The Singularity and Gaming

Vernor Vinge, author of Marooned in Real-Time, The Ungoverned (a short story), True Names, Tatja Grimm's World, The Peace War, Fire Upon the Deep,  A Deepness in the Sky, Collected Short Stories, and Rainbow's End is a visionary of uncommon talent and hard work.  He only produces a few books, but they are obviously the result of hard work and deep thought.  This separates him from many other SF writers.

Almost all of them are worth reading, even The Ungoverned as a primer to anarcho-capitalitst thought.  It is otherwise, fairly forgettable except as a background for his hero in Marooned.

His short story, Original Sin, while interesting does reveal some regrettable theories about the existence of sin being something taught to people.  Now granted, the Bible states that the Law taught of Sin to people, but the Bible also states that a knowledge of good and evil is inborn.

His primary focus in his infrequent books is the Technological

Singularity.  Secondarily, he focuses on Anarcho-Capitalism which is an extreme form of Libertarianism where governments cease to exist altogether.

But we are considering the Singularity here.  One common meaning of a singularity is that of a black hole, a stellar mass so large as to draw even light into it by its gravitational strength.  And we on this side, cannot tell anything about what happens on that side.

This was the inspiration for Vinge's term (although it is not wholly his own idea.  I believe John von Neumann back in 1954 had influence).  However, Vinge probably did the most to create interest in it.

The idea begins with an X-Y chart.  On the X side, we put Time.  On the Y side we put Technological Progress.

We then observe that Progress occurs at a fairly slow centuries apart pace early on. But writing (according to this theory anyways) is invented, and things pick up a bit.  The Rate of Progress rises.  Later still, Gutenberg and progress begins to change lifestyles within the lifetime of the people living.  Modern capitalism, corporations, international banking, and everything else not only improve things, but make it easier and faster to improve things the next time.

Now improvements are coming in "Ages" that last perhaps a decade.

And computers show up.  Moore's Law (which is not really a law, but it works anyways) kicks in. Every 18-24 months a doubling of processor capability occurs.

And back to the X-Y chart. Now the Rate of Progress is really cooking.  For every time unit we spend, we get much more progress each and every time unit.  In T1 we get P1, in T2 we get P2, in T3 we get P4....

About the year 2010, Moore's Law predicts we will have computers with the equivalent in chip size as the neurons in the human brain.  This is not to say that they will then wake up, and order a latte.  But it does say that a lot of problems will keep on getting easier and easier to solve, and that this process snowballs.

Eventually, and according to advocates of this theory like Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, in the not too distant future, the Rate of Progress shifts from climbing fast to nearly vertical to vertical.

As Vinge says, after fifty years of nearly vertical progress, where any human goal that is not internally inconsistent can be met, what we will have will be the Singularity. It will be unpredictable.

Why unpredictable? To use one of Vinge's metaphors, you have a dog and a man.  The dog may be able to learn how to change the channel on the TV, but he will never really understand the TV, nor will he ever be able to make one.

Why mention the man and the dog?  This is why, look below.

In the Singularity, one of the goals met will be to be superhumanly intelligent.  Advocates regularly mention numbers like a trillion IQ (which I find laughable).  To put it in Multiverser terms, the average human or his descendant will have 3@10 intelligence, plus a number of 3@10 skills which will aid that intelligence to make humans vastly more powerful than the Greek gods.

Vinge favors a method of human advancement called IA, which is Intelligence Enhancement.  You hook up to a computer, and become more than human.  And then you upgrade....

There are several Singularity scenarios.

One is the Hard Takeoff: That is, you go to sleep, and while you sleep a Chinese computer 'wakes up' and takes over the world.  It might ignore us. It might consider us cockroaches. It might even decide to be helpful to us.  Or it might squish us with a skill and power that would make Skynet green with envy.

The more preferred path is the Softer one where things keep getting more advanced, faster and faster, and people run very hard to keep up, and soon enough we're all gods.

There is also the nanotech scenario--the Gray Goo scenario. You wake up after a nanotech accident. Your house, your city, everything on the planet made by the hand of man is now a six inch thick lake of goo smeared over the whole planet.

This is unlikely because contrary to popular fiction, general assemblers (or in this case dis-assmblers) like any generalist, are not terribly efficient.

There are some more end-state ideas.

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Now, I like Vinge because contrary to a number of Singulatarians, he seems humane.  Ray Kurzweil, who hit the bestseller list, this year with "The Singularity is Nigh" says that the only thing that can stop the Singularity is a totalitarian government.  I think he is naive.  The engine of progress is a carefully balanced machine.

The Singulatarians offer in their dream various forms of extreme physical longevity (they call it immortality) ranging from having your brain sliced and dice and copied into a computer net to simply living forever, barring extremely freaky accidents.  They also offer superhuman intelligence.  And with the intelligence comes power.

But while there is a Heaven, there are also Hells.  An AI might decide your best use is as a calculating machine, and rewrite your brain to optimize your functionality.

Another note of discord in what some people by the early 90's were calling the Church of St. Vinge is the remark by Singulatarian author Ken McLeod when he called the Singularity "The Rapture of the Geeks." (Some say "Nerds").

There is a striking similiarity between Singulatarianism and Christianity. And Kurzweil does not think we need God.  Both have Raptures, Heavens, Hells, Perfected Bodies, Immortality.

And according to Kurzweil, by 2050 we should be in the Singularity. Of course, Vinge, some time ago, probably back in the late 80's was predicting the Singularity by 2030.  This reminds me of the fusion problem where its always 'thirty years down the road'.

Of course, Singulatarians believe that we are now in, or close to the "ell" in the graph, the point where things start heading seriously stratoscopic.  And they do have a point.

Some of the technologies that are supposed to get us there include biotech, nanotech, and computers.  Kurzweil supposedly has five areas of tech that would do the job, and if it turns out one or two won't for unforseen reasons, then the others will carry the weight, he is sure.

Incidentally, these ideas are often popular with Extropians which is a social movement.

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Now hopefully, I've laid the definition out in enough clarity to be understandable.  And added in some of the sidelights to give some analysis of the social areas, and controversies associated with this phenomenon.

I will now turn to what I've done on this.

My first serious adult novel attempt was about a botched Singularity--I still want to write Kingdom of Houses.  This was back in college, a long time ago.

Since then, I've written Starsong Systems which has another botched singularity.  This is due as in the KOH novel to an over abundance of pattern-matching skill with a corresponding lack in judgment.

--Note: This is due in part to some skepticism on my part, but also in part to Vinge's definition of Unknowability.  You cannot write about what you can't know. So you have to get close, but then swerve off.

Later, I've worked on Ascension or Apocalypse which deals with people trying to keep up with the latest tech advances while the society races out of control toward the Singularity. No one knows what is going to happen. Whether they will become superhuman, or whether they will kill themselves off when some bright guy makes antimatter in his basement.

Another work is my article Singularities Heroes.  This was in response to the Joe Haldeman novel Old Twentieth. In OT, the rich decide to get rid of the poor since the poor are not needed as workers anymore.  A targetted virus, and presto.  In Heroes, one man fears such an outcome, and decides to rebuild trust and honor across the society.

I'm also writing a novel on-line on my blog at Gaming Outpost.  The blog and the novel are entitled Singularity's End.  Because everyone, including super-intelligent 'gods' die.

I am hoping to put out a Worldbook, a small one, with a guide article similiar to this one, but not written in as much haste as this, and a number of alternate scenario and/or worlds.

I'm really not sure if we're heading into a Singularity. I use to be a Singulatarian.  Now, I'm a bit skeptical, in part because I think people are using this as just the latest 'lets spend money for the poor unemployed scientists' fund-raising rah-rah. Also, in part, because I see it being used as a weapon against Christianity.  The problem is, despite these flaws (and if it is real, then these flaws are a great disservice because they get in the way of solving pressing problems) that it may be real.

I do remember a few things.

One, my grandfather predicted we would all be driving helicopters to work in the year 2000.

Two, one very bright SF writer said that if you felt like you could predict the future, you should go home, take two aspirin, and lay down until the feeling goes away.

Lets not forget all the bold enviromentalists predictions about how mass starvation was going to overtake us in the eighties, and billions would die, or some such thing.

There is the S-curve, the sigmoid curve.  It starts slow, and then it rockets up, and then it flattens out.  The first ten percent, and the next eighty percent, and the last ten percent all take the same amount of time.  But before you take too much comfort from this, consider that the S curve of today can be supplanted by another S curve. 

Is the Singularity coming? I don't know. I do know Christ is coming.  And I do know that the Singularity is not dealt with that frequently in gaming, but its a hot topic this last year, and its big in the SF world.

However, let me warn you, many of the SF novels with Singularity in them would have in a different decade been packaged as stories about the inscrutable and ancient galatics.  One method used too much, is to have some wacky strange things happen, for no discernible reason, that are on a vast scale, and automated.  And them trumpet this as your Singularity. 

I can see how its a useful trick, but it become annoying.  I personally prefer the Galactic Level Alien Race.  They are more fun. 

Hmm, well, I guess that is about that for now, for this ROUGH draft.  Questions and clarifications and such can be directed to the Multiverser or Article forum.