[This turned out to be longer than I thought. I could have milked this post by splitting it into a two-parter, but I didn’t. So now I know what will happen. You will look at it and think “Hmm, looks interesting. I’ll read it later” and never quite get around to it. I don’t blame you. If you want the short, short, short version, scroll to the bottom of the page and read the paragraph starting with “Answer“. That way you get all the benefits of reading the article without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.]

The general consensus among People Smarter Than I is that technology has been advancing at a logarithmic rate over the past few hundred years. When extrapolated into the future, this reveals a startling conclusion. The ability to predict the Next Big Thing goes down as more Next Big Things are invented. Eventually everything will crash together and no predictions will be possible at all. At that point will have reached a milestone. For reasons unknown—or perhaps because it sounds futuristic and cool—this has been termed the technological singularity.

The idea has been explored in science fiction and it promises interesting happenings. While I’m not so presumptuous to sit here and type that the singularity will never be reached, there are some major hurdles we need to overcome before we get there. Let me be clear: they’re really major. Oddly, I have heard no discussion regarding these hurdles from any of the so called “futurists” whose job, I think, is to predict the future. (I would also like to take the time to point out that futurists do about the same things that meteorologists do when they predict the weather.) Of course, they don’t need to be right because they’ll never be around to be criticized when they’re wrong. By definition, it is impossible to be a bad futurist—lucky for them.

But I’m going to go ahead and call their bluff. The singularity is just a modern-day, fancy-pants term for Sir Thomas More’s Utopia.

The following is my list of obstacles between us and the Next Big Thing.

1. Money

It continues to astound me how people underestimate the power of money on human behavior. I don’t know much about what form the singularity will take, but I can guarantee one thing: it’s going to be expensive. By expensive, I don’t mean that you, personally, sitting in front of your computer won’t necessarily be able to afford to get into it. I mean that it will be expensive relative to the rest of the world. My internet service, at a few tens of dollars per month, is easily affordable to me, but not to the sweatshop labor that made my shoes. The point is that any singularity—when it arrives—will only be made up of rich important people living in rich important countries. More correctly, this will be no singularity at all, because it will exclude the majority of the human race. Suffice it to say that as long as money is a driving factor in the world at large, the true singularity will never be reached.

2. Privacy

The singularity promises instant access to all information at any time, anywhere. Combine this with a growing presence of cameras in everything including cell phones and personal espresso machines, and it means that when everyone has instant access to all data, they also have access to all public data on you.

I don’t particularly want people to have instant access to all data because it means they’ll know all about my opinions and writing style via this blog without having to read through the whole thing.

There will be a smart algorithm in their brain-computer interface whose sole purpose is to scour the internets for relationships between the contextual elements of whatever environment they happen to be in. As the person raises their hand to shake mine, they know my name and everything about me via this blog—including this particular post, making fun of the fact that they’ll never read it, although they just have which tends toward a sort of post-postmodernism, a terminology which, they realize with a subtle unconscious grimace, I have used incorrectly.

“Ted Stoltz,” he says correctly, handshake firm. “I’m a huge fan.” Then—with an attempt at humor which fails because even the most advanced multidimensional computers integrated with his brain don’t understand jokes and timing, and he’s a clod who thinks he’s funny but isn’t—he says, “Too bad the only thing they have for desert is cheesecake!”

See?

No privacy to be had. Any public social situation will bring on a wealth of useless personal information about you, and it will be impossible to remain anonymous. Suffice it to say that until people no longer care about retaining privacy in public situations, the singularity will never be reached.

3. Intellectual Property

Like privacy, there can’t be any. Simple as that. Sure the concept can exist, but in a world where information travels freely—particularly information that is purchased—the control over intellectual property will be lost. Completely.

But it’s not just a matter of information being shared faster and easier than it’s shared now. What many people don’t realize is that, unlike the physical world in which we live by default, we have absolute and total control over the digital world that we like to inhabit so much of our waking lives. (Prediction: sometime this century, someone will invent a way of interfacing with the digital world during REM sleep.) Read the last non-parenthetical comment again: total control.

How many ways are there of representing a picture digitally? How about a song? A movie? It’s the bane of the digital content producer’s job: there are a billion file formats, and more invented every year. In other words, there are an infinite number of ways to represent anything digital.

Then turn that around. How many things can a given string of binary digits be found in? Obviously the longer the string, the less likely. But as files get larger, any string of a given length becomes more likely to be found. The point is, some day people are going to realize that any digital data can be manipulated into any other digital data; that this can be done on the fly almost instantaneously; and that there are an infinite number of ways to accomplish this.

How can you claim to own the digital representation of sound or images in a computer when these sounds and images can be instantly resaved in an infinite number of formats? It would be absurd to claim that you own all possible permutations of ones and zeros, but, taken out of context or dissassociated from their “translator”, they are meaningless. Up to this point, it has been a relatively straightforward one-to-few correspondence between music and files, as most files are stored in popular formats. But what happens when someone makes a fast, invisible process that deconstructs these files into apparently random data?

This manipulation of digital data on a fundemental level will be inexorably tied to any convergence of technology as predicted by the singularity. Therefore, intellectual property becomes moot.

4. Religion

Infinite, unpredictable advancements will create infinite, unpredictable advancements which some people find blasphemous. We don’t even have to extrapolate into the future for this one. There are plenty of medical advancements today that have been delayed in development, due to their controversial nature. Because religious people have stepped into the arena challenging the morality of certain research, it has effectively been cancelled until other methods of accomplishing the same thing, without offending people’s moral sensibilities, can be found.

As the advancement of technology increases, this will become more acute. It only takes a small group of people with a strong enough voice on the internet to spread the word and get everyone outraged at a relatively minor or comparatively beneficial advancement which nevertheless exceeds our moral authority. It seems to me that as the speed of technological development increases, so to does the resistence to that technology in the case where the line between human and mechanical; living and non-living; man-created or naturally created is sufficiently blurred. And it is fairly clear that we are approaching this point. The closer we get to the singularity, and the more we begin to tinker with natural processes, the more resistence there will be to these same developments, delaying—or possibly preventing altogether—us reaching that point.

5. Implants

In order to reach the singularity, so say the futurists, we have to obtain a state where our physical bodies are integrated with digital data in such a way as to make storage and retrieval of necessary data a seamless process. We have to be like the Borg, as I pointed out in example number 2, with implants and accessories and stuff.

This is quite possibly the most absurd of all, and why anyone claiming “Technological Singularity in x years” has not thought of it, frankly, blows my mind. These futurists are supposed to be geniuses, yet they overlook the most obvious consequences of that which they preach.

But first, let’s revisit the definition because you’ve forgotten it by now: the technological singularity is the point at which advancements in technology are impossible to predict. Advancements. Impossible. To predict.

Hello! How fast does your current computer go out of date? No kidding, every month there’s better hardware than we had last month. Let me ask you something: why am I going to go through the hassle of implanting myself with fancy gadgets when they’re outdated in a freakin’ month!? Yet this is exactly what futurists think we’re going to be doing. Yes, I imagine some people will. But come on, think about this. You get a fancy new eyeball camera implanted in your retina, and before it’s finished healing, they’ve come out with a model with twice the resolution! Don’t you feel like an idiot? Geez, should’a waited until tomorrow to get that operation. Problem is, if you wait until then, something even more fantastic is going to come out the day after that, like an integrated eyeball camera and espresso maker, and then Bob’s going to get one, and then you can just forget about winning the Foobarman contract because your eyeball implant is so fourteen hours ago.

Sheesh.

No one is going to go through the process of implanting crap in their body when it gets outdated as fast as today’s hardware does. Even if it’s just a port, data ports become obsolete, too, and you’d have to upgrade that if you plan to have enough bandwidth in your tubes to push through all the data from the latest eyeball cam a la espresso maker.

But there is a way around some of these things. The biggest help at achieving the singularity is if some smart person invents a way to manipulate the physical world as easily as we can with the digital world. Nanotechnology hints at this, but I’d be willing to bet that that’s further off than people think. It would, however, have the advantage of making money pointless, making intellectual property go away, and make implants be simply upgradable without painful and dangerous surgery. Unfortunately, it will also make our world less private, so people are just going to have to get over other people knowing all about their lives—not to mention as we toy with physical reality, this will be considered by some to be “playing God”.

Also, eventually we’ll reach a point where digital representations of our lives are so good that we won’t be able to tell the difference between them and real life. How far away is a camera that has the resolution and contrast ratio of the human eye? Pretty far, but all trends suggest that we’ll get there, eventually. Arguably, we’ve already hit this point with audio. And look what happens: advancements in quality stop being made. Online music stores sell MP3s encoded at 192kbps, which was the same quality as I was downloading from Napster back in 2000. They may have gotten incrementally better, but for the most part, that’s good enough.

When that happens, we could see two things. Either they stop getting better or—and this is a big “or”—we interface them with our brain in such a way that we would benefit from even better quality. That is, enhancing ourselves to be better than we are naturally. At that point, there are no limits, and we’re back to the same problem of getting an implant only to have it be obsolete the next day.

So, what is the point of this absurdly long rant?

Answer: the singularity demands that fundemental aspects of human nature change, such as the importance of money, privacy, religious beliefs, and intellectual property ownership. While this is not an impossiblity, it is highly improbable, and will delay the achievement of the technological singularity for a longer period than many of its advocates claim.

And now I’m off to enjoy my expensive, slightly outdated, generally moral, and copyrighted life without telling you anything about it. And I like it that way.

-Ted