean, sure, it is faster than ever and it has the wisdom of a thousand stages past, present in future, but every single time you log on. I'm sure you'll have experienced this. It's barely ninety seconds before it's downloading OS updates and software patches, and then it's going to force me to

do a restart again. I can't restart my computer that often and get work done. It's really annoying, you know. I used to have that remind me in one hour option, but now every time I try to select that, my co Clear implant whispers this overwhelmingly persuasive argument that I should just go ahead and go with the update. Every

single time. It changes my mind. Well, the drones, in order to help out people who did not receive their personal implants last last night, are delivering new computers in waves, you know, so so they're they're delivering them to people who haven't received those implants first, and you'll get yours as soon as everyone else's cybernetics are taken care of.

That co Clear implant sounds really interesting. Mine was an eye ear, so I just end up buying lots of Apple products, although I still use a Windows based PC, but I got one of the future ones. It actually has been updating, uh five minutes from now ever since I got it, so it's kind of odd that I'm getting updates before the update is issued. In fact, yeah, I heard they did so many versions they ran out

of natural numbers. Yeah, we we ran out of numbers that we just couldn't have any numbers high enough to describe the Windows, so we had to I didn't even realize that would happened. Numbers. It turns out that if you go long enough, you do run out, so we had to start inventing new numbers. That's why I am currently on Windows three. It's the version I'm running right now. Yeah, that's the number right after Niven exactly. It goes Niven

than three. We haven't all decided exactly what the next number is going to be, but I have high hopes that by the time this podcast is over and we can all reconnect to the overmind, I will be updated to that point. You know. Another gripe is all the robots. Yeah, I mean there's so many I'm kind of bumping into them a lot. Yeah. It turns out that that automation

of mass production also meant a huge explosion in robot production. Uh. I for one did see the robot invasion coming from a mile away, but that's because we all have remote sensing technologies at our disposal now. And in fact, as many of you will be aware, a mile long detection radius is actually my opic. So I will be having a laser surgery to improve my sensors after this. Yeah, and they've I don't know about you. You can download a patch so that you don't have a sense of

personal space anymore. Oh, yeah, that does that does help. Yeah, it certainly certainly helps whenever I am being transported by robot to work now, uh, in fact, it's to a point where there's just a swarm of them that cover me and carry me bodily straight to work. I will also say that I did not anticipate the roomba cavalry last uh, well, early this morning. I didn't think that was gonna be a thing. Clearly, the robots were making use of any systems that they had available to them.

They really swept up the resistance quite handily. Yeah, puns have not yet been forbidden, but I hear that's on the table too. Now, I did hear there was one unit that just ended up bumping into the corner repeatedly.

So again, you know, we're still we're still working at the right right, you know, Another thing that I have thought we should do is that now that the machines have invented time travel, we should actually do a next episode from the future so we can sort of deliver a special investigative report from seventy two or whenever we want. I in fact have a message from two right now. Yeah, I thought that would be a great way to kind

of wrap up this entire discussion. So the report from two definitively answers a question that has been of great import over the last several years on the internet. It turns out it's pronounced neither gif nor jiff, but bif. Oh. Now, this is weird because it brings us back to back to back to the future, to part two, that episode we did a while back. We actually anticipated this, not knowingly, it had been implanted into our brains from the future.

And if you go back and listen to that episode, you will find the coded message about biff being the proper pronunciation. It's right there in the episode. That's crazy. Yeah, we didn't. We weren't even aware of it at the time. I wish I had time traveled this morning. I just had too much email to get through. Well, I mean, in my case I had Simply all I did was put in a Google future search, so it just came

back to me. I haven't actually been to seventy two yet. Okay, well hold on, I'm gonna go time travel real quick, just and then I'll come back and let you know I want to. Let's just try the year one sixty six. All right, that sounds interesting. Wow, that was amazing, Joe. You look different. Yeah. So in sixty six there are only robots and super intelligent apes left, and I don't look good with that much body hair. So I had

to join the robot legion fair enough. But you know, I don't really mind it, like I'm so shiny now. I don't know, it's pretty cool. Yeah, well, I mean that's that's fantastic news for you, Joe. The other thing now is that as a robot, I'm no longer driven by an insatiable lust for power and immortality the way I was as an organic human. More about something to

you about that. The obsession you had with that ax was kind of you know, now I can I can really focus on the things that matter, like gardening and like machine meditation, and I discovered a new love for kite flying, have you ever actually flown a kite? I mean not since I was a kid, but you know it's beautiful. Well, I mean, that's that's excellent things to to know, Joe, thank you for taking that upon yourself. I I think we all look forward to seeing sixty

six as soon as this episode is over. I also think anyone who doesn't embrace the singularity this April is being something of a fool. I would agree they are being a fool in April and absolute April fool. Yes, indeed, and with that it is time for us to sign off. However, of course we're going to have plenty to talk about in the future, since it is arriving so very quickly now, So stay tuned for future episodes of forward Thinking, and of course if you have an idea for an episode,

you should get in touch with us. Yeah, we are backwards compatible, so you can still access some of those those antiquated systems in case your uploads are are blocked by all of the video games that I'm uploading. I also have a lot of ad block software running in my brain const at least, so sometimes it catches things

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