Posthumanism or post-humanism (meaning "after humanism" or "beyond humanism") is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. Posthumanization comprises "those processes by which a society comes to include members other than 'natural' biological human beings who, in one way or another, contribute to the structures, dynamics, or meaning of the society."
It encompasses a wide variety of branches, including:
Antihumanism: a branch of theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about the human condition, vitality and agency.
Cultural posthumanism: A branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond "archaic" concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.
Philosophical posthumanism: A philosophical direction
that draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines
the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and
extending subjectivities beyond the human species.
Posthuman transhumanism: A transhuman
ideology and movement which, drawing from posthumanist philosophy,
seeks to develop and make available technologies that enable immortality
and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities in order to achieve a "posthuman future".
AI takeover: A variant of transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers and theorists, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise as a consequence of a technological singularity. This is related to the view of "cosmism",
which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if
it may entail the end of humanity, as in their view it "would be a
cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".
Philosopher Theodore Schatzki suggests there are two varieties of posthumanism of the philosophical kind:
One, which he calls "objectivism", tries to counter the overemphasis of the subjective, or intersubjective,
that pervades humanism, and emphasises the role of the nonhuman agents,
whether they be animals and plants, or computers or other things,
because "Humans and nonhumans, it [objectivism] proclaims, codetermine
one another", and also claims "independence of (some) objects from human
activity and conceptualization".
A second posthumanist agenda is "the prioritization of practices
over individuals (or individual subjects)", which, they say, constitute
the individual.
There may be a third kind of posthumanism, propounded by the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. Though he did not label it "posthumanism", he made an immanent critique of humanism, and then constructed a philosophy that presupposed neither humanist, nor scholastic, nor Greek thought but started with a different religious ground motive.
Dooyeweerd prioritized law and meaningfulness as that which enables
humanity and all else to exist, behave, live, occur, etc. "Meaning is the being of all that has been created", Dooyeweerd wrote, "and the nature even of our selfhood". Both human and nonhuman alike function subject to a common law-side, which is diverse, composed of a number of distinct law-spheres or aspects.
The temporal being of both human and non-human is multi-aspectual; for
example, both plants and humans are bodies, functioning in the biotic
aspect, and both computers and humans function in the formative and
lingual aspect, but humans function in the aesthetic, juridical, ethical
and faith aspects too. The Dooyeweerdian version is able to incorporate
and integrate both the objectivist version and the practices version,
because it allows nonhuman agents their own subject-functioning in
various aspects and places emphasis on aspectual functioning.
Emergence of philosophical posthumanism
Ihab Hassan, theorist in the academic study of literature,
once stated: "Humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms
itself into something one must helplessly call posthumanism."
This view predates most currents of posthumanism which have developed
over the late 20th century in somewhat diverse, but complementary,
domains of thought and practice. For example, Hassan is a known scholar
whose theoretical writings expressly address postmodernity in society.
Beyond postmodernist studies, posthumanism has been developed and
deployed by various cultural theorists, often in reaction to problematic
inherent assumptions within humanistic and enlightenment thought.
Posthumanism differs from classical humanism by relegating humanity back to one of many natural species, thereby rejecting any claims founded on anthropocentric dominance. According to this claim, humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or set themselves above it in ethical considerations a priori. Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. Human rights exist on a spectrum with animal rights and posthuman rights. The limitations and fallibility of human intelligence are confessed, even though it does not imply abandoning the rational tradition of humanism.
Proponents of a posthuman discourse, suggest that innovative
advancements and emerging technologies have transcended the traditional
model of the human, as proposed by Descartes among others associated with philosophy of the Enlightenment period. Posthumanistic views were also found in the works of Shakespeare.
In contrast to humanism, the discourse of posthumanism seeks to
redefine the boundaries surrounding modern philosophical understanding
of the human. Posthumanism represents an evolution of thought beyond
that of the contemporary social boundaries and is predicated on the
seeking of truth within a postmodern context. In so doing, it rejects
previous attempts to establish "anthropological universals" that are imbued with anthropocentric assumptions.
Recently, critics have sought to describe the emergence of posthumanism
as a critical moment in modernity, arguing for the origins of key
posthuman ideas in modern fiction, in Nietzsche, or in a modernist response to the crisis of historicity.
Although Nietzsche's philosophy has been characterized as posthumanist,Foucault placed posthumanism within a context that differentiated humanism from Enlightenment thought.
According to Foucault, the two existed in a state of tension: as
humanism sought to establish norms while Enlightenment thought attempted
to transcend all that is material, including the boundaries that are
constructed by humanistic thought.
Drawing on the Enlightenment's challenges to the boundaries of
humanism, posthumanism rejects the various assumptions of human dogmas
(anthropological, political, scientific) and takes the next step by
attempting to change the nature of thought about what it means to be
human. This requires not only decentering the human in multiple
discourses (evolutionary, ecological and technological) but also
examining those discourses to uncover inherent humanistic,
anthropocentric, normative notions of humanness and the concept of the
human.
Contemporary posthuman discourse
Posthumanistic
discourse aims to open up spaces to examine what it means to be human
and critically question the concept of "the human" in light of current
cultural and historical contexts. In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles,
writes about the struggle between different versions of the posthuman
as it continually co-evolves alongside intelligent machines. Such coevolution, according to some strands of the posthuman discourse, allows one to extend their subjective understandings of real experiences beyond the boundaries of embodied existence. According to Hayles's view of posthuman, often referred to as "technological posthumanism", visual perception
and digital representations thus paradoxically become ever more
salient. Even as one seeks to extend knowledge by deconstructing
perceived boundaries, it is these same boundaries that make knowledge
acquisition possible. The use of technology in a contemporary society is
thought to complicate this relationship.yles discusses the translation of human bodies into information (as suggested by Hans Moravec)
in order to illuminate how the boundaries of our embodied reality have
been compromised in the current age and how narrow definitions of
humanness no longer apply. Because of this, according to Hayles,
posthumanism is characterized by a loss of subjectivity based on bodily
boundaries.
This strand of posthumanism, including the changing notion of
subjectivity and the disruption of ideas concerning what it means to be
human, is often associated with Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg. However, Haraway has distanced herself from posthumanistic discourse due to other theorists' use of the term to promote utopian views of technological innovation to extend the human biological capacity (even though these notions would more correctly fall into the realm of transhumanism).
While posthumanism is a broad and complex ideology, it has
relevant implications today and for the future. It attempts to redefine social structures without inherently humanly or even biological origins, but rather in terms of social and psychological systems where consciousness and communication could potentially exist as unique disembodied
entities. Questions subsequently emerge with respect to the current use
and the future of technology in shaping human existence, as do new concerns with regards to language, symbolism, subjectivity, phenomenology, ethics, justice and creativity.
Technological versus non-technological
Posthumanism can be divided into non-technological and technological forms.
Non-technological posthumanism
While
posthumanization has links with the scholarly methodologies of
posthumanism, it is a distinct phenomenon. The rise of explicit
posthumanism as a scholarly approach is relatively recent, occurring
since the late 1970s; however, some of the processes of posthumanization that it studies are ancient. For example, the dynamics of non-technological posthumanization have existed historically in all societies in which animals were incorporated into families as household pets or in which ghosts, monsters, angels, or semidivine heroes were considered to play some role in the world.
Such non-technological posthumanization has been manifested not
only in mythological and literary works but also in the construction of temples, cemeteries, zoos,
or other physical structures that were considered to be inhabited or
used by quasi- or para-human beings who were not natural, living,
biological human beings but who nevertheless played some role within a
given society,to the extent that, according to philosopher Francesca Ferrando: "the notion of spirituality
dramatically broadens our understanding of the posthuman, allowing us
to investigate not only technical technologies (robotics, cybernetics,
biotechnology, nanotechnology, among others), but also, technologies of
existence."
Technological posthumanism
Some
forms of technological posthumanization involve efforts to directly
alter the social, psychological, or physical structures and behaviors of
the human being through the development and application of technologies
relating to genetic engineering or neurocybernetic augmentation; such forms of posthumanization are studied, e.g., by cyborg theory. Other forms of technological posthumanization indirectly "posthumanize" human society through the deployment of social robots or attempts to develop artificial general intelligences, sentient networks, or other entities that can collaborate and interact with human beings as members of posthumanized societies.
The dynamics of technological posthumanization have long been an important element of science fiction; genres such as cyberpunk
take them as a central focus. In recent decades, technological
posthumanization has also become the subject of increasing attention by
scholars and policymakers. The expanding and accelerating forces of
technological posthumanization have generated diverse and conflicting
responses, with some researchers viewing the processes of
posthumanization as opening the door to a more meaningful and advanced transhumanist future for humanity, while other bioconservative
critiques warn that such processes may lead to a fragmentation of human
society, loss of meaning, and subjugation to the forces of technology.
Common features
Processes of technological and non-technological posthumanization both tend to result in a partial "de-anthropocentrization"
of human society, as its circle of membership is expanded to include
other types of entities and the position of human beings is decentered. A
common theme of posthumanist study is the way in which processes of
posthumanization challenge or blur simple binaries,
such as those of "human versus non-human", "natural versus artificial",
"alive versus non-alive", and "biological versus mechanical".
Relationship with transhumanism
Sociologist James Hughes comments that there is considerable confusion between the two terms. In the introduction to their book on post- and transhumanism, Robert Ranisch and Stefan Sorgner
address the source of this confusion, stating that posthumanism is
often used as an umbrella term that includes both transhumanism and
critical posthumanism.
Although both subjects relate to the future of humanity, they differ in their view of anthropocentrism. Pramod Nayar, author of Posthumanism, states that posthumanism has two main branches: ontological and critical. Ontological posthumanism is synonymous with transhumanism. The subject is regarded as "an intensification of humanism".
Transhumanist thought suggests that humans are not post human yet, but
that human enhancement, often through technological advancement and
application, is the passage of becoming post human. Transhumanism
retains humanism's focus on the Homo sapiens as the center of the world
but also considers technology to be an integral aid to human
progression. Critical posthumanism, however, is opposed to these views.
Critical posthumanism "rejects both human exceptionalism (the idea that
humans are unique creatures) and human instrumentalism (that humans
have a right to control the natural world)". These contrasting views on the importance of human beings are the main distinctions between the two subjects.
Transhumanism is also more ingrained in popular culture than
critical posthumanism, especially in science fiction. The term is
referred to by Pramod Nayar as "the pop posthumanism of cinema and pop
culture".
Criticism
Some
critics have argued that all forms of posthumanism, including
transhumanism, have more in common than their respective proponents
realize. Linking these different approaches, Paul James
suggests that 'the key political problem is that, in effect, the
position allows the human as a category of being to flow down the
plughole of history':
This is ontologically critical.
Unlike the naming of 'postmodernism' where the 'post' does not infer the
end of what it previously meant to be human (just the passing of the
dominance of the modern) the posthumanists are playing a serious game
where the human, in all its ontological variability, disappears in the
name of saving something unspecified about us as merely a motley
co-location of individuals and communities.
Altruism, mutualism, humanism are
the soft and slimy virtues that underpin liberal capitalism. Humanism
has always been integrated into discourses of exploitation: colonialism,
imperialism, neoimperialism, democracy, and of course, American
democratization. One of the serious flaws in transhumanism is the
importation of liberal-human values to the biotechno enhancement of the
human. Posthumanism has a much stronger critical edge attempting to
develop through enactment new understandings of the self and others,
essence, consciousness, intelligence, reason, agency, intimacy, life,
embodiment, identity and the body.
While many modern leaders of thought are accepting of nature of
ideologies described by posthumanism, some are more skeptical of the
term. Haraway, the author of A Cyborg Manifesto,
has outspokenly rejected the term, though acknowledges a philosophical
alignment with posthumanism. Haraway opts instead for the term of
companion species, referring to nonhuman entities with which humans
coexist.
Questions of race, some argue, are suspiciously elided within the
"turn" to posthumanism. Noting that the terms "post" and "human" are
already loaded with racial meaning, critical theorist Zakiyyah Iman
Jackson argues that the impulse to move "beyond" the human within
posthumanism too often ignores "praxes of humanity and critiques
produced by black people", including Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten.
Interrogating the conceptual grounds in which such a mode of "beyond"
is rendered legible and viable, Jackson argues that it is important to
observe that "blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman
disruption and/or disruption" which posthumanists invite.
In other words, given that race in general and blackness in particular
constitute the very terms through which human-nonhuman distinctions are
made, for example in enduring legacies of scientific racism, a gesture toward a "beyond" actually "returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged". Posthumanist scholarship, due to characteristic rhetorical techniques, is also frequently subject to the same critiques commonly made of postmodernist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s.
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical
future point in time at which technological growth becomes
uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences
for human civilization According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent
will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles,
each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more
rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a
powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
The first person to use the concept of a "singularity" in the
technological context was the 20th-century Hungarian-American
mathematician John von Neumann. Stanislaw Ulam reports in 1958 an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue". Subsequent authors have echoed this viewpoint.
The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge
first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create
intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and
social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at
the center of a black hole", and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,
in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the
new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would
advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he
would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045.
Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction. The consequences of the singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.
Prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of
a technological singularity and the associated artificial intelligence
explosion, including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, and Gordon Moore.
One claim made was that the artificial intelligence growth is likely to
run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones, as was
observed in previously developed human technologies.
Intelligence explosion
Although
technological progress has been accelerating in most areas, it has been
limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not,
according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia.
However, with the increasing power of computers and other technologies,
it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is
significantly more intelligent than humans.
If a superhuman intelligence were to be invented—either through the amplification of human intelligence
or through artificial intelligence—it would vastly improve over human
problem-solving and inventive skills. Such an AI is referred to as Seed AI
because if an AI were created with engineering capabilities that
matched or surpassed those of its human creators, it would have the
potential to autonomously improve its own software and hardware to
design an even more capable machine, which could repeat the process in
turn. This recursive self-improvement could accelerate, potentially
allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by
the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in. It is speculated
that over many iterations, such an AI would far surpass human cognitive abilities.
I. J. Good speculated in 1965 that superhuman intelligence might bring about an intelligence explosion:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be
defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual
activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is
one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could
design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an
'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far
behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention
that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to
tell us how to keep it under control.
One version of intelligence explosion is where computing power
approaches infinity in a finite amount of time. In this version, once
AIs are doing the research to improve themselves, speed doubles e.g.
after 2 years, then 1 year, then 6 months, then 3 months, then 1.5
months, etc., where the infinite sum of the doubling periods is 4 years.
Unless prevented by physical limits of computation and time
quantization, this process would literally achieve infinite computing
power in 4 years, properly earning the name "singularity" for the final
state. This form of intelligence explosion is described in Yudkowsky
(1996).
A superintelligence, hyperintelligence, or superhuman intelligence is a hypothetical agent
that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and
most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to the form
or degree of intelligence possessed by such an agent. John von Neumann, Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil
define the concept in terms of the technological creation of super
intelligence, arguing that it is difficult or impossible for present-day
humans to predict what human beings' lives would be like in a
post-singularity world.
The related concept "speed superintelligence" describes an AI that can function like a human mind, only much faster.
For example, with a million-fold increase in the speed of information
processing relative to that of humans, a subjective year would pass in
30 physical seconds. Such a difference in information processing speed could drive the singularity.
Technology forecasters and researchers disagree regarding when,
or whether, human intelligence will likely be surpassed. Some argue that
advances in artificial intelligence
(AI) will probably result in general reasoning systems that bypass
human cognitive limitations. Others believe that humans will evolve or
directly modify their biology so as to achieve radically greater
intelligence. A number of futures studies focus on scenarios that combine these possibilities, suggesting that humans are likely to interface with computers, or upload their minds to computers, in a way that enables substantial intelligence amplification. The book The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
describes a hypothetical future scenario in which human brains are
scanned and digitized, creating "uploads" or digital versions of human
consciousness. In this future, the development of these uploads may
precede or coincide with the emergence of superintelligent artificial
intelligence.
Variations
Non-AI Singularity
Some
writers use "the singularity" in a broader way to refer to any radical
changes in society brought about by new technology (such as molecular nanotechnology),
although Vinge and other writers specifically state that without
superintelligence, such changes would not qualify as a true singularity.
Predictions
In
1965, I. J. Good wrote that it is more probable than not that an
ultraintelligent machine would be built in the twentieth century. In 1993, Vinge predicted greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030. In 1996, Yudkowsky predicted a singularity in 2021. In 2005, Kurzweil predicted human-level AI around 2029, and the singularity in 2045. In a 2017 interview, Kurzweil reaffirmed his estimates.
In 1988, Moravec predicted that if the rate of improvement continues,
the computing capabilities for human-level AI would be available in
supercomputers before 2010. In 1998, Moravec predicted human-level AI by 2040, and intelligence far beyond human by 2050.
Four polls of AI researchers, conducted in 2012 and 2013 by Nick Bostrom and Vincent C. Müller, suggested a confidence of 50% that human-level AI would be developed by 2040–2050.
In 2023 Ben Goertzel,
CEO of SingularityNET—who holds a Ph.D. from Temple University and has
worked as a leader of Humanity+ and the Artificial General Intelligence
Society—told Decrypt that he predicted that Singularity would happen by
2031.
Most proposed methods for creating superhuman or transhuman
minds fall into one of two categories: intelligence amplification of
human brains and artificial intelligence. The many speculated ways to
augment human intelligence include bioengineering, genetic engineering, nootropic drugs, AI assistants, direct brain–computer interfaces and mind uploading.
These multiple possible paths to an intelligence explosion, all of
which will presumably be pursued, makes a singularity more likely.
Robin Hanson
expressed skepticism of human intelligence augmentation, writing that
once the "low-hanging fruit" of easy methods for increasing human
intelligence have been exhausted, further improvements will become
increasingly difficult.
Despite all of the speculated ways for amplifying human intelligence,
non-human artificial intelligence (specifically seed AI) is the most
popular option among the hypotheses that would advance the singularity.
The possibility of an intelligence explosion depends on three factors.
The first accelerating factor is the new intelligence enhancements made
possible by each previous improvement. Contrariwise, as the
intelligences become more advanced, further advances will become more
and more complicated, possibly outweighing the advantage of increased
intelligence. Each improvement should generate at least one more
improvement, on average, for movement towards singularity to continue.
Finally, the laws of physics may eventually prevent further improvement.
There are two logically independent, but mutually reinforcing,
causes of intelligence improvements: increases in the speed of
computation, and improvements to the algorithms used. The former is predicted by Moore's Law and the forecasted improvements in hardware, and is comparatively similar to previous technological advances. But Schulman and Sandberg
argue that software will present more complex challenges than simply
operating on hardware capable of running at human intelligence levels or
beyond.
A 2017 email survey of authors with publications at the 2015 NeurIPS and ICML
machine learning conferences asked about the chance that "the
intelligence explosion argument is broadly correct". Of the respondents,
12% said it was "quite likely", 17% said it was "likely", 21% said it
was "about even", 24% said it was "unlikely" and 26% said it was "quite
unlikely".
Speed improvements
Both
for human and artificial intelligence, hardware improvements increase
the rate of future hardware improvements. An analogy to Moore's Law
suggests that if the first doubling of speed took 18 months, the second
would take 18 subjective months; or 9 external months, whereafter, four
months, two months, and so on towards a speed singularity.
Some upper limit on speed may eventually be reached. Jeff Hawkins has
stated that a self-improving computer system would inevitably run into
upper limits on computing power: "in the end there are limits to how big
and fast computers can run. We would end up in the same place; we'd
just get there a bit faster. There would be no singularity."
It is difficult to directly compare silicon-based hardware with neurons. But Berglas (2008) notes that computer speech recognition
is approaching human capabilities, and that this capability seems to
require 0.01% of the volume of the brain. This analogy suggests that
modern computer hardware is within a few orders of magnitude of being as
powerful as the human brain.
Exponential growth
Ray Kurzweil writes that, due to paradigm shifts, a trend of exponential growth extends Moore's law from integrated circuits to earlier transistors, vacuum tubes, relays, and electromechanical
computers. He predicts that the exponential growth will continue, and
that in a few decades the computing power of all computers will exceed
that of ("unenhanced") human brains, with superhuman artificial intelligence appearing around the same time.An updated version of Moore's law over 120 Years (based on Kurzweil'sgraph). The 7 most recent data points are all Nvidia GPUs.
The exponential growth in computing technology suggested by Moore's
law is commonly cited as a reason to expect a singularity in the
relatively near future, and a number of authors have proposed
generalizations of Moore's law. Computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec proposed in a 1998 book that the exponential growth curve could be extended back through earlier computing technologies prior to the integrated circuit.
Ray Kurzweil postulates a law of accelerating returns in which the speed of technological change (and more generally, all evolutionary processes)
increases exponentially, generalizing Moore's law in the same manner as
Moravec's proposal, and also including material technology (especially
as applied to nanotechnology), medical technology and others.
Between 1986 and 2007, machines' application-specific capacity to
compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months; the per
capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers has doubled
every 18 months; the global telecommunication capacity per capita
doubled every 34 months; and the world's storage capacity per capita
doubled every 40 months.
On the other hand, it has been argued that the global acceleration
pattern having the 21st century singularity as its parameter should be
characterized as hyperbolic rather than exponential.
Kurzweil reserves the term "singularity" for a rapid increase in
artificial intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing for
example that "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these
limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no
distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine".
He also defines his predicted date of the singularity (2045) in terms
of when he expects computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed
the sum total of human brainpower, writing that advances in computing
before that date "will not represent the Singularity" because they do
"not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence."
Some singularity proponents argue its inevitability through
extrapolation of past trends, especially those pertaining to shortening
gaps between improvements to technology. In one of the first uses of the
term "singularity" in the context of technological progress, Stanislaw Ulam tells of a conversation with John von Neumann about accelerating change:
One
conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology
and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of
approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond
which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
Kurzweil claims that technological progress follows a pattern of exponential growth, following what he calls the "law of accelerating returns". Whenever technology approaches a barrier, Kurzweil writes, new technologies will surmount it. He predicts paradigm shifts
will become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so
rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human
history". Kurzweil believes that the singularity will occur by approximately 2045.
His predictions differ from Vinge's in that he predicts a gradual
ascent to the singularity, rather than Vinge's rapidly self-improving
superhuman intelligence.
Oft-cited dangers include those commonly associated with molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering. These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of Bill Joy's April 2000 Wired magazine article "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".
Algorithm improvements
Some intelligence technologies, like "seed AI", may also have the potential to not just make themselves faster, but also more efficient, by modifying their source code. These improvements would make further improvements possible, which would make further improvements possible, and so on.
The mechanism for a recursively self-improving set of algorithms
differs from an increase in raw computation speed in two ways. First, it
does not require external influence: machines designing faster hardware
would still require humans to create the improved hardware, or to
program factories appropriately. An AI rewriting its own source code could do so while contained in an AI box.
Second, as with Vernor Vinge's
conception of the singularity, it is much harder to predict the
outcome. While speed increases seem to be only a quantitative difference
from human intelligence, actual algorithm improvements would be
qualitatively different. Eliezer Yudkowsky
compares it to the changes that human intelligence brought: humans
changed the world thousands of times more rapidly than evolution had
done, and in totally different ways. Similarly, the evolution of life
was a massive departure and acceleration from the previous geological
rates of change, and improved intelligence could cause change to be as
different again.
There are substantial dangers associated with an intelligence
explosion singularity originating from a recursively self-improving set
of algorithms. First, the goal structure of the AI might self-modify,
potentially causing the AI to optimise for something other than what was
originally intended.
Secondly, AIs could compete for the same scarce resources humankind uses to survive.
While not actively malicious, AIs would promote the goals of their
programming, not necessarily broader human goals, and thus might crowd
out humans completely.
Carl Shulman and Anders Sandberg
suggest that algorithm improvements may be the limiting factor for a
singularity; while hardware efficiency tends to improve at a steady
pace, software innovations are more unpredictable and may be
bottlenecked by serial, cumulative research. They suggest that in the
case of a software-limited singularity, intelligence explosion would
actually become more likely than with a hardware-limited singularity,
because in the software-limited case, once human-level AI is developed,
it could run serially on very fast hardware, and the abundance of cheap
hardware would make AI research less constrained.
An abundance of accumulated hardware that can be unleashed once the
software figures out how to use it has been called "computing overhang".
Criticism
Some critics, like philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and philosopher John Searle, assert that computers or machines cannot achieve human intelligence. Others, like physicist Stephen Hawking,
object that whether machines can achieve a true intelligence or merely
something similar to intelligence is irrelevant if the net result is the
same.
Psychologist Steven Pinker
stated in 2008: "There is not the slightest reason to believe in a
coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your
imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at
domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high
buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic
fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing
power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems."
Martin Ford
postulates a "technology paradox" in that before the singularity could
occur most routine jobs in the economy would be automated, since this
would require a level of technology inferior to that of the singularity.
This would cause massive unemployment and plummeting consumer demand,
which in turn would destroy the incentive to invest in the technologies
that would be required to bring about the Singularity. Job displacement
is increasingly no longer limited to those types of work traditionally
considered to be "routine".
Theodore Modis and Jonathan Huebner
argue that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to
rise, but is actually now declining. Evidence for this decline is that
the rise in computer clock rates
is slowing, even while Moore's prediction of exponentially increasing
circuit density continues to hold. This is due to excessive heat
build-up from the chip, which cannot be dissipated quickly enough to
prevent the chip from melting when operating at higher speeds. Advances
in speed may be possible in the future by virtue of more power-efficient
CPU designs and multi-cell processors.
Theodore Modis holds the singularity cannot happen.
He claims the "technological singularity" and especially Kurzweil lack
scientific rigor; Kurzweil is alleged to mistake the logistic function
(S-function) for an exponential function, and to see a "knee" in an
exponential function where there can in fact be no such thing.
In a 2021 article, Modis pointed out that no milestones – breaks in
historical perspective comparable in importance to the Internet, DNA,
the transistor, or nuclear energy – had been observed in the previous
twenty years while five of them would have been expected according to
the exponential trend advocated by the proponents of the technological
singularity.
AI researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber
stated that the frequency of subjectively "notable events" appears to
be approaching a 21st-century singularity, but cautioned readers to take
such plots of subjective events with a grain of salt: perhaps
differences in memory of recent and distant events could create an
illusion of accelerating change where none exists.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen argued the opposite of accelerating returns, the complexity brake;
the more progress science makes towards understanding intelligence, the
more difficult it becomes to make additional progress. A study of the
number of patents shows that human creativity does not show accelerating
returns, but in fact, as suggested by Joseph Tainter in his The Collapse of Complex Societies, a law of diminishing returns. The number of patents per thousand peaked in the period from 1850 to 1900, and has been declining since. The growth of complexity eventually becomes self-limiting, and leads to a widespread "general systems collapse".
Hofstadter
(2006) raises concern that Ray Kurzweil is not sufficiently
scientifically rigorous, that an exponential tendency of technology is
not a scientific law like one of physics, and that exponential curves
have no "knees". Nonetheless, he did not rule out the singularity in principle in the distant future and in the light of ChatGPT and other recent advancements has revised his opinion significantly towards dramatic technological change in the near future.
Jaron Lanier denies that the singularity is inevitable: "I do not think the technology is creating itself. It's not an autonomous process."
Furthermore: "The reason to believe in human agency over technological
determinism is that you can then have an economy where people earn their
own way and invent their own lives. If you structure a society on not emphasizing individual human agency, it's the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination ... to embrace [the idea of the Singularity] would be a celebration of bad data and bad politics."
Economist Robert J. Gordon points out that measured economic growth slowed around 1970 and slowed even further since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and argues that the economic data show no trace of a coming Singularity as imagined by mathematician I. J. Good.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett
said in 2017: "The whole singularity stuff, that's preposterous. It
distracts us from much more pressing problems", adding "AI tools that we
become hyper-dependent on, that is going to happen. And one of the
dangers is that we will give them more authority than they warrant."
In addition to general criticisms of the singularity concept,
several critics have raised issues with Kurzweil's iconic chart. One
line of criticism is that a log-log
chart of this nature is inherently biased toward a straight-line
result. Others identify selection bias in the points that Kurzweil
chooses to use. For example, biologist PZ Myers points out that many of the early evolutionary "events" were picked arbitrarily.
Kurzweil has rebutted this by charting evolutionary events from 15
neutral sources, and showing that they fit a straight line on a log-log chart. Kelly
(2006) argues that the way the Kurzweil chart is constructed with
x-axis having time before present, it always points to the singularity
being "now", for any date on which one would construct such a chart, and
shows this visually on Kurzweil's chart.
Some critics suggest religious motivations or implications of
singularity, especially Kurzweil's version of it. The buildup towards
the Singularity is compared with Judeo-Christian end-of-time scenarios.
Beam calls it "a Buck Rogers vision of the hypothetical Christian Rapture". John Gray says "the Singularity echoes apocalyptic myths in which history is about to be interrupted by a world-transforming event".
David Streitfeld in The New York Times questioned whether "it might manifest first and foremost—thanks, in part, to the bottom-line obsession of today’s Silicon Valley—as a tool to slash corporate America’s head count."
Potential impacts
Dramatic
changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past
because of technological advancement. Based on population growth, the
economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution.
The new agricultural economy doubled every 900 years, a remarkable
increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution,
the world's economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times
faster than during the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman
intelligence causes a similar revolution, argues Robin Hanson, one would
expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a
weekly basis.
Physicist Stephen Hawking
said in 2014 that "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in
human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we
learn how to avoid the risks."
Hawking believed that in the coming decades, AI could offer
"incalculable benefits and risks" such as "technology outsmarting
financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating
human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand."
Hawking suggested that artificial intelligence should be taken more
seriously and that more should be done to prepare for the singularity:
So,
facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts
are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right?
Wrong. If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying,
"We'll arrive in a few decades," would we just reply, "OK, call us when
you get here – we'll leave the lights on"? Probably not – but this is
more or less what is happening with AI.
Berglas (2008)
claims that there is no direct evolutionary motivation for an AI to be
friendly to humans. Evolution has no inherent tendency to produce
outcomes valued by humans, and there is little reason to expect an
arbitrary optimisation process to promote an outcome desired by
humankind, rather than inadvertently leading to an AI behaving in a way
not intended by its creators. Anders Sandberg has also elaborated on this scenario, addressing various common counter-arguments. AI researcher Hugo de Garis suggests that artificial intelligences may simply eliminate the human race for access to scarce resources, and humans would be powerless to stop them. Alternatively, AIs developed under evolutionary pressure to promote their own survival could outcompete humanity.
Bostrom (2002) discusses human extinction scenarios, and lists superintelligence as a possible cause:
When we create the first
superintelligent entity, we might make a mistake and give it goals that
lead it to annihilate humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual
advantage gives it the power to do so. For example, we could mistakenly
elevate a subgoal to the status of a supergoal. We tell it to solve a
mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the
solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the
person who asked the question.
According to Eliezer Yudkowsky,
a significant problem in AI safety is that unfriendly artificial
intelligence is likely to be much easier to create than friendly AI.
While both require large advances in recursive optimisation process
design, friendly AI also requires the ability to make goal structures
invariant under self-improvement (or the AI could transform itself into
something unfriendly) and a goal structure that aligns with human values
and does not automatically destroy the human race. An unfriendly AI, on
the other hand, can optimize for an arbitrary goal structure, which
does not need to be invariant under self-modification. Bill Hibbard (2014) proposes an AI design that avoids several dangers including self-delusion, unintended instrumental actions, and corruption of the reward generator. He also discusses social impacts of AI and testing AI. His 2001 book Super-Intelligent Machines
advocates the need for public education about AI and public control
over AI. It also proposed a simple design that was vulnerable to
corruption of the reward generator.
Schematic Timeline of Information and Replicators in the Biosphere: Gillings et al.'s "major evolutionary transitions" in information processing.Amount of digital information worldwide (5×1021 bytes) versus human genome information worldwide (1019 bytes) in 2014
While the technological singularity is usually seen as a sudden
event, some scholars argue the current speed of change already fits this
description.
In addition, some argue that we are already in the midst of a major evolutionary transition
that merges technology, biology, and society. Digital technology has
infiltrated the fabric of human society to a degree of indisputable and
often life-sustaining dependence.
A 2016 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution
argues that "humans already embrace fusions of biology and technology.
We spend most of our waking time communicating through digitally
mediated channels... we trust artificial intelligence with our lives through antilock braking in cars and autopilots
in planes... With one in three courtships leading to marriages in
America beginning online, digital algorithms are also taking a role in
human pair bonding and reproduction".
The digital information created by humans has reached a similar
magnitude to biological information in the biosphere. Since the 1980s,
the quantity of digital information stored has doubled about every 2.5
years, reaching about 5 zettabytes in 2014 (5×1021 bytes).
In biological terms, there are 7.2 billion humans on the planet,
each having a genome of 6.2 billion nucleotides. Since one byte can
encode four nucleotide pairs, the individual genomes of every human on
the planet could be encoded by approximately 1×1019
bytes. The digital realm stored 500 times more information than this in
2014 (see figure). The total amount of DNA contained in all of the
cells on Earth is estimated to be about 5.3×1037 base pairs, equivalent to 1.325×1037 bytes of information.
If growth in digital storage continues at its current rate of 30–38% compound annual growth per year,
it will rival the total information content contained in all of the DNA
in all of the cells on Earth in about 110 years. This would represent a
doubling of the amount of information stored in the biosphere across a
total time period of just 150 years".
In February 2009, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Eric Horvitz
chaired a meeting of leading computer scientists, artificial
intelligence researchers and roboticists at the Asilomar conference
center in Pacific Grove, California. The goal was to discuss the
potential impact of the hypothetical possibility that robots could
become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions. They
discussed the extent to which computers and robots might be able to
acquire autonomy, and to what degree they could use such abilities to pose threats or hazards.
Some machines are programmed with various forms of semi-autonomy,
including the ability to locate their own power sources and choose
targets to attack with weapons. Also, some computer viruses
can evade elimination and, according to scientists in attendance, could
therefore be said to have reached a "cockroach" stage of machine
intelligence. The conference attendees noted that self-awareness as
depicted in science-fiction is probably unlikely, but that other
potential hazards and pitfalls exist.
Frank S. Robinson predicts that once humans achieve a machine
with the intelligence of a human, scientific and technological problems
will be tackled and solved with brainpower far superior to that of
humans. He notes that artificial systems are able to share data more
directly than humans, and predicts that this would result in a global
network of super-intelligence that would dwarf human capability. Robinson also discusses how vastly different the future would potentially look after such an intelligence explosion.
Hard vs. soft takeoff
In
this sample recursive self-improvement scenario, humans modifying an
AI's architecture would be able to double its performance every three
years through, for example, 30 generations before exhausting all
feasible improvements (left). If instead the AI is smart enough to
modify its own architecture as well as human researchers can, its time
required to complete a redesign halves with each generation, and it
progresses all 30 feasible generations in six years (right).
In a hard takeoff scenario, an artificial superintelligence rapidly
self-improves, "taking control" of the world (perhaps in a matter of
hours), too quickly for significant human-initiated error correction or
for a gradual tuning of the agent's goals. In a soft takeoff scenario,
the AI still becomes far more powerful than humanity, but at a
human-like pace (perhaps on the order of decades), on a timescale where
ongoing human interaction and correction can effectively steer the AI's
development.
Ramez Naam
argues against a hard takeoff. He has pointed out that we already see
recursive self-improvement by superintelligences, such as corporations. Intel,
for example, has "the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of
humans and probably millions of CPU cores to... design better CPUs!"
However, this has not led to a hard takeoff; rather, it has led to a
soft takeoff in the form of Moore's law.
Naam further points out that the computational complexity of higher
intelligence may be much greater than linear, such that "creating a mind
of intelligence 2 is probably more than twice as hard as creating a mind of intelligence 1."
J. Storrs Hall
believes that "many of the more commonly seen scenarios for overnight
hard takeoff are circular – they seem to assume hyperhuman capabilities
at the starting point of the self-improvement process" in order
for an AI to be able to make the dramatic, domain-general improvements
required for takeoff. Hall suggests that rather than recursively
self-improving its hardware, software, and infrastructure all on its
own, a fledgling AI would be better off specializing in one area where
it was most effective and then buying the remaining components on the
marketplace, because the quality of products on the marketplace
continually improves, and the AI would have a hard time keeping up with
the cutting-edge technology used by the rest of the world.
Ben Goertzel agrees with Hall's suggestion that a new human-level
AI would do well to use its intelligence to accumulate wealth. The AI's
talents might inspire companies and governments to disperse its
software throughout society. Goertzel is skeptical of a hard five minute
takeoff but speculates that a takeoff from human to superhuman level on
the order of five years is reasonable. Goerzel refers to this scenario
as a "semihard takeoff".
Max More
disagrees, arguing that if there were only a few superfast human-level
AIs, that they would not radically change the world, as they would still
depend on other people to get things done and would still have human
cognitive constraints. Even if all superfast AIs worked on intelligence
augmentation, it is unclear why they would do better in a discontinuous
way than existing human cognitive scientists at producing super-human
intelligence, although the rate of progress would increase. More further
argues that a superintelligence would not transform the world
overnight: a superintelligence would need to engage with existing, slow
human systems to accomplish physical impacts on the world. "The need for
collaboration, for organization, and for putting ideas into physical
changes will ensure that all the old rules are not thrown out overnight
or even within years."
Relation to immortality and aging
Drexler (1986), one of the founders of nanotechnology, postulates cell repair devices, including ones operating within cells and using as yet hypothetical biological machines. According to Richard Feynman, it was his former graduate student and collaborator Albert Hibbs who originally suggested to him (circa 1959) the idea of a medical
use for Feynman's theoretical micromachines. Hibbs suggested that
certain repair machines might one day be reduced in size to the point
that it would, in theory, be possible to (as Feynman put it) "swallow the doctor". The idea was incorporated into Feynman's 1959 essay There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.
Moravec (1988)
predicts the possibility of "uploading" human mind into a human-like
robot, achieving quasi-immortality by extreme longevity via transfer of
the human mind between successive new robots as the old ones wear out;
beyond that, he predicts later exponential acceleration of subjective
experience of time leading to a subjective sense of immortality.
Kurzweil (2005) suggests that medical advances would allow people to protect their bodies from the effects of aging, making the life expectancy limitless.
Kurzweil argues that the technological advances in medicine would allow
us to continuously repair and replace defective components in our
bodies, prolonging life to an undetermined age. Kurzweil further buttresses his argument by discussing current bio-engineering advances. Kurzweil suggests somatic gene therapy;
after synthetic viruses with specific genetic information, the next
step would be to apply this technology to gene therapy, replacing human
DNA with synthesized genes.
Beyond merely extending the operational life of the physical body, Jaron Lanier
argues for a form of immortality called "Digital Ascension" that
involves "people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer
and remaining conscious."
History of the concept
A paper by Mahendra Prasad, published in AI Magazine, asserts that the 18th-century mathematician Marquis de Condorcet was the first person to hypothesize and mathematically model an intelligence explosion and its effects on humanity.
An early description of the idea was made in John W. Campbell's 1932 short story "The Last Evolution".
In his 1958 obituary for John von Neumann,
Ulam recalled a conversation with von Neumann about the "ever
accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human
life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential
singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we
know them, could not continue."
In 1965, Good wrote his essay postulating an "intelligence explosion" of recursive self-improvement of a machine intelligence.
In 1977, Hans Moravec
wrote an article with unclear publishing status where he envisioned a
development of self-improving thinking machines, a creation of
"super-consciousness, the synthesis of terrestrial life, and perhaps
jovian and martian life as well, constantly improving and extending
itself, spreading outwards from the solar system, converting non-life
into mind."
The article describes the human mind uploading later covered in Moravec
(1988). The machines are expected to reach human level and then improve
themselves beyond that ("Most significantly of all, they [the machines]
can be put to work as programmers and engineers, with the task of
optimizing the software and hardware which make them what they are. The
successive generations of machines produced this way will be
increasingly smarter and more cost effective.") Humans will no longer be
needed, and their abilities will be overtaken by the machines: "In the
long run the sheer physical inability of humans to keep up with these
rapidly evolving progeny of our minds will ensure that the ratio of
people to machines approaches zero, and that a direct descendant of our
culture, but not our genes, inherits the universe." While the word
"singularity" is not used, the notion of human-level thinking machines
thereafter improving themselves beyond human level is there. In this
view, there is no intelligence explosion in the sense of a very rapid
intelligence increase once human equivalence is reached. An updated
version of the article was published in 1979 in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
In 1981, Stanisław Lem published his science fiction novel Golem XIV.
It describes a military AI computer (Golem XIV) who obtains
consciousness and starts to increase his own intelligence, moving
towards personal technological singularity. Golem XIV was originally
created to aid its builders in fighting wars, but as its intelligence
advances to a much higher level than that of humans, it stops being
interested in the military requirements because it finds them lacking
internal logical consistency.
In 1983, Vernor Vinge addressed Good's intelligence explosion in print in the January 1983 issue of Omni
magazine. In this op-ed piece, Vinge seems to have been the first to
use the term "singularity" (although not "technological singularity") in
a way that was specifically tied to the creation of intelligent
machines:
We will soon create intelligences
greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached
a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as
the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will
pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already
haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic
extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set
more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between ... so
that the world remains intelligible.
In 1985, in "The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence", artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff
articulated mathematically the related notion of what he called an
"infinity point": if a research community of human-level self-improving
AIs take four years to double their own speed, then two years, then one
year and so on, their capabilities increase infinitely in finite time.
In 1986, Vernor Vinge published Marooned in Realtime,
a science-fiction novel where a few remaining humans traveling forward
in the future have survived an unknown extinction event that might well
be a singularity. In a short afterword, the author states that an actual
technological singularity would not be the end of the human species:
"of course it seems very unlikely that the Singularity would be a clean
vanishing of the human race. (On the other hand, such a vanishing is the
timelike analog of the silence we find all across the sky.)".
In 1988, Vinge used the phrase "technological singularity" (including "technological") in the short story collection Threats and Other Promises, writing in the introduction to his story "The Whirligig of Time" (p. 72): Barring a worldwide catastrophe, I believe that technology will achieve our wildest dreams, and soon. When
we raise our own intelligence and that of our creations, we are no
longer in a world of human-sized characters. At that point we have
fallen into a technological "black hole", a technological singularity.
In 1988, Hans Moravec published Mind Children,
in which he predicted human-level intelligence in supercomputers by
2010, self-improving intelligent machines far surpassing human
intelligence later, human mind uploading into human-like robots later,
intelligent machines leaving humans behind, and space colonization. He
did not mention "singularity", though, and he did not speak of a rapid
explosion of intelligence immediately after the human level is achieved.
Nonetheless, the overall singularity tenor is there in predicting both
human-level artificial intelligence and further artificial intelligence
far surpassing humans later.
Vinge's 1993 article "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", spread widely on the internet and helped to popularize the idea.
This article contains the statement, "Within thirty years, we will have
the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly
after, the human era will be ended." Vinge argues that science-fiction
authors cannot write realistic post-singularity characters who surpass
the human intellect, as the thoughts of such an intellect would be
beyond the ability of humans to express.
Minsky's
1994 article says robots will "inherit the Earth", possibly with the
use of nanotechnology, and proposes to think of robots as human "mind
children", drawing the analogy from Moravec. The rhetorical effect of
that analogy is that if humans are fine to pass the world to their
biological children, they should be equally fine to pass it to robots,
their "mind" children. As per Minsky, 'we could design our
"mind-children" to think a million times faster than we do. To such a
being, half a minute might seem as long as one of our years, and each
hour as long as an entire human lifetime.' The feature of the
singularity present in Minsky is the development of superhuman
artificial intelligence ("million times faster"), but there is no talk
of sudden intelligence explosion, self-improving thinking machines or
unpredictability beyond any specific event and the word "singularity" is
not used.
Tipler's 1994 book The Physics of Immortality
predicts a future where super–intelligent machines will build
enormously powerful computers, people will be "emulated" in computers,
life will reach every galaxy and people will achieve immortality when
they reach Omega Point.
There is no talk of Vingean "singularity" or sudden intelligence
explosion, but intelligence much greater than human is there, as well as
immortality.
In 1996, Yudkowsky predicted a singularity by 2021.
His version of singularity involves intelligence explosion: once AIs
are doing the research to improve themselves, speed doubles after 2
years, then 1 one year, then after 6 months, then after 3 months, then
after 1.5 months, and after more iterations, the "singularity" is
reached. This construction implies that the speed reaches infinity in finite time.
In 2000, Bill Joy, a prominent technologist and a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, voiced concern over the potential dangers of robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.
In 2007, Yudkowsky suggested that many of the varied definitions
that have been assigned to "singularity" are mutually incompatible
rather than mutually supporting.
For example, Kurzweil extrapolates current technological trajectories
past the arrival of self-improving AI or superhuman intelligence, which
Yudkowsky argues represents a tension with both I. J. Good's proposed
discontinuous upswing in intelligence and Vinge's thesis on
unpredictability.
In 2009, Kurzweil and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis announced the establishment of Singularity University,
a nonaccredited private institute whose stated mission is "to educate,
inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address
humanity's grand challenges." Funded by Google, Autodesk, ePlanet Ventures, and a group of technology industry leaders, Singularity University is based at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
The not-for-profit organization runs an annual ten-week graduate
program during summer that covers ten different technology and allied
tracks, and a series of executive programs throughout the year.
In Embryology a phylotypic stage or phylotypic period is a particular developmental stage or developmental period during mid-embryogenesis where embryos of related species within a phylum
express the highest degree of morphological and molecular resemblance.
Recent molecular studies in various plant and animal species were able
to quantify the expression of genes covering crucial stages of embryo
development and found that during the morphologically defined phylotypic
period the evolutionary oldest genes, genes with similar temporal
expression patterns, and genes under strongest purifying selection are
most active throughout the phylotypic period.
Historical origins of concept
Haeckel's drawings, reproduced by G.J. Romanes
in 1892. Early embryologists, including Haeckel and von Baer, noted
that embryos of different animals pass through a similar stage in which
they resemble one another very closely.Karl Ernst von Baer, whose third law of embryology gave the basis for the idea of the phylotypic stage
The idea that embryos of different species have similar morphologies at some point during development can be traced back to Aristotle. Aristotle observed a number of developing vertebrate embryos, noting in his text The Generation of Animals that the morphological differences among the different embryos arose late in development. In 1828, Karl Ernst von Baer created his laws of embryology, which summarized the results of his comparative embryogenesis studies.
In his first law, he proposed that the more general characters of a
group appear earlier in their embryos than the more special characters. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed that each developing organism passes through the evolutionary stages of its ancestors, i.e., ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The hypothesis that different organisms pass through the developmental
stages of closely related organisms is outdated. However, the idea that
early stages of development are conserved among species, with increasing
divergence as development progresses, has influenced modern
evolutionary and developmental biology. The early conservation or funnel model of development (see below) is closely tied to these historical origins.
Phylotypic period
The first formulation of the phylotypic period concept came in 1960 from Friedrich Seidel's Körpergrundgestalt,
which translates to “basic body shape.” In 1977, Cohen defined the
phyletic stage as the first stage that reveals the general characters
shared by all members of that phylum. Klaus Sander revised this concept in 1983 and named it the phylotypic stage,
which is ‘‘the stage of greatest similarity between forms which, during
evolution, have differently specialized both in their modes of adult
life and with respect to the earliest stages of ontogenesis." Note that
this definition demonstrates his support for the hourglass model (see
below). Recent papers refer to the phylotypic period, or the phylotypic
stage, as a period of maximal similarity between species within each
animal phylum.
While this concept was originally devised using morphological comparisons of developing embryos from different species,
the period of maximal similarity has recently been identified using
molecular evidence. The phylotypic period has been identified using
conservation of gene expression, estimates of gene age, gene sequence conservation, the expression of regulatory genes and transcription factors, and the interconnectivity of genes and proteins.
Funnel and hourglass models
The
funnel model is the hypothesis that the most conserved stage of
development (the phylotypic period) occurs at the beginning of embryogenesis, with increasing divergence as development progresses. This is also known as the early conservation model of development.
Evidence for an alternative model arose from careful comparisons
of the temporal divergence in morphology of the embryos of different
species. For example, Klaus Sander noticed that the “incredible
variation in larvae and adults” of insects occurs after they "develop
from nearly identical rudiments in the germ band stage".
The most conserved stage of development, the germ band stage, occurs
near the middle of development rather than at the beginning, supporting a
mid-developmental period of maximal similarity between species. This
model, called the hourglass model,
is the idea that early embryos of different species display divergent
forms but their morphologies converge in the middle of development,
followed by a period of increasing divergence.
Support for hourglass model
Contrary to the early morphological work by von Baer and Haeckel,
recent morphological studies have demonstrated the greatest divergence
among closely related species both early in development (gastrulation) and late in development, supporting the hourglass model. Further support for the hourglass model came from the discovery that Hox genes,
a group of sequentially activated genes that regulate
anterior-posterior body axis formation, are activated during the middle
of development at the phylotypic stage.
Because these genes are highly conserved and are involved in body axis
formation, the activation of Hox genes could be an important player in
the heightened conservation among embryos of closely related species
during mid-development.
The advent of next-generation sequencing
enabled scientists to use molecular methods to identify the period of
development that has the most conserved gene expression patterns among
different species. In 2010, two studies found molecular evidence that
supports the hourglass model. Kalinka et al. sequenced the transcriptome of six Drosophila
species over developmental time, identifying the most conserved gene
expression in mid-development during the arthropod germ band
developmental stage. Genes that were enriched in the developing embryos
at the germ band stage are involved in cellular and organismal
development. Domazet-Lošo and Tautz analyzed the transcriptome of zebrafish (Danio rerio) over developmental time, from unfertilized eggs to adults. They used a method called genomic phylostratigraphy to estimate the age of each gene during development. In zebrafish, as well as in additional transcriptomic datasets of Drosophila, the mosquito Anopheles and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans,
the authors found that genes expressed during mid-development are older
than those expressed at the beginning and end of development,
supporting the hourglass model.
Other recent genomic studies have supported a mid-developmental phylotypic stage in vertebrates and in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The temporal gene expression profiles for a developing mouse (Mus musculus), chicken (Gallus gallus), frog (Xenopus laevis) and zebrafish (Danio rerio)
revealed that the most conserved gene expression in vertebrates occurs
in mid-development at the pharyngular embryo stage. The pharyngula
stage occurs when the four distinguishing features of vertebrates
(notochord, dorsal hollow nerve cord, post-anal tail, and a series of
paired branchial slits) have developed.
Support for early conservation (funnel) model
Recent molecular data also provide support for the early conservation model. For example, Piasecka et al. re-analyzed the zebrafish dataset published by Domazet-Lošo and Tautz.
They found that applying a log-transformation to the gene expression
data changed the results to support highest conservation in early
development. Further, after clustering the zebrafish gene expression
data into “transcription modules” reflecting each stage of development,
they found multiple lines of evidence supporting the early conservation
model (gene sequence, age, gene family size, and expression conservation) while only the analysis of gene regulatory regions supported the hourglass model.
One hypothesis for the evolutionary conservation during the
phylotypic period is that it is a period characterized by a high level
of interactions as the body plan is being established.
In zebrafish, the interconnectivity of proteins over developmental time
was found to be highest in early development, supporting the early
conservation model.
Another way to examine the point in development at which developmental
constraints are the strongest is through experimental gene loss, because
the removal of a gene should be more deleterious when it is expressed
at a developmental stage with stronger evolutionary constraints. Gene knockout
experiments from mice and zebrafish demonstrated that the ratio of
essential genes to non-essential genes decreases over developmental
time, suggesting that there are stronger constraints in early
development that are relaxed over time.
Despite increasing evidence supporting the hourglass model, identifying
the point in development that is most conserved among species with a
phylum (the phylotypic period) is a controversy in the field of
developmental biology.
Intra-phylum vs. inter-phylum phylotypic period
The
phylotypic period is defined as a period of maximal similarity between
species within a phylum, but a recent study compared the phylotypic
period across different phyla to examine whether the same conserved
periods during development have been maintained across deeper
phylogenetic relationships. Levin et al.
compared the developmental gene expression patterns among ten
individuals from ten different animal phyla and found evidence for an
inverse hourglass model of gene expression divergence among different
phyla.
This inverse hourglass model reflects the observation that gene
expression was significantly more divergent among species at the
mid-developmental transition, while gene expression was more conserved
in early and late stages of development. While this intriguing pattern could have implications for our definition of a phylum,
a follow-up paper argued that there are a few methodical issues that
must be addressed to test the hypothesis that the timing of
developmental constraints are different among phyla compared to within a
phylum. First, the comparison of a single representative of ten
different phyla could reflect differences between phyla as well as the
deeper or shallower phylogenetic branches that fall between those ten
individuals, so greater sampling within each phyla is necessary.
Second, pairwise comparisons treat each of the ten species as
independent observations, but some species are more closely related than
others.
