Meeting notice: The 00.03.01 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Proposed topic: The onset of the Singularity The question has been lofted at previous meetings as to whether we are seeing the first signs of 'the Singularity'. This term, introduced by SF author Verner Vinge in his novels _The Peace War_ and _Marooned in RealTime_, refers to a phase of technological change so rapid that historians or archeologists examining the traces of a civilization passing through that phase can make no sense of it at all. They would be unable to reconstruct the order of events or the patterns of cause and effect. Vinge's thinking was that at some point technology would become genuinely autocatylic or self- accelerating. Machines would accept instructions on the most general level ('amuse me', 'make me some money', 'reduce the amount of suffering in the world', 'find some new physics'), and be able to go off and without further input create strategies that satisified those instructions, even when doing so required developing altogether new technologies. In a society like that it would be inappropriate even to describe the pace of change as 'rapid', since that term is usually taken as implying a direction, and no such direction would exist. Obviously no one thinks such turbo-charged AI is anywhere in prospect, but technological self-acceleration is not critical to the model. If the rate at which innovations appear and are adopted is sufficiently high, society will enter a Singularity phase, whether humans retain a role in the process or not. At the moment current speculation about the onset of this phase change reflects a subjective sense that the 'sound' of the flow of developments coming out of such fields as molecular engineering, biotech, MEMS, and computing has acquired a deeper note over the past few years. One senses something large and violent happening downriver, around the next few bends. There is another thread of evidence that bears on and confirms the supposition. Life inside a society passing through a Singularity would almost certainly be experienced as profoundly chaotic. Generalizations that hitherto have legitimated and rationalized development and investment decisions would break down. As a consequence people would start investing in companies with business models that made no sense in traditional terms, or even with no perceptible business model at all (if you don't count 'and when we've run out of investors we'll get acquired' as a model). Investment fashions would wash over the market, attracting vast amounts of money, and then sink into the sands, losing equally vast amounts, in days; equity prices would be driven by rumors of rumors; CEO turnover would soar; marketing horizons -- the date past which a market for a product is expected to have vanished -- would shrink again and again. There is a body of opinion that all the nonsense in the market today -- in which investors riot to invest in companies losing the largest possible amounts -- is a reflection of the moral and intellectual rot that comes at the end of booms, and that once the correction imposes itself we will return to the orderly principles that have guided investors for centuries. That might be, but it might have another meaning entirely. It might signal the onset of the Singularity. It is in any case worth thinking about what it would mean to live and invest in a radically chaotic culture. How would the development of nanotechnology be affected if it emerges inside a Singularity? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg-d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and you must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti-spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com