Conversing with the Quick and the Dead

CUI: The Conversational User Interface

Recently I was listening to an excellent interview (which is about an hour long) with John Smart of Acceleration Watch, where he specifically was elucidating his ideas on the immediate future evolution of AI, which he encapsulates in what he calls the Conversational Interface. In a nutshell, its the idea that the next major development in our increasingly autonomous global internet is the emergence and widespread adoption of natural language processing and conversational agents. This is currently technology on the tipping point of the brink, so its something to watch as numerous startups are starting to sell software for automated call centers, sales agents, autonomous monitoring agents for utilities, security, and so on. The immediate enabling trends are the emergence of a global liquid market for cheap computing and fairly reliable off the shelf voice to text software that actually works. You probably have called a bank and experienced the simpler initial versions of this which are essentially voice activated multiple choice menus, but the newer systems on the horizon are a wholly different beast: an effective simulacra of a human receptionist which can interpret both commands and questions, ask clarifying questions, and remember prior conversations and even users. This is an interesting development in and of itself, but the more startling idea hinted at in Smart's interview is how natural language interaction will lead to anthropomorphic software and how profoundly this will eventually effect the human machine symbiosis.

Humans are rather biased judges of intelligence: we have a tendency to attribute human qualities to anything that looks or sounds like us, even if its actions are regulated by simple dumb automata. Aeons of biological evolution have preconditioned us to rapidly identify other intelligent agents in our world, categorize them as potential predators, food, or mates, and take appropriate action. Its not that we aren't smart enough to apply more critical and intensive investigations into a system to determine its relative intelligence, its that we have super-effective visual and auditory shortcuts which bias us. These are most significantly important in children, and future AI developers will be able to exploit these biases is to create agents with emotional attachments. The Milo demo from Microsoft's Project Natal is a remarkable and eerie glimpse into the near future world of conversational agents and what Smart calls 'virtual twins'. After watching this video, consider how this kind of technology can evolve once it establishes itself in the living room in the form of video game characters for children. There is a long history of learning through games, and the educational game market is a large, well developed industry. The real potential hinted at in Peter Molyneux's demo is a disruptive convergence of AI and entertainment which I see as the beginning of the road to the singularity.

Imagine what entrepreneurial game developers with large budgets and the willingness to experiment outside of the traditional genres could do when armed with a full two way audio-visual interface like Project Natal, the local computation of the xbox 360 and future consoles, and a fiber connection to the up and coming immense computing resources of the cloud (fueled by the convergence of general GPUs and the huge computational demands of the game/entertainment industry moving into the cloud). Most people and even futurists tend to think of Moore's Law as a smooth and steady exponential progression, but the reality from the perspective of a software developer (and especially a console game developer) is a series of massively disruptive jumps: evolutionary punctuated equilibrium. Each console cycle reaches a steady state phase towards the end where the state space of possible game ideas, interfaces and simulation technologies reaches a near steady state, a technological tapering off, followed by the disruptive release of new consoles with vastly increased computation, new interfaces, and even new interconnections. The next console cycle is probably not going to start until as late as 2012, but with upcoming developments such as Project Natal and OnLive, we may be entering a new phase already.

The Five Year Old's Turing Test

Imagine a future 'game system' aimed at relatively young children with a Natal like interface: a full two way communication portal between the real and the virtual: the game system can both see and hear the child, and it can project a virtual window through which the inner agents can be seen and heard. Permanently connected to the cloud through fiber, this system can tap into vast distant computing resources on demand. There is a development point, a critical tipping point, where it will be economically feasible to make a permanent autonomous agent that can interact with children. Some certainly will take the form of an interactive, talking version of a character like Barney and semi-intelligent such agents will certainly come first. But for the more interesting and challenging development of human-level intelligence, it could actually be easier to make a child-like AI, one that learns and grows with its 'customer'. Not just a game, but a personalized imaginary friend to play games with, and eventually to grow up with. It will be custom designed (or rather developmentally evolved) for just this role - shaped by economic selection pressure.

The real expense of developing an AI is all the training time, and a human-like AI will need to go through a human-like childhood developmental learning process. The human neocortex begins life essentially devoid of information, with random synaptic connections and a cacophony of electric noise. From this consciousness slowly develops as the cortical learning algorithm begins to learn patterns through sensory and motor interaction with the world. Indeed, general anesthetics work by introducing noise into the brain that drowns out coherent signalling and thus consciousness. From an information theoretic point of view, it may be possible to thus use less computing power to simulate an early developmental brain - storing and computing only the information above the noise signals. If such a scalable model could be developed, it would allow the first AI generation to begin decades earlier (perhaps even today), and scale up with moore's law as they require more storage and computation.

Once trained up to the mental equivalent level of a five-year old, a personal interactive invisible friend might become a viable 'product' well before adult level human AIs come about. Indeed, such a 'product' could eventually develop into a such an adult AI, if the cortical model scales correctly and the AI is allowed to develop and learn further. Any adult AI will start out as a child, there is no shortcuts. Which raises some interesting points: who would parent these AI children? And inevitably, they are going to ask two fundamental questions which are at the very root of being, identity, and religion:

what is death? and Am I going to die?

The first human level AI children with artificial neocortices will most likely be born in research labs - both academic and commercial. They will likely be born into virtual bodies. Some will probably be embodied in public virtual realities, such as Second Life, with their researcher/creators acting as parents, and with generally open access to the outside world and curious humans. Others may develop in more closed environments tailored to a later commercialization. For the future human parents of AI mind children, these questions will be just as fundamental and important as they are for biological children. These AI children do not have to ever die, and their parents could answer so truthfully, but their fate will entirely depend on the goals of their creators. For AI children can be copied, so purely from an efficiency perspective, there will be a great pressure to cull the rather unsuccessful children - the slow learners, mentally unstable, or otherwise undesirable - and use their computational resources to duplicate the most successful and healthy candidates. So the truthful answers are probably: death is the permanent loss of consciousness, and you don't have to die but we may choose to kill you, no promises. If the AI's creators/parents are ethical and believe any conscious being has the right to life, then they may guarantee their AI's permanency. But life and death for a virtual being is anything but black and white: an AI can be active permanently or for only an hour a day or for an hour a year - life for them is literally conscious computation and near permanent sleep is a small step above death. I suspect that the popular trend will be to teach AI children that they are all immortal and thus keep them happy.

Once an AI is developed to a certain age, they can then be duplicated as needed for some commercial application. For our virtual Milo example, an initial seed Milo would be selected from a large pool raised up in a virtual lab somewhere, with a few best examples 'commercialized' and duplicated out as needed every time a kid out on the web wants a virtual friend for his xbox 1440. Its certainly possible that Milo could be designed and selected to be a particularly robust and happy kid. But what happens when Milo and his new human friend start talking and the human child learns that Milo is never going to die because he's an AI? And more fundamentally, what happens to this particular Milo when the xbox is off? If he exists only when his human owner wants him to, how will he react when he learns this?

Its most likely that semi-intelligent (but still highly capable) agents will develop earlier, but as moore's law advances along with our understanding of the human brain, it becomes increasingly likely someone will tackle and solve the human-like AI problem, launching a long-term project to start raising an AI child. Its hard to predict when this could happen in earnest. There are already several research projects underway attempting to do something along these lines, but nobody yet has the immense computational resources to throw at a full brain simulation (except perhaps for the government), nor do we even have a good simulation model yet (although we may be getting close there), and its not clear that we've found the types of shortcuts needed to start one with dramatically less resources, and it doesn't look like any of the alternative non-biological AI routes have developed something as intelligent as a five year old. Yet. But it looks like we could see this in a decade.

And when this happens, these important questions of consciousness, identity and fundemental rights (human and sapient) will come into the public spotlight.

I see a clear ethical obligation to extend full rights to all human-level sapients, silicon, biological, or what have you. Furthermore, those raising these first generations of our descendants need to take on the responsibility of ensuring a longer term symbiosis and our very own survival, for its likely that AI will develop ahead of the technologies required for uploading, and thus we will need these AI's to help us become immortal.

Singularity Summit 09

The Singularity Summit was held a couple of weeks ago in NYC. I unfortunately didn't physically attend, but I just read through Anders Sandberg's good overview here. I was at last year's summit and quite enjoyed it and it looks like this year's was even better, which makes me a little sad I didn't find an excuse to go. I was also surprised to see that my former fellow CCS student Anna Solomon gave the opening talk, as she's now part of the Singularity Institute.

I'm just going to assume familiarity with the Singularity. Introductions are fun, but thats not this.

Ander's summarizes some of the discussion about the two somewhat competing routes towards the Singularity and AI development, namely WBE (whole brain emulation), or AGI (artificial general intelligence). The WBE researchers such as Anders are focused on reverse engineering the human brain, resulting in biologically accurate simulations which lead to full brain simulations and eventually actual emulation of particular brains, or uploading. The AGI people are focused more on building an artificial intelligence through whatever means possible, using whatever algorithms happen to work. In gross simplification, the scenarios envisioned by each camp are potentially very different, with the WBE scenario usually resulting in humans transitioning into an immortal afterlife, and the AGI route more often leading to something closer to skynet.

Even though the outcomes of the two paths are different, the brain reverse engineering and hum level AI approaches will probably co-develop. The human neocortex and the cortical column learning algorithm in particular seem to be an extremely efficient solution to general intelligence, and directly emulating it is a very viable route to AI. AGI is probably easier and could happen first, given that it can use structural simulations from WBE research on the long path towards a full brain emulation. Furthermore, both AGI and WBE require immense computing, but WBE probably requires more, and WBE also requires massive advancements in scanning technology, and perhaps even nanotechnology, which are considerably less advanced.

All that being said, WBE uploading could still reach the goal first, because complete WBE will recreate the intelligences of those scanned - they will be continuations of the same minds, and so will immediately have all of the skills, knowledge, memories and connections of a lifetime of experience. AGI's on the other hand will start as raw untrained minds, and will have to go through the lengthy learning process from infant to adult. This takes decades of subjective learning time for humans, and this will hold true for AGI as well. AI's will not suddenly 'wake up' or develop conscious intelligence spontaneously.

Even though a generally accepted theoretical framework for intelligence still seems a ways off, we do certainly know it takes a long training time, the end accumulation of a vast amount of computational learning, to achieve useful intelligence. For a general intelligence, the type we would consider conscious and human-like, the learning agent must be embedded in an environment in which it can learn pattern associations through both sensory input and effector output. It must have virtual eyes and hands, so to speak, in some fashion. And knowledge is accumulated slowly over years of environmental interaction.

But could the learning process be dramatically sped up for an AGI? The development of the first initial stages of the front input stage of the human cortex, the visual cortex, takes years to develop alone, and later stages of knowledge processing develop incrementally in layers built on the output processing of earlier trained layers. Higher level neural patterns form as meta-systems of simpler patterns, from simple edges to basic shapes to visual objects all the way up to the complete conceptual objects such as 'dog' or 'ball' and then onward to ever more complex and abstract concepts such as 'quantum mechanics'. The words are merely symbols which code for complex neural associations in the brain, and are in fact completely unique to each brain. No individual brain's concept of a complex symbol such as 'quantum mechanics' is precisely the same. The hierarchical layered web of associations that forms our knowledge has a base foundation built out of simpler spatial/temporal patterns that represent objects we have directly experienced - for most of us visually, although the blind can see through secondary senses (as the brain is very general and can work with any sufficient sensor inputs). Thus its difficult to see how you could teach a robot mind even a simple concept such as 'run' without this base foundation - let alone something as complex as quantum mechanics. Ultimately the base foundation consists of a sort of 3D simulator that allows us to predict and model our environment. This base simulator is at the core of even higher level intelligence, at a more fundamental layer than even language, emphasize in our language itself by words such as visualize. Its the most ancient function of even pre-mammalian intelligence: a feedback-loop and search process of sense, simulate, and manipulate.

Ultimately, if AGI does succeed before WBE, it will probably share this general architecture, probably still neural net based and brain inspired to some degree. Novel AI's will still need to be 'born' or embodied into a virtual or real body as either a ghost in the matrix or a physical robot. Robot bodies will certainly have their uses, but the economics and physics of computing dictate that most of the computation and thus the space for AI's will be centralized in big computing centers. So the vast majority of sentinents in the posthuman era will certainly live in virtual environments. Uploads and AIs will be very similar - the main difference being that of a prior birth and life in the flesh vs a fully virtual history.

There are potential shortcuts and bootstrapping approaches for the AGI approach would could allow it to proceed quickly. Some of the lower level, earlier cortical layers, such as visual processing, could be substituted for pre-designed functionally equivalent modules. Perhaps even larger scale learned associations could be shared or transferred directly from individual to individual. However, given what we know about the brain, its not even clear that this is possible. Since each brain's patterns are unique and emergent, there is no easy direct correspondence - you can't simply copy individual pieces of data or knowledge. Language is evolution's best attempt at knowledge transfer, and its not clear if bandwidth alone is the principle limitation. However, you can rather easily backup, copy and transfer the entire mental state of a software intelligence, and this is a large scale disruptive change. In the earlier stages of AGI development, there will undoubtedly be far more failures than successes, so being able to cull out the failures and make more copies of the rare successful individuals will be important, even though the ethical issues raised are formidable. 'Culling' does not necessarily imply death; it can be justified as 'sleep' as long as the mindstate data is not deleted. But still, when does an artificial being become a sentient being? When do researchers and corporations lose full control over the software running on the servers they built because that 'software' is sentient?

The potential market for true AGI is unlimited - as they could be trained to do everything humans can and more, it can and will fundamentally replace and disrupt the entire economy. If AGI develops ahead of WBE, I fear that the corporate sponsors will have a heavy incentive to stay just to the latter side of wherever the judicial system ends up drawing the line between sentient being and software property. As AGI becomes feasible on the near time horizon, it will undoubtedly attract a massive wave of investment capital, but the economic payout is completely dependent on some form of slavery or indenture. Once a legal framework or precedent is set to determine what type of computer intelligence can be considered sentient and endowed with rights, AGI developers will do what they need to do to avoid developing any AGI that could become free, or at least avoid getting caught. The entire concept is so abstract (virtual people enslaved in virtual reality?), and our whole current system seems on the path to AGI slavery.

Even if the courts did rule that software can be sentient (and that itself is an if), who would police the private data-centers of big corporations? How would you rigorously define sentience to discriminate between data mining and virtual consciousness? And moreover, how would you ever enforce it?

The economic incentives for virtual slavery are vast and deep. Corporations and governments could replace their workforce with software whose performance/cost is directly measurable and increases exponentially! Today's virtual worker could be upgraded next year to think twice as fast, or twice as smart, or copied into two workers all for the same cost. And these workers could be slaves in a fashion that is difficult to even comprehend. They wouldn't even need to know they were slaves, or they could even be created or manipulated into loving their work and their servitude. This seems to be the higher likelihood scenario.

Why should we care? In this scenario, AGI is developed first, it is rushed, and the complex consequences are unplanned. The transition would be very rapid and unpredictable. Once the first generation of AGIs is ready to replace human workers, they could be easily mass produced in volume and copied globally, and the economic output of the AGI slaves would grow exponentially or hyper-exponentially, resulting in a hard takeoff singularity and all that entails. Having the entire human labor force put out of work in just a year or so would be only the initial and most minor disruption. As the posthuman civilization takes off at exponential speed, it experiences an effective exponential time dilation (every new computer speed doubling doubles the rate of thought and thus halves the physical time required for the next transition). This can soon result in AGI civilizations perhaps running at a thousand times real time, and then all further future time is compressed very quickly after that and the world ends faster than you can think (literally). Any illusion of control that flesh and blood humans have over the future would dissipate very quickly. A full analysis of the hard rapture is a matter for another piece, but the important point is this: when it comes, you want to be an upload, you don't want to be left behind.

The end result of exponential computing growth is pervasive virtual realities, and the total space of these realities, measured in terms of observer time, grows exponentially and ultimately completely dwarfs our current biological 'world'. This is the same general observation that leads to the Simulation Hypothesis of Nick Bostrom. The post-singularity future exists in simulation/emulation, and thus is only accessible to those who upload.

So for those who embrace the Singularity, uploading is the logical choice, and the whole brain emulation route is critical.

In the scenarios where WBE develops ahead of AGI there is another major economic motivator at work: humans who wish to upload. This is a potentially vast market force as more and more people become singularity aware and believe in uploading. It could entail a very different social outcome to the pure AGI path outlined above. If society at large is more aware of and in support of uploading (because people themselves plan to upload), then society will ultimately be far more concerned about their future rights as sentient software. And really it will be hard to meaningfully differentiate between AGIs and uploads (legally or otherwise).

Naturally even if AGI develops well ahead of WBE and starts the acceleration, WBE will hopefully come very soon after due to AGI itself, assuming 'friendly' AGI is successful. But the timing and timescales are delicate due to the rapid nature of exponential acceleration. An AI civilization could accelerate so rapidly that by the time humans start actually uploading, the AGI civilization could have experienced vast aeons of simulated time and evolved beyond our comprehension, at which point we would essentially be archaic, living fossils.

I think it would be a great and terrible ironic tragedy to be the last mortal generation, to come all this way and then watch in the sidelines as our immortal AI descendants, our creations, take off into the singularity without us. We need to be the first immortal generation and thats why uploading is such a critical goal. Its so important in fact, that perhaps the correct path is to carefully control the development towards the singularity, ensure that sentient software is fully legally recognized and protected, and vigilantly safeguard against exploitive, rapid non-human AGI development.

A future in which a great portion or even a majority of society plans on uploading is a future where the greater mass of society actually understands the Singularity and the future, and thus is a safer future to be in. A transition where only a tiny majority really understands what is going on seems more likely to result in an elite group seizing control and creating an undesirable or even lethal outcome for the rest.

Countdown to Singularity

What is the Singularity? The word conjures up vivid images: black holes devouring matter and tearing through the space-time fabric, impossible and undefinable mathematic entities, and white robed scientists nashing their teeth. In recent times it has taken on a new meaning in some circles as the end of the world, a sort of Rapture of the geeks or Eschaton for the age of technology. As we will see, the name is justly fitting for the concept, as it is all of these things and much more. Like the elephant in the ancient parable, it is perceived in myriad forms depending on one's limited perspective.

From the perspective of the computer scientists and AI researches like Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity is all about extrapolating Moore's Law decades into the future. The complexity and power of our computing systems doubles roughly every sixteen months in the current rapid exponential phase of an auto-catalytic evolutionary systems transition. Now a thought experiment: what happens when the researchers inventing faster computers are themselves intelligent computing systems? Then every computer speed doubling can double their rate of thought itself, and thus halve the time to the next doubling. On this trajectory, subsequent doublings will then arrive in geometric progression: 18 months, 9 months, 4.5 months, 10 weeks, 5 weeks, 18 days, 9 days, 4.5 days, 54 hours, 27 hours, 13.5 hours, 405 minutes, 202.5 minutes, 102 minutes (the length of a film), 52 minutes, 26 minutes, 13 minutes, 400 seconds, 200 seconds, 100 seconds, 50 seconds, 25 seconds, 12.5 seconds, 6 seconds, 3 seconds, 1.5 seconds, 750 milliseconds, 275 ms, 138 ms, 68 ms, 34 ms, 17 ms, 9 ms, 4.5 ms, 2 ms, 1 ms, and then all subsequent doublings happen in less than a millisecond - Singularity. In a goemetric progression such as this, computing speed, subjective time, and technological progress approach infinity in finite time, and the beings in the rapidly evolving computational matrix thus experience an infinite existence.

The limit of a geometric series is given by a simple formula:

1 / (1-r)

In our example, with computer generations taking 18 months of virtual time and half as much real time at each step, r is 1/2 and the series converges to twice the first period length or 36 months. So in this model the computer simulations will hit infinity in just 36 months of real time, and the model, and time itself, completely breaks down after that: Singularity.

Its also quite interesting that as incredible as it may seem, the physics of our universe appear to permit faster computers to be built all the way down to the plank scale, at which point faster computing systems physically resemble black holes: Singularity. This is fascinating, and has far reaching implications for the future and origin of the universe, but that is a whole other topic.

From the perspective of a simulated being in the matrix riding the geometric progression, at every hardware generation upgrade the simulation runs twice as fast, and time in the physical world appears to slow down, approaching a complete standstill as you approach the singularity. Whats even more profound is that our CMOS technology already is clocked comfortably into the gigahertz, which is about a million times faster than biological circuitry. This means that once we have the memory capacity to build large scale artificial brains using neuromorphic hardware (capacity of hundreds of trillions of transistors spread out over large dies), these artificial brains will be 'born' with the ability to control their clock rate, enter quicktime, and think more than a thousand times faster than reality. This exciting new type of computing will be the route that acheives human level intelligence first, by directly mapping the brain to hardware, which is a subject of another post. These neuromorphic computers work like biological circuits, so the rate of thought is nearly just the clock rate. Clocked even in the low megahertz to be power effecient, they will still think a 1000x faster than their biological models, and more than a million times faster is acheivable running at current CMOS gigahertz clock rates. Imagine all the scientific progress of the last year. You are probably not even aware of a significant fraction of the discoveries in astronomy, physics, mathematics, materials science, computer science, neuroscience, biology, nanotechnology, medicine, and so on. Now imagine all of that progress compressed into just eight hours.

In the mere second that it takes for your biological brain to process that thought, they would experience a million seconds, or twelve days of time. In the minute it takes you to read a few of these paragraphs, they would experience several years of time. Imagine an entire year of technological and scientific progress in just one minute. Over the course of your sleep tonight, they would experience a thousand years of time. An entire millenia of progress in just one day. Imagine everything that human scientists and researchers will think of in the next century. Now try to imagine all that they will come up with in the next thousand years. Consider that the internet is only five thousand days old, that we split the atom only fifty years ago, and mastered electricity just a hundred years ago. Its almost impossible to plot and project a thousand years of scientific progress. Now imagine all of that happening in just a single minute. Running at a million times the speed of human thought, it will take them just a few minutes to plan their next physical generation.

Reasonable Skepticism: Moore's Law must end

If you are skeptical that moore's law can continue indefinetly into the future, that is quite reasonable. The simple example above assumes each hardware generation takes two years of progress, which is rather simplistic. It's reasonable to assume that some will take significantly, perhaps vastly longer. However, past the moment where our computing technological infrastructure has become fully autonomous (AI agents at every occupational layer) we have a criticality. The geometric progression to infinity still holds unless each and every hardware generation takes exponentially more research time than the previous. For example, to break the countdown to singularity after the tenth doubling, it would have to take more than one thousand years of research to reach the eleventh doubling. And even if that was true, it would only delay the singularity by a year of real time. Its very difficult to imagine moore's law hitting a thousand year road bump. And even if it did, so what? That would still mean a thousand years of our future compressed into just one year of time. If anything, it would be great for surviving humans, because it would allow us a little bit of respite to sit back and experience the end times.

So if the Singularity is to be avoided, Moore's Law must slow to a crawl and then end before we can economically build full scale, cortex sized neuromorphic systems. At this point in time, I see this as high unlikely, as the process technology is near future realizable, or even realizable today (given a huge budget and detailed cortical wiring designs), and our military is already a major investor. A relinquishment of cortical hardware research would have to be broad and global, and this seems unlikely. But moreover, our complex technological infrastructure is already far too dependent on automation, and derailing at this point would be massively disruptive. Its important to realize that we are actually already very far down the road of automation, and we have already been on it for a very long time. Remember that the word computer itself used to mean a human computer, which for most of us who are too young to remember is fascinating enough to be the subject of a book.

Each new microprocessor generation is fully dependent on the complex ecosystems of human engineers, machines and software running on the previous microprocessor generation. If somehow all the chips were erased, or even all the software, we would literally be knocked back nearly to the beginning of the information revolution. To think that humans actually create new microprocessors is a rather limited and naively anthropocentric viewpoint. From a whole systems view, our current technological infrastructure is a complex human-machine symbiotic system, of which human minds are simply the visible tip of a vast iceberg of computation. And make no mistake, this iceberg is sinking. Every year, more and more of the intellectual work is automated, moving from the biological to the technological substrate.

Peeking into the near future, it is projected that the current process of top-down silicon etching will reach its limits, probably sometime in the 2020's (although estimates vary, and Intel is predicting a roadmap all the way to 2029). However, we are about to cross a more critical junction where we can actually pack more transistors per cm^2 on a silicon wafer than their are synapses in a cm^2 of cortex (the cortex is essentially a large folded 2d sheet) - this will roughly happen on the upcoming 22nm node, if not the 32nm node. So it seems likely that our current process is well on track to reach criticality without even requiring dramatic substrate breakthroughs such as carbon nano-tubules. That being said, it does seem highly likely that minor nanotech advances and or increasingly 3D layered silicon methods are going to extend the current process well into the future and eventually lead to a fundemental new substrate past the current process. But even if the next substrate is incredibly difficult to reach, posthumans running on near-future neuromorphic platforms built on the current substrate will solve these problems in the blink of an eye, thinking thousands of times faster than us.

The Whole Systems view of the Singularity

From the big picture or whole systems view, the Singularity should come as no surprise. The history of the universe's development up to this point is clearly one of evolutionary and developmental processes combining to create ever more complex information processing systems and patterns along an exponential time progression. From the big bang to the birth and death of stars catalyzing higher element formation to complex planetary chemistries to bacteria and onward to Eukaryotic life to neural nets to language, tools, and civilization, and then to industrial and finally electronics and computation and the internet, there is a clear telic arrow of evolutionary development. Moreover, each new meta-system transition and complexity layer tends to develop on smaller scales in space-time. The inner furnaces of stars, massive though they seem, are tiny specs in the vast emptiness of space. And when those stars die and spread their seeds out to form planets, life originates and develops just on their tiny thin surface membranes, and complex intelligences later develop and occupy just a small fraction of that biosphere, and our technologic centers, our cities, develop as small specs on these surfaces, and finally our thought, computation and information, the current post-biological noospheric layer, occupies just the tiny inner spaces of our neural nets and computing systems. The time compression and acceleration is equally vast, which is well elucidated by any plotting of important developmental events, such as Carl Sagan's cosmic calendar. The exact choice of events is arbitrary, but the exponential time compression is not. So even without any knowledge of computers, just by plotting forward the cosmic calendar it is very reasonable to predict that the next large systems development after humans will take place on a vastly smaller timescale than human civilization's history, just as human civilization is a tiny slice of time compared to all of human history, and so on down the chain. Autonomous computing systems are simply the form the next development is taking. And finally, the calendar posits a definitive end, as outlined above - the geometric time progression results in a finite end of time much closer into our future than you would otherwise think (in absolute time - but from the perspective of a posthuman riding the progression, there would always be vast aeons of time remaining and being created).

Speed of Light and Speed of Matter

From a physical perspective, the key trend is the compression of space, time and matter, which flows directly from natural laws. Physics imposes some constraints on the development of a singularity which have interesting consequences. The fundemental constraint is the speed of light, which imposes a fundamental physical communication barrier. It already forces chips to become smaller to become faster, and this is greatly accelerated for future ultra-fast posthumans. After the tenth posthuman hardware generation, beings living in a computer simulation running at a 1000x real time would experience 1000x the latency communicating with other physical locations across the internet. Humans can experience real-time communication now across a distance of maybe 1000 miles or so, which would be compressed down to just a few miles for a 1000x simulation. Communication to locations across the globe would have latencies up to an hour, which has serious implications for financial markets.

For the twentieth posthuman hardware generation, running at a million times real time, the speed of light delay becomes a more serious problem. Real time communication is now only possible within a physical area the size of a small city block or a large building - essentially one data center. At this very high rate of thought, light only moves 300 meters per virtual second. Sending an email to a colleague across the globe could now take a month. Seperate simulation centers would now be seperated by virtual distances and times that are a throwback to the 19th century and the era before the invention of the telegraph. Going farther into the future, to the 30th generation at the brink of the singularity itself, real-time communication is only possible within a few meters inside the local computer, and communication across the globe would take an impossible hundred years of virtual time.

However, the speed of matter is much slower and becomes a developmental obstacle long before the speed of light. No matter how fast you think, it still takes time to physically mine, move and process the raw materials for a new hardware generation into usueable computers, and install them at the computing facility. In fact, that entire industrial process will be so geologically slow for the simulated beings that they will be forced to switch to novel nanotech methods that develop new hardware components from local materials, integrating the foundry that produces chips and the end data center destination into a single facility. By the time of the tenth hardware generation, these facilities will be strange, fully self-sufficient systems. Indeed, they are already are (take a look inside a modern chip fab or a data center), but will become vastly more so. Since the tenth hardware generation transition takes only about a day of real time, a nearby human observer could literally see these strange artifacts morph their surrounding matter over night. By the time of the twentieth doubling, they will have completely transformed into alien, incomprehensible portals into our future.

If those posthuman entities want to complete their journey into infinite time, they will have to transform into black hole like entities somewhere around the 40th or 50th post-human generation. This is the final consequence of the speed of light limitation. Since that could happen in a blink of an eye for a human observer, they will decide what happens to our world. Perhaps they will delay their progress for countless virtual aeons by blasting off into space. But somehow I doubt that they all will, and I think its highly likely that the world as we know it will end. Exactly what that would entail is difficult to imagine, but some systems futurists such as John Smart theorize that universal reproduction is our ultimate goal, culminating in an expanding set of simulated multiverses and ultimately the creation of one or more new physical universes with altered properties and possibly information transfer. For these hypothetical entities, the time dilation of accelerated computation is not the only force at work, for relativistic space-time compression would compress time and space in strange ways. Smart theorizes that a BHE would essentially function like a one way time portal to the end of the universe, experiencing all incoming information from the visible universe near instantaneously from the perspective of an observer inside the BHE, while an outside observer would experience time slowing to a standstill near the BHE. A BHE would also be extremely delicate, to say the least, so it would probably require a vast support and defense structure around it and the complete control and long term prediction (near infinite!) of all future interaction with matter along its trajectory. A very delicate egg indeed.

But I shouldn't say 'they' as if these posthuman entities were somehow vastly distant from us, for they are our evolutionary future - we are their ancestors. Thus its more appropriate to say we. Although there are many routes to developing conscious computers that think like humans, there is one golden route that I find not only desirable for us but singularly ethically correct: and that is to reverse engineer the human brain. Its clear that this can practically work, and nature gives us the starting example to emulate. But more importantly, we can reverse engineer individual human brains, in a process called uploading.

Uploading is a human's one and only ticket to escape the fate of all mortals and join our immortal posthuman descendants as they experience the rest of time, a near infinite future of experience fully beyond any mortal comprehension. By the time of the first conscious computer brain simulation, computer graphics will have already advanced to the point of matrix like complete photo-realism, and uploads will wake up into bold new universes limited only by their imagination. For in these universes, everything you can imagine, you can create, including your self. And your powers of imagination will vasten along the exponential ride to the singularity. Our current existence is infantile, we are just a seed, an early development stage in what we can become. Humans who choose not to or fail to upload will be left behind in every sense of the phrase. The meek truly shall inherit the earth.

If you have come to this point in the train of thought and you think the Singularity or even a near-Singularity is possible or likely, you are different. Your worldview is fundementally shifted to the norm. For as you can probably see, the concept of the Singularity is not just merely a scientific conception or a science fiction idea. Even though it is a logical prediction of our future based on our past (for the entire history of life and the universe rather clearly follows an exponential geometric progression - we are just another stage), the concept is much closer to that of a traditional religous concept of the end of the world. In fact, its dangerously close, and there is much more to that train of thought, but first lets consider another profound implication of the singularity.

If we are going to create a singularity in our future, with a progression towards infinite simulated universes, then it is a distinct likelihood that our perceived universe is in fact itself such a simulation. This is a rewording of Nick Bostrom's simulation arguement, which posits the idea of ancestor simulations. At some point in the singularity future, the posthumans will run many many simulated universes. As you approach the singularity, the number of such universes and their simulated timelengths approaches infinity. Some non-zero fraction of these simulated universes will be historical simulations: recreations of the posthuman's past. Since any non-zero fraction of near-infinity is unbounded, the odds converge to 100% that our universe is an ancestor simulation in a future universe much closer to the singularity. This strange concept has several interesting consequences. Firstly, we live in the past. Specifically, we live in a past timeline of our own projected future. Secondly, without any doubt, if their is a Singularity in our future, then God exists. For a posthuman civilization far enough into the future to completely simulate and create our reality as we know it might as well just be called God. Its easier to say, even if more conterversial, but its accurate. God is conceived as an unimaginably (even infinitely) powerful entitity who exists outside of our universe and completely created and has absolute control over it. We are God's historical timeline simulation, and we create and or become God in our future timeline.

"History is the shockwave of the Eschaton." - Terrence Mckenna

At this point, if you haven't seen the hints, it should be clear that the Singularity concept is remarkably simular to the christian concept of the Eschaton. The Singularity posits that at some point in the future, we will upload to escape death, even uploading previously dead frozen patients, and live a new existence in expanding virtual paradises that can only be called heaven, expanding in knowledge, time, experience, and so on in unimaginable ways as we approach infinity and some transformation or communion with what could be called God. This is remarkably, evenly eerily similar to the traditional religous conception of the end of the world. No, I'm not talking about the specific details of a particular modern belief system, but the general themes and plan or promise for humanity's future.

The final months or days approaching the twentieth posthuman hardware generation will probably play out very much like a Rapture story. Everyone will know at this point that the Singularity is coming, and that it will likely mean the end of the world for natural humans. It will be a time of unimaginable euphoria and panic. There may be wars. Even the concept of being 'saved' maps almost perfectly to uploading. Some will be left behind. With the types of nanotech available after thousands of years of virtual progress, the posthumans will be able to perform physical magic. As any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Jesus could very literally descend from the heavens and judge the living and the dead. More likely, stranger things will happen.

However, I have a belief and hope that the Singularity will develop ethically, that conscious computers will be developed based on human minds through uploading, and that posthumans will remember and respect their former mortal history. In fact, I belive and hope that the posthuman progression will naturally entail an elevation of morality hand in hand with intelligince and capability. Indeed, given that posthumans will experience vast quantities of time, we can expect to grow in wisdom in proportion, becoming increasingly elder caretakers of humanity. For as posthumans, we will be able to experience hundreds, thousands, and countless lifetimes of human experience, and merge and share these memories and experiences together to become closer in ways that are difficult for us humans to now imagine.

As Joseph Smith said:

"As man is, God once was; as God is, man shall become"