The Coming Technological singularity

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The Coming Technological Singularity:
                      How to Survive in the Post-Human Era
   
                                Vernor Vinge
                      Department of Mathematical Sciences
                        San Diego State University

                          (c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge
              (Verbatim copying/translation and distribution of this
              entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this
                            notice is preserved.)   
   
                    This article was for the VISION-21 Symposium
                      sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center
                and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.
              It is also retrievable from the NASA technical reports
                        server as part of NASA CP-10129.
                    A slightly changed version appeared in the
                    Winter 1993 issue of _Whole Earth Review_.
                           
   
                                      Abstract

                  Within thirty years, we will have the technological
              means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after,
              the human era will be ended.

                  Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can
              events be guided so that we may survive?  These questions
              are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further
              dangers) are presented.

        _What is The Singularity?_

              The acceleration of technological progress has been the central
        feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge
        of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise
        cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of
        entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means
        by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another
        reason for having confidence that the event will occur):
            o The development of computers that are "awake" and
              superhumanly intelligent. (To date, most controversy in the
              area of AI relates to whether we can create human equivalence
              in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there
              is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed
              shortly thereafter.
            o Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake
              up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
            o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
              may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
            o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
              human intellect.

              The first three possibilities depend in large part on
        improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has
        followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [16]. Based
        largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than
        human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.  (Charles
        Platt [19] has pointed out the AI enthusiasts have been making claims
        like this for the last thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a
        relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I'll be surprised if
        this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

              What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human
        intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.
        In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve
        the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter
        time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past:
        Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster
        than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own
        simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability
        to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can
        solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.
        Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher
        speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human
        past as we humans are from the lower animals.

              From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away
        of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an
        exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that
        before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever)
        will likely happen in the next century. (In [4], Greg Bear paints a
        picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

              I think it's fair to call this event a singularity ("the
        Singularity" for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our
        models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer
        and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human
        affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally
        happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.  In
        the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [27] paraphrased
        John von Neumann as saying:

              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.

              Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he
        is still thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman
        intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the
        Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches,
        never properly absorbed (see [24]).)

              In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of
        superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [10]:

              Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine
              that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any
              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.
              ...
              It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century,
              an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
              the last invention that man need make.

              Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue
        its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort
        he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans
        are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

              Through the '60s and '70s and '80s, recognition of the cataclysm
        spread [28] [1] [30] [4]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers
        who felt the first concrete impact.  After all, the "hard"
        science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories
        about all that technology may do for us.  More and more, these writers
        felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such
        fantasies millions of years in the future [23].  Now they saw that
        their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ...
        soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain.
        Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

              What about the '90s and the '00s and the '10s, as we slide toward
        the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the
        human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine
        sapience will have good press. After all, till we have hardware as
        powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we'll be
        able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is
        the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out
        of less powerful hardware, if were willing to give up speed, if we
        were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow
        [29]. But it's much more likely that devising the software will be a
        tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If
        so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after
        the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than
        humans' natural equipment.)

              But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt
        by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative
        endeavors.  (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about
        how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be
        produced by the technically commonplace.) We will see automation
        replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now
        (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level
        drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the
        domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In
        the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of _true_
        technological unemployment finally come true.

              Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas
        themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will
        quickly become commonplace.  When I began writing, it seemed very easy
        to come up with ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural
        consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of
        course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but
        I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible
        flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the
        critical speed.

              And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be
        said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual
        runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution
        seen so far.  The precipitating event will likely be unexpected --
        perhaps even to the researchers involved. ("But all our previous
        models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters....") If
        networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it
        may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

              And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I
        have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in
        the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism,
        sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these
        transcendental events from one thousand years remove ... instead of
        twenty.
       
        _Can the Singularity be Avoided?_

              Well, maybe it won't happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine
        the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to
        develop.  There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose [18] and
        Searle [21] against the practicality of machine sapience.  In August
        of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate
        the question "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks" [Thearling]. As
        you might guess from the workshop's title, the participants were not
        especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence.
        In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on
        nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance
        to the existence of minds.  However, there was much debate about the
        raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt
        that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude
        of the power of the human brain.  The majority of the participants
        agreed with Moravec's estimate [16] that we are ten to forty years
        away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who
        pointed to [6] [20], and conjectured that the computational competence
        of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so,
        our present computer hardware might be as much as _ten_ orders of
        magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this
        is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is
        valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early '00s
        we would find our hardware performance curves begin to level off --
        this caused by our inability to automate the complexity of the design
        work necessary to support the hardware trend curves. We'd end up with
        some _very_ powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it
        further.  Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome,
        giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing
        would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway
        which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a
        golden age ... and it would also be an end of progress. This is very
        like the future predicted by Gunther Stent.  In fact, on page 137 of
        [24], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman
        intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

              But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even
        if all the governments of the world were to understand the "threat"
        and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue.
        In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the
        construction of "a machine in the form of the mind of man" [12].  In
        fact, the competitive advantage -- economic, military, even artistic
        -- of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws,
        or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone
        else will get them first.

              Eric Drexler [7] has provided spectacular insight about how far
        technical improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences
        will be available in the near future -- and that such entities pose a
        threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues that we can embed
        such transhuman devices in rules or physical confinement such that
        their results can be examined and used safely.  This is I. J. Good's
        ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that
        confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical
        confinement: Imagine yourself confined to your house with only limited
        data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought
        at a rate -- say -- one million times slower than you, there is little
        doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with
        "helpful advice" that would incidentally set you free. (I call this
        "fast thinking" form of superintelligence "weak superhumanity". Such a
        "weakly superhuman" entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of
        outside time. "Strong superhumanity" would be more than cranking up
        the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind.  It's hard to say
        precisely what "strong superhumanity" would be like, but the
        difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very
        high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human
        insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and _then_ run at
        high speed, we might see something different....) Most speculations
        about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman
        model. I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity
        world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong
        superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)

              The other approach to Drexlerian confinement is to build _rules_
        into the mind of the created superhuman entity (Asimov's Laws). I
        think that performance rules strict enough to be safe would also
        produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered
        versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the
        those more dangerous models).  Still, the Asimov dream is a wonderful
        one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your capabilities in
        every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe wish
        (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other
        activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood,
        but filled with benevolent gods (though one of _my_ wishes might be to
        become one of them).

              If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad
        could the Post-Human era be? Well ... pretty bad. The physical
        extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler
        put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do,
        perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need
        citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest
        possibility.  Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate
        to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet....
        In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where
        human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in
        autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of
        larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be
        a Society of Mind [15] with some very competent components.) Some
        of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital
        signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others
        might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_
        that would put them in a mental hospital in our era.  Though none of
        these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the
        closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J.
        Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the
        advice may be moot: Good [11] proposed a "Meta-Golden Rule",
        which might be paraphrased as "Treat your inferiors as you would be
        treated by your superiors."  It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and
        most of my friends don't believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff
        is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some
        sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness
        in this universe.)

              I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity,
        that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural
        competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.  And yet
        ... we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by
        small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions,
        make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of
        course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the
        right guiding nudge really is:


        _Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification_

              When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings,
        they are usually imagining an AI project. But as I noted at the
        beginning of this paper, there are other paths to superhumanity.
        Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than
        AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this
        contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something
        that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized
        by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to access
        information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense
        we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the
        team of a PhD human and good computer workstation (even an off-net
        workstation!) could probably max any written intelligence test in
        existence.

              And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the
        achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest
        development problems have already been solved. Building up from within
        ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really
        are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at
        least conjectural precedent for this approach.  Cairns-Smith [5] has
        speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still
        more primitive life based on crystalline growth.  Lynn Margulis [14]
        has made strong arguments for the view that mutualism is the great
        driving force in evolution.

              Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less
        funded. What goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and
        vice versa.  I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and
        interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild)
        as Artificial Intelligence. With that insight, we may see projects
        that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and
        network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the
        Singularity along the IA path.

              Here are some possible projects that take on special
        significance, given the IA point of view:
            o Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally
              considered for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing
              problems), and design programs and interfaces that take a
              advantage of humans' intuition and available computer hardware.
              Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional
              hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been
              devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting
              displays and control tools provided to the human team member.
            o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic
              generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic
              sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous
              amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as
              labor saving tools.  I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a
              greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the
              cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [22] has done
              wonderful work in this direction.
            o Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already
              have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But
              how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a
              human, to get something even better? If such teams were allowed
              in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive
              effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had
              for the corresponding niche in AI.
            o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without
              requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a
              computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known
              economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on
              it.)
            o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular
              research/product area in recent years has been decision support
              systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on
              systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user
              information, there must be the idea of the user giving the
              program guidance.
            o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie,
              are more effective than their component members). This is
              generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular
              commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to
              regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one
              sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing
              a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance,
              group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical
              meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated
              from ego issues such that the contribution of different members
              is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases
              could be used much more conveniently than in conventional
              committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team
              operations rather than political meetings. In a political
              setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the
              power of the persons making the rules!)
            o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine
              tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is
              proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before
              anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day
              Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our
              contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of
              their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET
              "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!)
              The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of
              its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and
              computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn
              Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor
              recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with
              millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

              The above examples illustrate research that can be done within
        the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are
        other paradigms. For example, much of the work in Artificial
        Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection
        with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand
        biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the
        creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for
        guidance or for the providing features we don't understand well enough
        yet to implement in hardware. A long-time dream of science-fiction has
        been direct brain to computer interfaces [2] [28]. In fact, there is
        concrete work that can be done (and has been done) in this area:
            o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability.
              Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13].  This is an
              exciting, near-term step toward direct communcation.
            o Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the bit
              rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual
              brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected.
              Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke
              victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven
              interfaces.
            o Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths
              of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the
              fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an
              enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision.  If we want
              our high bandwidth connection to be _in addition_ to what paths
              are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more
              intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers
              into a brain certainly won't do it.  But suppose that the
              high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was
              actually setting up, as the embryo develops.  That suggests:
            o Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success
              in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains
              access to complex simulated neural structures might be very
              interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain
              develops.  In the long run, such experiments might produce
              animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual
              abilities.
             
              Originally, I had hoped that this discussion of IA would yield
        some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity. (After all, IA
        allows our participation in a kind of transcendance.) Alas, looking
        back over these IA proposals, about all I am sure of is that they
        should be considered, that they may give us more options. But as for
        safety ...  well, some of the suggestions are a little scarey on their
        face. One of my informal reviewers pointed out that IA for individual
        humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans have millions of
        years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a
        deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today's
        world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are coopted
        into the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built _de novo_
        might possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a kernel
        based on fang and talon. And even the egalitarian view of an Internet
        that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare
        [25].

              The problem is not that the Singularity represents simply the
        passing of humankind from center stange, but that it contradicts some
        of our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the
        notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.


        _Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for_

              Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain
        our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for:
        That humans themselves would become their own successors, that
        whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our
        roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign
        treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of
        being masters of godlike slaves).  It could be a golden age that also
        involved progress (overleaping Stent's barrier). Immortality (or at
        least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive [9]
        [3]) would be achievable. 

              But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical
        problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same
        capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look
        more like a repeating tape loop than a person.  (The most chilling
        picture I have seen of this is in [17].)  To live indefinitely long,
        the mind itself must grow ... and when it becomes great enough, and
        looks back ... what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it
        was originally?  Certainly the later being would be everything the
        original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual,
        the Cairns-Smith (or Lynn Margulis) notion of new life growing
        incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

              This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct
        ways.  The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of
        the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the
        notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial
        Intelligence people ("self-awareness and other delusions").
        Intelligence Amplification undercuts the importance of ego from
        another direction.  The post-Singularity world will involve extremely
        high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman
        entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable
        bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages.
        What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the
        size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the
        problems under consideration?  These are essential features of strong
        superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to
        feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be
        -- _no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be_.

       
              From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams:
        a place unending, where we can truly know one another and understand
        the deepest mysteries.  From another angle, it's a lot like the worst
        case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

              Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is
        simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and
        evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds
        connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity
        world _does_ fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation
        that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological
        life). I think there _are_ notions of ethics that would apply in such
        an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should
        improve this understanding.  I see just the glimmerings of this now,
        in Good's Meta-Golden Rule, perhaps in rules for distinguishing self
        from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind
        and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we
        value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think
        Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [8]: "God is what mind becomes
        when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."