Blog of Wade Making Connexions

Moving Towards Technological Singularity, or the Reverse?

Donal’s blog raises the question about the movement of technology. He gives the direction of movement towards a Technological Singularity. I believe the opposite is happening. I also believe that the rate of ‘giant leaps’ is actually slowing down.

Kevin Kelly’s talk on Biology and Technology (youtube at bottom), is one of the sources used by Donal mentions as pointing out the promise of the Technological Singularity(wiki). Kelly in the same video points out that all technology has already come from a single point; the big bang. In this way, I shall use Donal’s video against him.

The big bang was a point, a dot, from which everything has come out of. Everything advancement has it’s start at this point. Advancements come about through examination, understanding, meditation, division, classification and so on. Technological advancements are the greatest way of showing the slow down and the reverse of the singularity. The greatest potential for change was at the big bang, each step and change from there contains less impact or purity then the step before it.

This is better explained using a tree as an example. The trunk is the core, the singularity, the big bang, the single point from which everything comes. From the trunk comes a few main branches, these are massive changes, from nothing comes something. from 0 branches to 2. These branches are a single step away from the singular nature. Each of those branches has massive potential to change and effect what comes after it. Each branch then spawns 3 of it’s own branches. Each of these is even further away from the singularity, and only 1/6 from which the singularity came from. This is repeated step after step, and can be called evolution. Using this method evolution appears to be moving away from the singularity. Each step we take is based upon something that was closer to the single before it. This same pattern is the acceptance principle for development used to explain all 6 kingdoms of life.

Based on this, we aren’t moving towards the singularity, we’re moving away from it. Our advancements in technology are really subdivisions of a single branch into multiples branches. We are not creating new branches from the source, we are continually re-examining what exists and breaking it down even further. We are diving single branches into multiples.

The History of Technology, shows greater conceptual advancements the further back you look. One of the great advancements of the 20th century is it’s “transportation technology”. I find this hard to believe, the creation of the these forms of transportation are 100’s and 1000’s of years old. The wheel was invented in 4000bc, the rockets in 300CE and the steam engine in 1689. In this regard, our advancement is not really advancement, but refinement. We create nothing, we continue to modify what already exists, through analysis and division.

Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human talks about art and music moving towards uglyness and noise, which is much the same concept, of moving away from the whole, the single, the pure.

The desensualization of higher art. — Because the artistic development of modern music has forced the intellect to undergo an extraordinary training, our ears have become increasingly intellectual. Thus we can now endure much greater volume, much greater “noise,” because we are much better trained than our forefathers were to listen for the reason in it. All our senses have in fact become somewhat dulled because we always inquire after the reason, what “it means” and no longer what “it is.” Such a dullness is betrayed, for example, by the unqualified rule of tempered notes. For now those ears still able to make the finer distinctions, say, between C-sharp and D-flat are exceptions. In this regard, our ear has become coarsened. (Continue reading 218 here)

Update:Whilst reading A Way of Being(Carl Rogers) I found an interesting section on this topic, that swings both ways. From my eastern understandings, anything polar is only partial truth. The full truth is found in the middle way. Rogers’ in his approach takes this middle path.

…without ignoring the tendency towards deterioration, we need to recognize fully what Szent-Gyoergui terms “syntropy” and what Whyte calls the “morphic tedency,” the ever operating trend toward increased order and interrelated complexity evident at both the inorganic and the organic level. The universe is always building and creating as well as deteriorating. This process is evident in human beings, too.

What do you think? Progress or Regress? Feel free to leave a comment.