So, there’s been some interesting debate lately about Singularity University, which George Dvorsky has kindly summarized for us here. I’m not going to weigh in on that debate, because I think that a list of the academic tracks isn’t enough to pass judgement, and that we actually have to wait for the course materials (which, according to David Orban from personal communication with Ray Kurzweil, will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license) to say anything meaningful. Otherwise, I think that early reactions to the idea are mostly based on one’s prior opinion of Kurzweil’s stuff rather than reacting to anything genuinely new.

The point of this article is to remind the reader that there are three schools of Singularity thought — this is so fundamental, but so few people are aware of it. It should be the first thing that people learn when introduced to the concept. As I argued in 2007, the word “Singularity” has lost all meaning, but if we’re stuck with it, we should at least pull apart three of the major meanings it tends to have. (Though the number of meanings it has in practice are almost unlimited, generated by Silicon Valley socialite types who are trying to look cool but only know about the Singularity from a few short blurbs on places like CNET.) The three schools are Accelerating Change, Event Horizon, and Intelligence Explosion. The full talk on the subject is available here.

When I was introduced to the Accelerating Change school by reading The Age of Spiritual Machines at age 16, I thought the concept had a lot of explanatory power. I still do. However, Mr. Kurzweil’s presentation of the idea gives it an aura of inevitability that is misleading, for instance predicting AGI in precisely the year 2029, and a rupture in the fabric of our understanding in 2045. He addresses the concept of existential risk at length in The Singularity is Near, curtailing the implications of inevitability, but his less thoughtful fans have a tendency to miss this.

When I bought this domain in 2003, I was still very excited about the Accelerating Change school of the Singularity, hence the name “accelerating future”. Since then, I’ve become more moderate in my enthusiasm for the idea. One problem is that the value of different varieties of technological advancement, or even technological advancement in general, are highly subjective. So even if a given technological metric is advancing at a loose exponential, this is not impressive to someone who sees linear practical returns from that particular advancing metric. The highly quantitative nature of the Accelerating Change analysis is also especially likely to provoke and alienate those averse to technological determinism. Still, I think the world is far more technologically deterministic than most humanities types would like to believe.

In the end, I find the Event Horizon and Intelligence Explosion schools of the Singularity more acutely relevant to our future than the Accelerating Change analysis. These other schools point to the unique transformative power of superintelligence as a discrete technological milestone. Is technology speeding up, slowing down, staying still, or moving sideways? Doesn’t matter — the creation of superintelligence would have a huge impact no matter what the rest of technology is doing. To me, the relevance of a given technology to humanity’s future is largely determined by whether it contributes to the creation of superintelligence or not, and if so, whether it contributes to the creation of friendly or unfriendly superintelligence. The rest is just decoration.

Take space colonization for example. Does it matter to the future of humanity if we spend billions of dollars on building space stations and missions to the Moon? Only insofar as it influences how and if superintelligence is created, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t. That exclusivity about superintelligence has caused some to question my sanity, but that’s the same reaction I would expect if I were an intelligent Homo habilis in an alternate universe ranting about how developments in technology were only relevant insofar as they gave us the ability to produce Homo sapiens or something even smarter. People are so preoccupied by the impact of humans that they fail to realize that the creation of transhumans would sideline much of our ongoing impact in the global sense.

That’s the thing about superintelligence that so offends human sensibilities. Its creation would mean that we’re no longer the primary force of influence on our world or light cone. Its funny how people then make the non sequitur that our lack of primacy would immediately mean our subjugation or general unhappiness. This comes from thousands of years of cultural experience of tribes constantly killing each other. Fortunately, superintelligence need not have the crude Darwinian psychology of every organism crafted by biological evolution, so such assumptions do not hold in all cases. Of course, superintelligence might be created with just that selfish psychology, in which case we would likely be destroyed before we even knew what happened. Prolonged wars between beings of qualitatively different processing speeds and intelligence levels is science fiction, not reality.

It’s interesting that quotes which were originally fielded to back up the Intelligence Explosion school find themselves repurposed in The Singularity is Near to argue for the Accelerating Change school. There is actually somewhat of a merger between the two schools in the book, to the point where one might find it difficult to disentangle them, and condemn one idea for the flaws of the other. For instance, on page 10 of the book is a quote by myself, from a 2003 interview with Phil Bowermaster. The quote goes, “When the first transhuman intelligence is created and launches itself into recursive self-improvement, a fundamental discontinuity is likely to occur, the likes of which I can’t even begin to predict.” Well, that quote is at odds with Mr. Kurzweil’s presentation in the rest of the book, which argues that AI will surpass the human brain around 2029 but the rupture of predictability won’t occur until 2045. According to my quote, that rupture would occur almost instantaneously.

A related quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky appears on page 35: “Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve… [T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from “impossible” to “obvious”. Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them become obvious.” These quotes are hammering home the point that superintelligence is the main thing, and all that tangential stuff about genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, and so on, are just the inventions of merely human-level thinkers, and in the long run their impact will be measured by their contribution (or lack thereof) to superintelligence.

I hope that our differences in thinking from Mr. Kurzweil have been made clear.