Marty's Singularity Blog
The Singularity is happening now!
June 20, 2010 at 11:25 pm
filed under Singularity
Tagged John von Neumann, Ray Kurzweil, Singularity, Vernor Vinge
The first documented reference to the term singularity in relation to technological progress was in a report by Stanislaw Ulam (May 1958, “Tribute to John von Neumann”, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64 (nr 3, part 2): 1–49) of a conversation regarding accelerating change that he had with John von Neumann. The quote from this reference is:
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.
In case you are not familiar with John von Neumann, he was an extraordinary mathematician and scientist. He was involved in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic weapon. He did extensive work in game theory. The computer you are using to read this web page, and just about every other computer in the world, is based on the von Neumann architecture.
In 1965 I.J. Good published a paper (1965, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, ed., “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine“, Advances in Computers (Academic Press)6: 31–88) speculating on the “intelligence explosion” that would be caused by the invention of a computer more intelligent than humans that would then work on designing even more intelligent machines. There was no mention of the term singularity in this paper but the concept was there.
The real origins of term singularity as it is used today trace to Vernor Vinge in the 1980’s. At the time Vinge was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, as well as an award winning science fiction writer. In a number of talks that he gave during the 1980’s Vinge used the term singularity to refer to a technological explosion like Good’s intelligence explosion. In 1993 he published an article, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. In this article Vinge cites both the Ulam/von Neumann conversation and Good’s paper mentioned above. Here is a quote from the opening paragraph of this article:
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.
The century he refers to is, of course, the 20th century. Note the phrase “change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” An exaggeration? Methinks not!
Finally we have Ray Kurzweil. No one over the last ten or twelve years has been a bigger proponent of the Singularity concept that Kurzweil. In his books The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil has proposed an astonishing set of arguments to support the near inevitability of the Singularity. Much of what we will discuss in this blog owes a huge debt to him.
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