kurzweilon the Singularity part I

Dear Colleagues,

I listened to Kurzweil's talk on the Singularity this morning. It presented some great follow-ups to ideas from my last seminar. The talk is available here:

http://download.fora.tv/rss_media/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2005-09-23-kurzweil.mp3

Kurzweil's big insight is the power of exponential growth, or rather that we are living in the elbow of the hockey stick. Plot the history of life on a log-log scale, with key dates being: origin of life, Cambrian explosion, mammals, humans, stone tools, agriculture/cities, machines (industrial rev), computers,... and you get a straight line. Plot it on a linear chart, and everything that has happened is happening right now.

The current rate of change supports my claim that we are at the beginning of a whole new age.

The driving force is that life (and technology) are autocatalitic systems. The current stage powers the development of the next stage.

Shifting stages also requires/implies shifing paradigms. The most powerful example he gave is the shift from drug discovery to drug design. In drug discovery, you find a compound which seems to have the desired effect. This explains almost all current medicines. It also explains why they are so crude and have so many undesired side effects.

The drug design paradigm works by finding a known biological mechanism and working with it. We discussed life extension in the seminar. Olga reminded us that calorie restriction was a proven, if unpleasant, way to increase lifespan by 20%. Kurzweil mentioned a drug which works by RNA interference to block a key insulin related pathway. Since it is based on RNA interference, it does not need to get into the cell nucleous, only into the cell. In mice, the drug reproduces the bilogical benefits of calorie restriction even though the mice eat normally (or actually more than normally).

Now that is only one example, and one that might fail. It is near imposible to predict the path of any one specific particle/idea/approach, the overal system is too complex. But, as in thermodynamics, even though the path of any one molecule is random, the path of the whole system is easy to see. Things are heating up.

A final key point which we all should consider closely when planning our projects. A successful project will be aimed at what is possible/expected when it is complete, not the world as it is today. Old example: sequencing the human genome. Venture knew that exponential growth in technology would make it possible in 15 years. Ten years into the project the doubters were still laughing at him, as only 2% had been sequenced. But it is the last few doublings which gets you the remaining 98%, and as we all know, the genome was sequenced in time.

Cheers,

+glenn