4545

What is happening to us?  We look around but it is hard to understand and make sense of it all. Everything is happening so fast; certainty is no longer. Unpredictability is ascendent.  Humanity seems to be in a losing battle.

Moore’s law postulates that computing power expressed as the number of transistors on microchips doubles every two years.

A significant view has been developing over decades about the relationship between the ‘accelerating acceleration’ in technology and its impacts on the nature and viability of humanity.  There are serious and very well credentialed individuals who believe that artificial intelligence may overtake human intelligence. Some of them call the probable future tipping point, Singularity.

Singularity is foreseen as a future event in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.  Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay, The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7]  wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Steven Hawking, among others, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction: “This [AI] will be a new form of life that outperforms humans.”

One version of intelligence explosion is where computing power approaches infinity in a finite amount of time. In this version, once AIs are doing the research to improve themselves, speed doubles e.g. after 2 years, then 1 year, then 6 months, then 3 months, then 1.5 months, etc., where the infinite sum of the doubling periods is 4 years. Unless prevented by physical limits of computation and time quantization, this process would literally achieve infinite computing power in 4 years, properly earning the name “singularity” for the final state. (Yudkowsky, 1996, Staring into the Singularity)

If we consider human history from say just the golden age of the Egyptian Pharaohs from say 2,000 BCE to 1,075 BCE, the beginning of the CE, and think about the progress of technology, the developing intelligence and expressions derived therefrom, while superimposing the accelerating acceleration, we can expect to find humanity in an unimaginable existence in the not-too-distant future.

Rick Evans of Zager and Evans wrote In The Year 2525 in 1969. The lyrics tell a story of man’s advance across 10,000 years and point to great changes in our existence and possible extinction.

I have begun my inquiry and expressions on this subject with 4545, the year in which Zager and Evans postulate we ‘won’t need our teeth, won’t need our eyes’.