The Unpaved Road to Singularity

Singularity is often associated with a smooth advance into a time of an unfathomable paradigm shift.  It can be portrayed as a great hope, a great solution, a fix to the worlds problems….a clean, paved highway to the future.

 On the contrary, as we draw nearer and nearer to singularity, we are entering one of the most volatile and dangerous times in modern human history.  The road is one of the most challenging and dangerous roads that mankind has ever attempted to traverse.

Knowledge advance is an ideological magnifying glass.  Human ideologies, with a very few exceptions, have endured for thousands of years.  Yes, there have always been conflicts and wars, but knowledge advance gives the power of war to the individual and small group.  What once took an army of soldiers, can not be done with machinery that fits in the trunk of a car….and the threats are becoming smaller and smaller.

The rise toward Singularity holds an obvious dichotomy with inherent risk on many different fronts:

• The same technology that creates low cost water filtration for third world countries, has the potential to create a nano weapon that can fit in a shirt pocket and could annihilate large parts of cities.
• The same industrialism that allows nations like India and China to move their populations out of poverty and into prosperity is producing pollution and environmental threats on a global scale.
• Human population is booming, and planetary biodiversity is threatened.
• Some countries are becoming desperate for immigration to keep their economies vibrant and other countries like China are trying to place limits on the number of children born.
• The same medical advances that create cancer ‘smart bombs’ or ‘manufactured (instead of grown) food’ can create human engineered disease, self-replicating destructive nanobots.
• Technologies like cloning could solve food production issues and can also totally destroy the balance of nature.
• The same molecular economy that will create billions in wealth for various nations is also changing the balance of power in our world and these instabilities are increasing the threat of major war.

And there are not just physical conflicts and wars, but also conflicts and wars in the knowledge working space.  Not only in the sense of cyber-terrorism, but inherent to the nature of knowledge itself.  You see, knowledge, by its very nature, is one.  Knowledge advances from a logical structure that can be represented categorically and all knowledge can be categorized into a single structure.  This is possible, because it is the very nature of knowledge to be structured into one structure.  As we move toward greater and greater knowledge working computer power, this ‘oneness’ of knowledge will become more and more apparent.  Add to this the potential for ubiquitous computing and knowledge will begin to melt, as it already has, traditional national boundaries.

The open source vs. closed source argument in computer software is spreading into knowledge in general with the introduction of technologies like the wiki (Wikipedia).  These conflicts are in their infancy.  As computing power increases, it becomes increasingly more ‘discoverable’ by nations, groups, factions, and individuals.  What took years to discover just 50 years ago, now takes only minutes, and we can expect this to increase.  In addition, there is a rising level of conflict over who owns this ‘one knowledge.’  What exactly is ‘public knowledge’ and how does it relate to a particular national interest For example, how can a nation protect itself from technology of weaponry that becomes ‘public knowledge’ or knowledge that is easily accessed?

Also, collaboration is tearing down national boundaries at individual and small group levels and this new found cooperation is escalating into conflict with politcal power bases. It’s pretty easy today for, e.g., Russians, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans, and U.S. citizenry to collaborate to discover new knowledge.  But the national interests these collaborations sit down in have, in most cases, not changed and this will create escalating conflict between governments and citizenry.

Seen as a whole, these problems are daunting if not just plain scary.  But all of these problems have one thing in common and this commonality is also the key to their individual resolution.  Every problem we have emerging in this post-information age culture is ‘Integral.’  Integral in the sense that a solution requires collaboration and contributions from several areas or facets of society in order to arrive at a resolution.
Just try to name one issue that an educational, governmental, or industrial enterprise today can solve ‘on their own.’  If you consider the ripple effect of our actions in a ubiquitous world, I dare say the stand alone issue is becoming extinct.  For example:

• It won’t be possible to solve Los Angeles pollution, if that polution is travelling across the pacific from China, unless we help, or cooperate, or dialogue with China to solve it. 
• It won’t be possible to remain profitable in an industrial sense without cooperating and dialoguing across nations on environmental impacts.
• It won’t be possible to stop a nano bomb in a shirt pocket, unless we cooperate and create a dialogue between governments, militaries, academic researchers, and industries on a global scale.

The list of examples is a long one.  Issues in all types of enterprises are largely global in nature, have increasing levels of risk inherent to the issues, and are integral.

We are leaving the time of national problems and entering a time when all problems require some type of dialogue or cooperation to solve them.

Dialogue is a group problem-solving discussion.  It’s simply talking together to solve a problem.  Futures generative dialogue, coined by Rick Smyre, is a dialogue that focuses on problems that are ‘coming’ as identified by trends and weak signals.

The answer to human survival, which we will struggle with more and more as we move toward Singularity, is in dialogue and cooperation between social institutions, enterprises, groups, facets, and individuals.