The left singularity versus the technological singularity

Lately this blog has largely been about the left singularity:  That leftism leads to more leftism, which leads to even more leftism even faster, until everything goes to hell. The best known singularity, however is the information technology singularity, the rapture of the nerds

What of the theory that information technology leads to more information technology?

Well, in a sense, in the long run, looking back over the last several million years, it is obviously true.  Problem is that it is far from obvious that dramatic technological change is coming any time soon. We have had quite a few dark ages interrupting the process, and there is what looks like a dark age coming up now.

The distinguishing feature of the technological singularity, what makes it singular, is accelerating progress.  Progress has been accelerating  from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, but during the twentieth century, in one field after another, progress has slowed, usually stopping altogether within the west, while continuing at a somewhat slower pace in Asia.   Accelerating progress continues in DNA reading, but that is the last place where it is still evident that progress is accelerating. Progress may well have stopped in DNA writing, and any future advances in DNA writing are likely to come from Asia.  Rapid progress continues in integrated circuit manufacture, but that progress is not accelerating, and the shrinking number of fabs and increasing cost of fabs threatens to end that progress.

If yet another dark age hits, then when the next civilization rises, the high point of western civilization will be dated precisely to 1972 – last man on the moon, tallest buildings in the west, coolest muscle cars.

Information technology has been growing exponentially – everyone these days has a powerful computer connected to the internet with a lot of storage, giving them instant access to all the information in the world, which they mostly use to download badly made porn and worse written romantic fiction.

The continued advance of computing power, data storage, and internet bandwidth, will likely give us … lots and lots of 3D computer animated porn taking place in virtual worlds with reasonable physics..

That everyone now has access to all the information in the world has not accelerated the scientific progress that underlies technological progress:  Arguably scientific progress was fastest around the 1870s, and it has slowed dramatically after 1942, when peer review was introduced.

DNA, the unification of information technology with biology?

One of the areas of information technology that is progressing rapidly, and the only place where it still accelerating, is DNA reading.

DNA sequencing, protein sequencing, new techniques for revealing the three dimensional structure of proteins, and many other breakthroughs have generated a rapidly increasing flood of data, which is now running into the limits of computers to keep up with it.  Back in the 1990s, everyone expected this would result in huge flood of useful biotechnology, that biotechnology would be where fortunes were made, as previously computers were where fortunes were made, that there would be extraordinary and rapid progress in medicine and other practical fields.

Instead, the number of new medical entities has been falling rapidly, with the result that drug companies are facing big troubles as their patents run out.

In the late 2000s, social decay outran information advance.

What is happening with biotechnology is cultural decline, the decline of science, social decay.  Biomedical research is rapidly becoming less and less reproducible, so biotech companies cannot use academic research to produce new medical treatments.

Peer Review is science by consensus.  Instead of experimentalists telling the scientific community what they see, the scientific community tells experimentalists what they should see.  Science ceases to be science, and becomes the consensus of the most holy synod.  The academy is generating theology, not biology, and when biotech companies attempt to apply the latest advances in theology to produce actual treatments, the treatments of course do not work.  Biotech companies have found that some time in recent years, biomedical scientific research ceased to reproducible.  Should a university’s biology department try to do biology, it is going to fall short on its goals for affirmative action and number of papers published.  Reproducibility seriously slows down the production of papers, and oppresses female ways of knowing.

DNA synthesis

DNA writing may be progressing also, though this is less clear.  The high point was Venter synthesizing a functional one million base pair chromosome to create a simple bacterium.  It remains to be seen whether this is the start of creating synthetic organisms, or like the landing on the moon, a civilizational high point signalling the beginning of social decay.  The next step would be to create synthetic chloroplasts based on blue green algae that can synthesize organic nitrogen from atmospheric nitrogen using sunlight, thus giving bioengineered crop plants a huge advantage over natural weeds, and then, eventually work our way to creating synthetic humans, free from accumulated genetic load.

It is probable that a human free from genetic load would be an all round gold medal Olympic athlete, extremely smart, with a reaction time of less than a hundred milliseconds, rather than the usual three hundred milliseconds.  There are large variations in human reaction time and very fast reaction times appear to have no downside – people with very fast reaction times tend to be generally smarter and saner.  Reaction time is a good indicator of brain efficiency and effectiveness.  People with good reaction times not only make decisions faster, they make better decisions faster.

Since evolution has every reason to select for faster reaction time, and no reason to select for slower, the fact that we have any significant variation in this, that we are not all close to the shortest possible time, suggests that the problem is genetic load.

On average, humans acquire about seventy new single nucleotide variants per genome per generation.  This causes genetic load.

The difference between someone whose reaction time is one standard deviation below average, and someone whose reaction time is one standard deviation above average, is apt to be decisive in a fight, overwhelmingly decisive in a fight with deadly weapons, and also quite important when dancing to live music in the presence of members of the opposite sex.  These are big differences.

Reaction time is is highly heritable and one would expect it to have a large effect on survival and reproductive success, so, if not already minimized, random mutations must be increasing it as fast as evolution is shortening it.

There is evidence that reaction time has increased by substantially more than a standard deviation since first measured in Victorian times, probably due to the relaxation in selection and the resulting accumulation of genetic load due to random mutation.

Silverman IW. Simple reaction time: it is not what it used to be. American Journal of Psychology. 2010; 123: 39-50.

Unfortunately, Venter’s one million base pair chromosome may turn out to have been the high point of DNA writing, much as 1972 was the last man on the moon.  No further functional chromosomes have been synthesized de novo, and plans to create them are slipping further away, not getting closer.

If Moore’s law for DNA writing is still on trend, we should be synthesizing human eggs and sperm around 2016 or so.  This does not seem at all likely, suggesting that the trend has broken, just as the space travel trend broke in 1972, though it is too early to be sure yet.  In the short run, Moore law graphs are bouncy, but this bounce is troublingly large.

DNA Reading is not going to change things in itself:

Reading genomes, DNA sequencing, is still zipping along on a Moore’s law curve with a very fast exponential.   Pretty soon, it will be reasonable to do a complete high accuracy gene read on every human that shows up for medical treatment.  Unfortunately our ability to make sense of gene reads is not improving, so it is far from obvious that this will produce substantial medical benefits.  It turns out that most of “non coding” or “junk” DNA is not junk.  Instead of coding for proteins, it codes for which proteins will be produced under what circumstances, and what shall be done with those proteins.  Unfortunately it is very hard to make sense of it

We should be able to get a low accuracy read of someone’s genome for about a hundred dollars in 2018.  Unfortunately a low accuracy read is not particularly useful, because you want to be able to detect rare mutations, since every single person carries thousands of rare mutations.  So we should get good information on individual genomes in around 2021, at the present rate of progress.  This will provide significant medical benefits, but it is unlikely to be a game changer.

How about artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is doing fine.  Unfortunately, artificial consciousness is going absolutely nowhere.  Chess playing computers are very impressive, and so is Google translate.  Unfortunately, Google translate suffers from the Chinese Room syndrome.  If you look at the typical errors that Google makes, it is obviously translating words into the nearest word without knowing what words mean, without even knowing that words have meanings.  It is, like the Chinese Room,  not conscious, and the lack of consciousness shows.

If you look at the progress we are making towards conscious computers, it is as if we wanted to build a plane, a machine that flies like a bird, but had no idea about aerodynamics, engines, or even that air exists, and so we found ourselves building bigger and better pogo sticks.  No matter how big and how good the pogo sticks we build, they are not going to be plane, not getting any closer to being a plane, and no matter how intelligent the computers we program become, they are not getting any closer to being conscious.

Maybe in future we will create artificial consciousness, but at the moment there are no good indications we are headed in that direction, or even know what direction to head.  Maybe computer consciousness will quietly appear out of artificial intelligence, but there are no indications that this is likely.

Perhaps the reason we are not making any obvious progress is that we have no clear idea what consciousness is, how it works, or even what it does, as if we were trying to build a plane, but did not realize that air existed.

If we cannot design brains, maybe we can copy them: How about uploads, simulating brains in software and hardware?

The tiny worm caenorhabditis elegans has just three hundred and two neurons, whose connections have been completely mapped. While a lot of its behavior is arguably well described and well explained in terms of those neurons, no one has actually managed to create a simulated worm driven by simulated neurons. Neurons frequently process information in ways that are not altogether obvious, not always easy to explain or describe, and each attempt to upload the worm reveals that we are even further from the capacity to do so than we thought.  We are not making progress towards uploading, we are making progress towards realizing how difficult the task is.

Nanotechnology. When line widths get down to one nanometer, is that not nanotechnology?

Well it is not the nanotechnology that is likely to transform the world.  What people are hoping for is nanoassemblers in your laptop, so that you can download a new computer and new nanoassembler, and have your old system make the new one.  Laptops could create new laptops as rabbits create new rabbits, except that they could create anything, not just rabbits.

That sort of nanotechnology would mean that everyone would become largely independent of physical trade.  The entire economy would move to the internet.  We could settle space and inhospitable parts of the earth, because we would not need to do shopping trips every few days.  We would only need energy and raw materials, which tend to be abundant in inhospitable unsettled places.  It would also mean an end to gun control.  The government would find it mighty difficult to stop people from settling the unsettled places.

If we were heading towards nanotechnology in that sense, fabs would be getting smaller and cheaper.  Instead, they are getting bigger and more expensive.

If we were using printers, rather photolithography, we could be on that path.

The way we make very small things is that we coat a surface in resist, then we illuminate the resist with an image, so that some parts of the resist are changed by the light, and some parts unchanged by the darkness, which is to say, we create a photo.  Chemical processes then transform the surface, so that we get some detailed structure on the surface.  Rinse and repeat.

For example, to generate the electrical leads, we coat the entire surface in a very thin layer of conductive metal, then we coat the metal with resist.  The resist that is exposed to light becomes non soluble.  We dissolve away the unexposed resist, just like developing an old style black and white photo.  We then dissolve away the metal except where it is protected by the exposed resist.

Now suppose, instead of using light, we had print heads that made mechanical contact with the surface, laying the resist down, or scraping it off, or transforming it with electrical current.  Then the trend would be towards larger and  large numbers of smaller and cheaper fabs.

But instead, each generation of fabs is bigger and more expensive than the last one, threatening an end to Moore’s law for semiconductors.  We are very close to having only one fab in the world, and the next step after that is no fabs.

Even if photolithography can take us all the way down to nanometer scale, which is not clear, as fabs get ever fewer and more expensive, it still not the nanotechnology that is hoped for, the nanotechnology of nanofabs.

The failure.

Continued progress with existing technologies will not get us to the technological singularity.  We need some genuinely new technologies to get us there, and the rate at which we have been introducing genuinely new technologies has been slowing down markedly since the nineteen forties, arguably since the eighteen seventies.  Biotechnology provides a clear and striking recent illustration of social decay outpacing technological advance.

In 1967, the writers of Startreck assumed that by the 1990s, we would have large nuclear powered orbit to orbit interplanetary craft with large crews.  Given the progress that had been happening, that seemed at the time a reasonable expectation.  Progress has slowed, slowed strikingly and obviously

No technological singularity is likely until we recover from social decay.  Right now we are heading downwards fast, and have no idea how to turn around once we hit bottom, or how deep bottom is going to be.  While China and Russia are recovering nicely from their respective left singularities, post Roman Britain tells us that a dark age can be very dark indeed.