Why the Technological Singularity Won't Happen
The difference between a Cult and a Scientific Peer Group
The Cult of the Singularity
A remarkable number of members of the AI community are proud to be Singularitarians.
They share the view that the Technological Singularity will occur in just a few years, after which we will either be living in a dystopian nightmare or a utopian dream world. Sincere believers lobby politicians to prepare for this event, usually despairing of the short-term thinking that dominates political elites in democratic societies.
There are many cheerleaders for this idea:
It’s the first time in history when we’ll have no idea how human society will be like in a couple of decades.
Yuval Noah Hariri, interviewed by the New York Times in 2018
I’m sure the people who lived through the Rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, or the Mongol Invasions of Central Asia and China in the thirteenth century CE, would disagree with this. The First Industrial Revolution started in England in the 1760s and changed the world, but it did not have a name until 1799 in French and was not well known in English until Arnold Toynbee wrote about it in the 1880s.
I am not sure who Harari means by “we”, but surprising, unexpected changes in human society have always happened and most of us take them in our stride, rapidly adapt to “the new normal” and forget how life used to be.
So what is all this excitement based on? There are a few fundamental assumptions that underlie the idea of the Technological Singularity:
The human mind is just an emergent property of the human brain.
The human brain is just a clunky digital computer.
Moore’s Law says Digital Computers have been doubling in performance roughly every two years since 1970.
Therefore, Artificial Intelligences (AIs), built from networks of Digital Computers, will soon be more intelligent than the most intelligent humans.
Once they are, they will either take over and abuse the human race, or will be able to solve all our problems, depending on whether they are aligned with the values of the human race.
Far be it from me to question the sincerely held beliefs of any community, but assumptions 1, 2, 4 & 5 are not based on any scientific evidence, so they ought to be treated as statements of religious belief, and believers in the Technological Singularity should therefore be seen as members of a rather strange new Cult.
The Difference Between a Cult and a Scientific Peer Group
We talked in my last post about the Science & Engineering “Flywheel” being an example of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that has been operating since the 1660s. We could equally consider the community that has built the ubiquitous digital devices we all use as another AGI, whose history I documented in my series of posts About Cybernetics. In fact, all the institutions that we have invented are examples of AGIs, at different levels of Recursion.
AGIs surround us, but we don’t notice them, because we are so immersed in them:
The Latin motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in verba which means Take Nobody’s Word for It. It captures the essential difference between a Cult and a Scientific Peer Group – the former forbids its members to question its assumptions and the latter devises tests of those assumptions, to see whether they are true or not.
How Newtonian Physics Tested Its Assumptions
The Newtonian Paradigm dominated Physics from the seventeenth until the early twentieth century. It believed that light travelled through a medium, in the same way that sound travels through a medium, such as air, and cannot travel through a vacuum. That medium was known as the Luminiferous Ether. If it existed, the speed of light ought to be different, depending on what direction the light was travelling in.
The Michelson-Morley Experiment tested this with great precision in the late nineteenth century, but found that the speed of light was the same whatever direction the light was travelling in. This opened the way for Einstein to revolutionise Physics and explain why there was no such thing as the Luminiferous Ether.
Has the AI Community Tested its Assumptions?
Sadly, so far, the AI community has failed to test its assumptions about the relationship between the human mind, the human brain and digital computers.
It therefore is a Cult and not a Scientific Peer Group.
In fact, it is a Millenarian Cult, with the same functional structure as:
Early Pauline Christianity which started out as an obscure Jewish sect and grew to take over as the official cult of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE.
Marxist-Leninism which took over the Russian Empire by staging a coup in 1917, dominated Russia until 1990, and still dominates China, Vietnam and North Korea.
Millenarian Cults are distinguished by their belief in the impending end of history and the dawning of a perfect world for the chosen elect and damnation for everyone else:
Christian believers will be saved when Jesus returns to end history and overthrow Satan.
Proletarians will rise up against the Bourgeoisie, overthrow Capitalism, found Socialism, then the State will wither away and Communism will emerge.
Those who assist the advent of the Singularity will enable illness and death to be banished, but those who stand in the way will be members of a Global Useless Class.
How a Cult can Still do Some Science?
The fact that the AI Community is a Cult doesn’t mean it hasn’t done any Science. Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper of Google Deepmind richly deserved to win half the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing AlphaFold to predict 3D protein structures.
But this is really no different to the fact that Protestant Christianity encouraged mass literacy because people believed that reading the Bible would save their souls from damnation, or that the Mormon Church developed one of the best genealogical resources because they believe they can baptise the dead ancestors of their living converts and therefore save their souls.
Could the AI Community become a Scientific Peer Group?
Unfortunately, they probably cannot do so.
This is because the research on assumptions 1 & 2 above has already been done by existing Scientific Peer Groups, and there are no grounds for accepting those assumptions, except as Articles of Faith.
What are the Implications of This?
Millenarian Cults can unleash tremendous energy, leading to huge historical changes:
The Roman Empire was changed dramatically by its adoption of Pauline Christianity, although the debate about whether that was a good or a bad thing has been going on for several centuries and will probably never be settled.
The takeover of the Russian Empire by Marxist-Leninism led to the deaths of millions, but also enabled Russia to industrialise rapidly and defeat Nazism in the Great Patriotic War before it ran out of energy and finally collapsed in 1991.
The takeover of China by Marxist-Leninism led to the deaths of tens of millions, but, after the death of Mao, has led to the fastest Industrial Revolution ever to have taken place.
So far, the current wave of AI research has created powerful fuzzy librarians, backed up by a collection of idiot savants, but will probably lead to an economic crash that will dwarf the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and might permanently shift the centre of global power from the USA to China.
Recommendations for Policy Makers
My recommendations are:
Don’t panic – the millenarian claims are just marketing hype to promote US corporations and sell books written by popular historians.
There are real dangers associated with the unregulated adoption of any new technology, but this is nothing new. Our political institutions haven’t even yet caught up with the use of TV advertising to sway voters, let alone the use of social media or AI, as Stafford Beer warned us about in 1973, as described here.
Learn Management Cybernetics, and reform your institutions accordingly.
Recommendations for the Rest of Us
Ignore the deliberate use of hope and fear to manipulate us to comply with the dictats of strange Cult Leaders, such as:
And in the political domain:
The best antidote to their vapourings is to retain a sense of humour.
They are really not worth taking too seriously – as long as you are outside the range of their tendency to use intimidation and violence to shut people up.
When will the Technological Singularity Happen?
We can expect the Technological Singularity to happen round about the same time as these events:
The Rapture.
The arrival of the Mahdi.
The Withering Away of the State in China, Vietnam and North Korea.
The building of the first Interstellar Spacecraft by SpaceX.
History shows that a good Millenarian Cult is not fazed by the non-arrival of the expected end of history. Their leaders simply re-calculate when history will end and carry on regardless…