1 accelerating to the singularity singularity university: preparing humanity for accelerating...
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Accelerating to the Singularity
Singularity University: Preparing Humanity for Accelerating Technological Change
Founding MeetingSeptember 20, 2008
Professor George F. SmootUniversity of California
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Von Neumann’s SingularityA technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after
the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict.
Innovation: Society changing developmentIn 1958, Stanisław Ulam wrote in a tribute to John von Neumann of a
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.”
The Paradigm Shift Rate is now doubling every decade.
Implies Singularity is very near, within your lifetime
Relevant time scale is the paradigm shift rate.
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What is the Singularity?• The time between major innovations
decreases by large factors every innovation period.
• We are now at 10 year time scale.
• Next major scale is 1 year.
• After that is 1 month.
• After that 1 day, then 1 hour, then 1 sec.
• When it reaches 1 millisecond, this is beyond current human ability to register/comprehend.
• Enhanced abilities will be necessary.
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Singularity Universityfounded to:
• Prepare Humanity for this accelerating technological change
• Connect present and future leaders and innovators to these accelerating, transformational and convergent technologies
• Find a path that allows this process to develop in a way that benefits and improves the welfare of humanity - new heights of intelligent wisdom, material (economic) progress, and longevity
• illuminate the path to our new future.
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Courses
• Graduate and Postgraduate level
• Masters Degrees
• C-Level (e.g. CEOs, CFOs, etc.)– 3 day course– 10 day course
•
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Main Program OfferingsMain Program Offerings
M.Sc. in singularity technology studies (MSS)
12 Months on Campus
-Scientists, engineers- Technical Management
M.Sc. In Singularity management (MSM)
12 Months at Campus - Business, policy- Project/Business Management interest
Singularity Studies Program (SSP)
9 weeks in worldwide rotation (during summer break)
- Young professionals
- Hi-potentials
Singularity Management Institute (SMI)
1 week in worldwide rotation moving with SSP
- Middle management in tech sector with tech background and experience
Executive Course (ESC)
1 week on Campus - Middle management in tech sector with legal/finance/marketing background
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Singularity Studies Program (SSP)
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What about saturation of a technology?Exponential growth ends in saturation.The famous S-curve.
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Information Technologies (of all kinds) double their power (price performance,
capacity, bandwidth) every year
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Measure MIT’s IBM 7094 Notebook Circa 2003
Year
Processor Speed (MIPS)
Main Memory (K Bytes)
Approximate Cost (2003 $)
1967
0.25
144
$11,000,000
2003
1,000
256,000
$2,000
24 Doublings of Price-Performance in 36 years, doubling time: 18 months not including vastly greater RAM memory,
disk storage, instruction set, etc.
A Personal Experience
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Moore’s Law is one example
of many….
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The Biotechnology revolution: the intersection of biology with
information technology
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Every form of communicationstechnology is doubling
price-performance, bandwidth,capacity every 12 months
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Miniaturization: another exponential trend
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Nanosystems bearing
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Nanosystems smaller bearing
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copyright Zyvex (Katherine Green)
Microbivores II
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Recent Milestones2008 Computer as intelligent as a Mouse2009 Computer as intelligent as a Rat2010 Computer as intelligent as a Cat
Scientists, at IBM Research � Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.
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The Singularity is Near by
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Reverse Engineering the Brain:the ultimate source of the
first templates of intelligence
How do we find a source for wisdom?
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• Gathering data from multiple studies, Javier F. Medina, Michael D. Mauk, and their colleagues at the University of Texas Medical School devised a detailed bottom-up simulation of the cerebellum.
• Their simulation includes over 10,000 simulated neurons and 300,000 synapses, and includes all of the principal types of cerebellum cells.
The Cerebellum
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Beginning of Connection Mapping
• 3D reconstruction of projection fibers in a human brain. Fibers were reconstructed from a DTI dataset with 2.2mm isotropic resolution. The cortical-brainstem connections are shown in light blue color and a subset of fibers that connect the motor cortex and the pyramidal tracts in the caudal pons level are painted white. Red purple , red and blue purple indicate anterior, superior, and posterior thalamic radiations. The light green, green, and yellow structures are globus pallidus, caudate, and thalamus. Ventricles are shown in gray.
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Mapping the Connections down to the individual
neurons
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The Law of Accelerating Returns is driving economic growth
• The portion of a product or service’s value comprised of information is asymptoting to 100%
• The cost of information at every level incurs deflation at ~ 50% per year
• This is a powerful deflationary force– Completely different from the deflation in the 1929
Depression (collapse of consumer confidence & money supply)
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Solar Energy
• Emerging nanotechnology will accelerate progress of cost of solar panels and storage – fuel cells
• Tipping point (cost per watt less than oil and coal) expected within 5 years
• Progress on thermo-solar• Doubling time for watts from solar < 2 years
– We are less than 10 doublings from meeting 100% of the world’s energy needs
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What does this imply ?
• We live in an accelerating world.
• Increasingly rapid changes are ahead.
• Many are roughly predictable but some real surprises
• World is global and flat now and it is getting increasingly obvious
• Demographics have major implications
• Technology developments even more
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• Machines are rapidly improving in pattern recognition
• Progress will be accelerated now that we have the tools to reverse engineer the brain
• Human pattern recognition is limited to certain types of patterns (faces, speech sounds, etc.)
• Machines can apply pattern recognition to any type of pattern
• Humans are limited to a couple dozen variables, machines can consider thousands simultaneously
Contemporary Examples of Self-organizing systems
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2010: Computers begin to disappear
• Tablets and phones and then • Images written directly to our retinas• Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the
Internet at all times• Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the
environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses• Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality• Augmented real reality• Interaction with virtual personalities as a
primary interface (They also do our research and other work with little guidance.)
• Effective language technologies
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2029: An intimate merger
• $1,000 of computation = 1,000 times the human brain• Reverse engineering of the human brain completed• Computers pass the Turing test• Nonbiological intelligence combines
– the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence, with
– the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence
• Nonbiological intelligence will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed
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Nanobots provide…• Neural implants that are:
– Noninvasive, surgery-free– Distributed to millions or billions of points in the brain
• Full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses– You can be someone else– “Experience Beamers”
• Expansion of human intelligence– Multiply our 100 trillion connections many fold– Intimate connection to diverse forms of nonbiological
intelligence
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Average Life Expectancy (Years)Cro Magnon 18
Ancient Egypt 25
1400 Europe 30
1800 Europe & U.S.
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1900 U.S. 48
2002 U.S. 78
2010 150
PDF and priors mean if you are older, you are likely to live longer because of childhood mortality.Now can expect to live longer because of technical advances (double-edged sword).