Spike How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies

1: The Headlong Rush of Time If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will comeyou heard it here firstwhen the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology, and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Thomas Pynchon,New York Times Book Review, 1984 Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Vernor Vinge, NASA Vision-21 Symposium, 1993 It rushes at you, the future. Usually we don't notice that. We are unaware of its gallop. Time might not be a rushing black wall coming at us from the future, but that's surely how it looks when you stare unflinchingly at the year 2050 and beyond, at the strange creatures on the near horizon of time (our own grandchildren, or even ourselves, technologically preserved and enhanced). Call themtranshumansor evenposthumans. The initial transition into posthumanity, for people intimately linked to specially designed computerized neural nets, might not wait until 2050. It could happen even earlier. Twenty-forty. Twenty-thirty. Maybe sooner, as Vinge predicted. This is no longer the deep, the inconceivably distant future. These are the dates when quite a few young adults today expect to be packing up their private possessions and leaving the office for the last time, headed for retirement. These are dates when today's babes in arms will be strong adults in the prime of life. Around 2050, or maybe even 2030, is when a technological Singularity, as it's been termed, is expected to erupt. That, at any rate, is the considered opinion of a number of informed if unusually adventurous scientists. Professor Vinge called this projected event "the technological Singularity," something of a mouthful. I call it "the Spike," an upward jab on the chart of change, a time of upheaval unprecedented in human history. And, of course, it's a profoundly suspect suggestion. We've heard this sort of thing prophesied quite recently, in literally Apocalyptic religious revelations of millennial End Time and Rapture. That'snotthe kind of upheaval I'm describing. A number of perfectly rational, well-informed, and extremely smart scientists are anticipating a Singularity, a barrier to confident anticipation of future technologies. I prefer the termSpike, because when you chart it on a graph itlookslike a Spike! Its exponential curve resembles a spike on a graph of change over time. Here's a picture of it: As you see, the more the curve grows, the larger is each subsequent bound upward. It takes a long time to double the original value, but the same period again gets you four times farther up the curve, then eight times...so that after justtendoublings, you've risen athousandtimes as far, then two thousand, and on it goes. Note this: the time it takes to go from one to two, and then from two to four, is just the same period needed to take that mighty leap from 1000 to 2000. A short time later we're talking a millionfold increase in a single step, and the very next step after that istwo millionfold...3 History's slowly rising trajectory of progress over tens of thousands of years, having taken a swift turn upward in recent centuries and decades, quickly roars straight up some time after 2030 and before 2100. That's the Spike. Change in technologBroderick, Damien is the author of 'Spike How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies' with ISBN 9780312877828 and ISBN 031287782X.