Spectrum on the Singularity

[sawyl]

This month's Spectrum contains a series of articles on the singularity, including a good lie of the land essay by Vernor Vinge. Assessing the taxonomy of singularities, Vinge identifies a Digital Gaia scenario in which embedded systems become self-aware:

A singularity arising from networks of embedded microprocessors—the Digital Gaia Scenario—would probably be less deniable, if only because of the palpable strangeness of the everyday world: reality itself would wake up. Though physical objects need not be individually sapient, most would know what they are, where they are, and be able to communicate with their neighbors (and so potentially with the world). Depending on the mood of the network, the average person might notice a level of convenience that simply looks like marvelously good luck. The Digital Gaia would be something beyond human intelligence, but nothing like human. In general, I suspect that machine/network life-forms will be faster, more labile, and more varied than what we see in biology. Digital Gaia is a hint of how alien the possibilities are.

When taken in combination with some of the comments he makes in his interview — that a singularity might emerge out of trying to solve hard tasks (amongst which he includes fluent natural language translation and cleaning an unprepared bathroom!) and that rapid military development projects might potentially trigger a hard takeoff — I begin to suspect that the incubator of the singularity might already be with us.

Where? The world of aggressive computerised surveillance. Think about it. Surveillance systems make use of complex, large scale, tightly coupled systems. They specialise in the sort of fuzzy tasks that are generally perceived to be the domain of humans, e.g. facial recognition, natural language processing etc.; they're the sorts of systems that are likely to spiral in complexity as the watched find ways to work around their watchers and the watchers find ways to respond; and they're the sorts of systems where immediate enhancements are going to be preferred over detailed checking of every intermediate step. In short, they sound a lot like the perfect breeding grounds for Digital Gaians.

Wouldn't that be ironic? To find that one day you're master of all you survey; then the next, you find that an uppity intelligence has evolved out of dirty details of your panopticon and is revealing all your dirty laundry in public...