History of discussion about singularity

Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, first wrote about the vision of technological singularity and coined the term in 1993. He wrote, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, is a fervid proponent of technological singularity. Kurzweil predicts the timeline of singularity as follows:

• By 2019, a $1000 PC will have the computing power of the human brain. It will be capable of performing 20 million billion calculations.
• By 2029, a $1K PC will be a thousand times more powerful than the human brain; the human brain itself will be successfully reverse engineered.
• 2045 is singularity: machines will have surpassed humans in intelligence and in fact will have created next-generation robots even smarter than themselves. We should either merge with our creations or step out of their way. Immortality!
• By 2055, $1K of computing power will equal the processing power of all the humans on the planet.

In 2011, Ray Kurzweil sponsored a movie/documentary about singularity, titled "Transcendent Man," which has been screened in five major cities in the U.S., as well as London. In December 2012, Kurzweil was hired by Google as a director of engineering to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing."
In 2000, Bill Joy, a well known computer scientist and the primary figure behind the BSD operating system (on which MacOS was built on) and the widely used Java programming language, joined this discussion. In a Wired magazine article, "Why the future doesn’t need us," Joy declared, in what some have described as a "neo-Luddite" position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would pose severe risks to humanity.

Arguments and counterarguments about the feasibility of singularity

Proponents of singularity often cite Moore’s law to support their claim. Moore’s law states, crudely, that the capacity of computer chips doubles every two years. That is, the speed and capability of computers grows at an exponential speed. Such an exponential growth is a powerful enabler. Consider the series 1,2,4,8,16,32… The small increments in the beginning may be misleading about the overall speed of the series’ growth. The 20th element in this series would be 1 million. The 266th element in this series is 1080, which is more than the number of atoms in the universe.
Proponents of singularity argue that thanks to this exponential growth, the processing powers of computers will reach such high levels in the next few decades that it will be possible to simulate the human brain in high fidelity. The workings of each neuron in the brain will be simulated in real time, achieving a full simulation of the brain. At that point, the computer will essentially have the equivalent of human intelligence. In the succeeding years, with the increase in capacity, the computer intelligence will be several folds ahead of human intelligence.
Opponents of the feasibility of singularity cite that exponential growth is hard to sustain. Exponential growth is seen in the beginning of a series, but then due to limitations/adversities, most series will level off and stay constant. An example of this is the population of rabbits. Initially, the increase is exponential; however, due to scarcity of food sources and an abundance of predators, the population stabilizes around a constant. Therefore, opponents of singularity argue that the exponential progress of computer processing speeds will similarly hit a brick wall. At the chip level, physical issues such as heating will make exponential speedup unsustainable. At the cluster level, latency, consistency, and scalability issues will also prevent exponential growth.
Underlying all of Kurzweil’s ideas regarding the progress of technology and the singularity is the Law of Accelerating Returns. This Law states that technological progress occurs exponentially instead of linearly, meaning that each new advancement enables several higher advancements instead of just one higher advancement, and, concordantly, every year brings more useful inventions and discoveries than were made in the last. The first generation artificial intelligence (AI) approaches failed, but simulating a human brain may work if we know the workings of the brain in excruciating detail. As a promising development, recently, “deep learning” and “deep neural networks” technologies achieved great success in image and speech recognition tasks.
However, the opponents of singularity like to point out that the workings of the brain as a whole are still a big mystery. We have information about the rough mechanism of how a neuron works. An excited neuron can transmit a signal to a neighboring neuron through its synapses. But, there is no clear explanation about how thought occurs from this process. Brain-scanning techniques are improving, as they are based on computers, but the brain may throw us more complex surprises as we learn more about it.
In fact, much of the brain power comes about through organic materials, and the very low-level analog physical interactions between these materials. These physical phenomena could be close to impossible to model/simulate in a digital environment. Henry Markram, lead researcher of the "Blue Brain Project" for simulating mammal brains at the molecular level, has stated that "it is not [their] goal to build an intelligent neural network." He claimed, “[That would] be very difficult because, in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today."
Another relevant question is whether we can develop the parallel processing architectures needed to support the parallel processing that goes on in the brain. The brain uses far more parallel processing than exists in most classical computing designs.
Even if a computer successfully simulates the human brain, whether such a computer design will be “scalable” to two times, ten times, or even one hundred times the brain’s normal power is an unknown; for the human brain’s computation power may be inherently unscalable. Also, if a computer models the human brain, human emotions would also be modeled. Would the resulting computer be stable? As it scales up, would it become existential and suicidal, or perhaps become an arrogant killer?

The aftermath of singularity

Several questions are raised about the aftermath of singularity. Can a downloaded personality replace the spirit? How does this equate to living forever? Singularity promises are similar to claiming that you can live forever by cloning yourself. One copy dies, but another digital copy survives. But it is clear that the copies are different entities.
And it is also clear that this is not true immortality. If we stretch singularity’s approach to immortality a little further, we can argue that humans can achieve immortality through their work or art. And to this idea Woody Allen provided the best response: "I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying."

References

• Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”, 1993, available from https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html
• Ray Kurzweil, ”The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology”, Penguin books, 2005.
• Bill Joy, “Why the future doesn’t need us”, Wired 8 (04), 2000.  
• Henry Markram, “The blue brain project”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7 (2), 153–160, 2006.

I would like to focus briefly on the twentieth century in terms of technological innovations and their impact on the human soul. The Industrial Revolution radically changed our traditional lifestyle. Modern technology engendered many improvements in such areas as production and transportation. These changes were reflected in the literature and art of the period as well.

Views of Technology

In 1909, for instance, the Italian writer Marinetti published The Manifesto of Futurism, a great example of how intellectuals were affected by technology. He states that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by this new beauty, the beauty of speed: We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back? What we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible. Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.(1)

This approach is very understandable, because its adherents assumed that modern technology would provide opportunities they had never experienced. The prospects of technology amazed them. But looking back, we see that technology shaped a new type of people who are dependent on machines. Producing tools and making money became cornerstones of modern life. These views threaten cultural values and traditional relationships among people who feel alone in these technologically separated environments. We ask: How much do machines dominate humanity, and why do people feel so deeply abandoned?

We can look at two perspectives from that period. The first is technology as a magical and wonderful creation, promoted by Marinetti and other futurists. The other is characterized by people like Charlie Chaplain who, in one of his movies, shows a worker who screws bolts every day as eventually starting to see everything as a bolt. This is the worst effect of twentieth-century technology: People have begun to feel like machines or parts of machines.

Do people need and deserve more than this? Of course, they do.

The latest version of modern technology is cyberspace, a place where people can find all sorts of information. Locating information and sharing experiences is easier than ever before. The Internet, for example, has become the information superhighway on which people can find almost everything. The Internet and other technological tools have helped create the expression being digital, which refers to people who use a lot of technology. Is this the illusion of technological globalization(2) or electronic democracy will be the end of participatory democracy?(3) Even though this digital medium provides a new source of information, we have not figured out how best to use it or what information to trust on it.

Issues

At this point, we must learn how to use modern technology and regulate information, because we cannot ignore them. These scientific and technological advances will play important roles in future developments. Science and technology in and of themselves are not the problem, nor have they ever been. The real problem is that science and technology are developed, deployed, and controlled by the predatory system of pancapitalism. The mainstream development of knowledge and technology is guided by increased efficiency in militarized production of violence and/or by potential corporate profits in civilian markets.(4)

There is another significant point here: Modern technology has been trying to create a cyberbody. In the future, scientists will be able to produce digital flesh to enhance our abilities. So here is the problem we have to solve: People who have these enhancements installed may begin to wonder if they are humans or robots. We already have seen that people can adjust their bodies in many ways: laser surgery to correct their vision, or synthetic material to replace their teeth.

Cyberfeminism focusing on women’s role in cyberculture is another interesting example of changing the human body. This already has caused some problems. The challenge here is rather how to combine the recognition of postmodern embodiment with resistance to relativism and a free fall into cynicism.(5)

Technology has limited privacy. When we are born, we get a birth certificate that quickly goes online. Educational files, social security files, insurance files, criminal files, consumption files, and so on are all in cyberspace. The Internet has become an on-line marketplace and is continuing to grow.

On the other hand, even though we are so connected, our social relationships with others have fallen apart. Every relationship between teachers and students, buyers and sellers, parents and children, for example, will be changed radically in the next few decades.

The most important question is how can we find a good balance that gives happiness and hope for both our bodies and our souls? We are not just bodies that need to eat, sleep, and rest, among other things; our souls must be nourished. In this technological age, this has led to a conflict”the crisis of modernity”between religious and metaphysical ideas. Nietzsche said that God was dead. Of course he was wrong, because he, like other philosophers, could not have realized that spiritual needs would become so important in modern times.

Today, we still are seeking for something to feed modern society’s spiritual hunger. We will have to find or build a way of thinking that will include metaphysical ideas, scientific innovations, and religious thought. After that, we will be able to put ourselves in a place where people can regulate their spiritual and physical needs. Otherwise, we will never feel that we are free

Footnotes

1. F. T. Marinetti, The Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figaro (February 20, 1909).
2. Steve Gibson, www.kk.kau.se/mct/MCTO199/steve/ right.html.
3. An Interview with Paul Virilio, www.nettime.org/ nettime.w3archive/199904/msgn00456.html.
4. Critical Arts Ensemble Staff, Critical Art Ensemble, The Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness (Autonomedia: 1998), 7-8.
5. Rosi Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a Difference, www.let.ruu.nl/womens_studies/library.html.

In this issue, we address the effect of rapid technological development on our society. One of the most recent and unexpected examples is the phenomenal spread of the Internet. We are becoming even more of a global village than we were in the 1960s, when Marshall McLuhan first coined the term. From the comfort of our living room or office, we can click a button and read foreign newspapers and magazines, study languages, and learn about other cultures.

But such access has its disadvantages: sexually explicit Web sites, chat rooms where people are not what they seen, and violent and ultra-violent video games that can be downloaded. Thus, a still hotly debated issue concerning the entertainment industry now includes the Internet.

With all the talk in Washington about censoring or somehow controlling the Internet’s content, one wonders if one day we will have an equivalent of Breen’s Code, one of the few successful attempts to force Hollywood to produce ‘socially acceptable’ entertainment. Demands for such codes are growing, as more people become fed up with rap and gangsta rap music, ultra-violent video games, the use of sex to sell everything, and programs ridiculing traditional social and moral values.

As our world becomes smaller, we must deal with people who are not like us. To do this to everyone’s benefit, we need to understand other people’s worldviews, religions, histories, cultures, role models, and so on. As Islam is the fastest growing religion in America today, we offer an Islamic perspective on several core Christian beliefs.

Such technological progress has given us increased opportunities for arm-chair travelling. No longer do we have to spend years travelling, as did Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. We can simply turn on the Travel Channel or the Internet and find whatever we want. But many people are actually travelling, whether as migrants or refugees, with the intention of settling somewhere else. As pointed out in our book review, such a phenomenon simultaneously represents a cultural homogenization and a cultural heterogenization.

Technological developments also have proliferated in science. Humanity has landed on the moon, sent unmanned probes to study other planets and asteroids, and continues to add to our knowledge of our own planet and its inhabitants. This has all been accomplished in the name of objective and value-free science.

But, as one of our authors reminds us, science is as not as ‘objective’ as it seems, for scientists are human. For example, when asked to explain why he had not considered the possibility that God could use evolution to create diverse life forms, Darwin replied that he had problems reconciling suffering with a merciful God. And so we learned that the scientists are subject to human weaknesses, just like the rest of us. This article explains what the scientific process is, how it works, and how it can be applied to religious beliefs.

Also included are three articles for the spiritual edification of our readers.

The winner of our writing contest will be announced in the next issue.

We hope that you enjoy this issue and, as always, look forward to your comments.

Technology can be referred to as the systematic knowledge for manufacture of a product, for the application of a process or for the interpretation of a service and the capacity to use such knowledge.1 Today, knowledge or technology is not freely accessible or distributed among nation-states. It is predominantly concentrated in the Western world which is therefore called ‘technologically advanced’. In the industrialized states the majority of knowledge is subject to proprietary rights to prevent the free transfer of technology and sold commercially as ‘intellectual property’.2 Thus, whoever controls technology as an expensive commodity is in a privileged position to influence the international accumulation of wealth. Since the West controls technology, as a solidified form of science, they hold that technology as their most valuable industrial resource and a means to influence other nations’ attempts on the way of development.

For the developing world, technology is an indispensable condition of ecologically sound economic development to catch up with the industrialized world:3 The Third World countries’ backwardness in technology is therefore one of the biggest problems of our time in view of the ongoing ecological destruction. The World Commission on Environment and Development has stated that the promotion of sustainable development requires international exchange of technology – to increase agricultural production, to encourage use of renewable energy systems, and to control pollution.4

Developing countries paid some $ 2 billion in 1980 by way of royalties and fees to industrialized countries who hold 65 per cent of the world patents granted.5 As years pass, the gap in scientific and technological capabilities in, among other things, biotechnology and genetic engineering, new energy sources, new materials and substitutes, and in ecosound technologies, is gradually increasing. Even though the developing countries need the help of the industrialized countries to overcome the economic and ecological problems they face, the latter do not intend to share with the Third World ‘their’ intellectual resources; in other words, they refuse to transfer technology and know-how, however great the need for it.6

What is yours is ours and what’s ours is ours. That would appear to be the philosophy of the technologically advanced states in dealing with the less-developed countries.7 However, as we shall briefly argue below, technology cannot be confined within state boundaries; it is the expression of mankind’s solidarity. It cannot, historically speaking, be the property of a few states; rather, it is the heritage of all mankind which was inherited by our ancestors, regardless of their nationalities.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

A look at the past shows that technology is a blend of knowledge acquired and transmitted by various peoples and scholars of different eras and nationalities. A brief account of the contribution of Islamic scientists will clarify this point about human knowledge as a common inheritance.

In the first part of this millennium, Arab Muslims attained the highest levels in pure and applied science, such as medicine, chemistry, astronomy, geography, history, literature, mathematics, engineering, architecture etc. They educated many great scholars, jurists, philosophers in Cordoba, the capital city of the Arab Andalusian state, from the early eighth century on. In Cordoba, the Arabs built the first university of Europe at that time.8 In those days, the Europeans were ignorant of scientific knowledge. The great Christian clergymen of the time learned with the Arabs – for example, Pope Sylvester, who studied in the University of Andalusia.9 They then carried to Europe and spread more widely the knowledge they had obtained. Technical terms such as chemistry geometry, algebra, among many others, as well as the names of particular products (cotton, sugar, coffee, for example) lacked equivalents in the then European languages and had to be adopted directly from the Arabic. Thus, the names of many constellations are of Arabic origin because the relevant knowledge was introduced to the world by the Arab Muslims.

While the Europeans considered the world flat, the Muslims measured the lengths of longitudinal circles in the Sinjar desert near Mosul, and calculated (with results astoundingly similar to the present estimate) the length of the equator.10 Moreover, Western philosophy owes a profound debt to the Arab Muslims who translated the books of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers which the Church authorities of the Middle Ages proscribed. Even books of medicine passed on by the ancient Greek and Roman scientists were burned by the uneducated Christians of the time; the few that survived did so because they were protected and translated into Arabic by Huseyn ibn Johaq of Baghdad, who also translated the works of Aristotle and Plato.11 In sum, Western philosophy and science came into existence as a result of the efforts of the Arab scholars. As even some Western scholars and historians now have the courage to admit, the Renaissance in fact started in the Muslim world of the Middle Ages.

The Frenchman, Jean Ferrera, is an example.12 He confirms in his article that the works of Ptolemy, Euclid and Archimedes were translated from Greek or Latin into Arabic. He adds that the Muslims also transmitted to Europe the concept, initially discovered in India, of zero (the word cipher in many modern European languages is from the Arabic). It was also the Arabs who taught Europe the science of trigonometry. And how many Europeans know that the logarithms they struggled with through school were the invention of Al-Khwarizmi? Only in Islamic universities was every aspect of scientific or technical development freely taught from the ninth to the twelfth century.

Unfortunately, the Ancient and the Muslim scientific and technological heritage was further developed almost exclusively by Europeans who had a different attitude to knowledge, which therefore became their exclusive property. While the Muslim scholars passed on what they inherited, the Western world takes for granted the real roots of its success. Nevertheless, in the last two decades or so, the developing world is seriously demanding that the West share its accumulated scientific and technological know-how with the technologically less-endowed countries which account for three-quarters of the world population. We shall now survey briefly some of the legal efforts of the Third World to achieve this aim.

LEGAL PERSPECTIVE

By the advent of the New International Economic Order in the mid-1970s, the developing countries had started to project their demands through non-binding international documents. Article 13 of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, adopted on 12 December 1974 by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3281 (XXIX), is an instance of such an attempt. By the provisions of Article 13: ‘Every State has the right to benefit from the advances and developments in science and technology for the acceleration of its economic and social development’ (para.1). Succeeding paragraphs fully endorse the promotion of international scientific and technological co-operation and the transfer of technology in order to assist the developing countries to accelerate their economic development. Similarly, Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples adopted in Algeria states: ‘Scientific and technical progress being part of the common heritage of mankind, every people has the right to participate in it.’

Another proposal was recently put forward in Germany. According to its Article 1, ‘unprotected knowledge of normal human intellectual activity belongs to the common heritage of mankind’.13 Article 2 states that ‘this free flow is in the interest of the human, scientific, technological and economic development of the entire international community.’ Article 8 accepts ‘the legitimacy of fair access by developing states to modern technology.’ All in all, the key question is how such proposals could be made into binding legal norms in the near future.

Prof. I Seidl-Hohenveldern, on behalf of developed countries, argues that the common heritage approach ‘cannot be extended to assets which, like patent rights, are the property of an inventor or of his successors in title’.14-15 He rejects the idea that the present-day inventor alone should carry the cost of compensating the inequalities between the rich and the poor states; instead, such inequalities should, he says, be borne by states.

As a matter of fact, the developing countries are not demanding that every bit of technology that the West possesses be made freely available to them. They ask that three kinds of technology in particular be given to them at reasonable cost. These are, first, the transfer of adequate technology to exploit the living and non-living resources of the oceans;16 second, the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes;17 and finally, protection and preservation of the environment.18

In the face of continuing global environmental crises, that last demand of the developing countries should be taken on board with some urgency in order to protect the life and dignity of the present and future generations. Under-developed countries need expert assistance and transfer of specific technologies to, for example, prevent tropical forest from becoming deserts; to reduce CFC production and emission to the atmosphere; to decrease CO2 emissions by using alternative environmentally-friendly technologies.

CONCLUSION

We have almost entered the post-industrial era in which knowledge has become the most highly valued commodity. Knowledge, alas is kept only in the industrialized world, only a small minority of the world population have access to it, while the majority suffer from ecological and economic problems because of lack of development. The starvation, environmental pollution and low productivity-which we are accustomed to seeing in the developing world – can only be alleviated by mass technology transfer from the rich countries to the poor. The poor cannot get access to the know-how they need because it is over-priced. Therefore, in practice, the West uses technology as a new way of continuing colonialism. The transfer of technology is carried out in an unequal milieu, in which the receiver of technology pays an unnecessarily high price for technology which is often unsuitable or obsolete.19

If the prevailing norms of international protection of intellectual property continue, the gap between North and South will deepen. As confrontation rather than co-operation between the two hemispheres intensifies, there will be widespread starvation. Drought, deforestation, regional conflicts, etc. To prevent these, intellectual property could (and should) be used as a means to bridge the dangerously growing gap, and do so in a relatively short time.20 In the long run, such a policy will benefit the developed industrialized states as well. Technological colonialism can only result in a politically, economically and environmentally more vulnerable and unstable world. For these reasons, the application of the concept of knowledge as the common heritage of mankind. which demands easy access for all to the intellectual properties of the industrialized world, is very timely and necessary. Allowing easy and sometimes cost-free access to mankind’s technological heritage is also a debt owed by the West to the developing countries: not only because the West inherited the intellectual wealth of others in the past, but also because it attracts millions of intellectuals of the developing world, who represent a brain-drain of enormous scale to the great material advantage of the West.21

References

1. YUSUF, Abdulqawi Ahmed, ‘Transfer of Technology’ in BEDJAOUI, Muhammed (ed.), International law: Achievements and Prospects, Martinus Nijhoff Publ., UNESCO, Paris, 1991, p.691.

2. YUSUF, pp.691-2.

3. ibid.

4. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, p.87.

5. ibid.

6. BEDJAOUI, M., Towards A New International Economic Order, UNESCO, Paris, 1979, p.230.

7. ibid.

8. The second university was established in Oxford, England, in 1215, some four centuries later. See, for the Arab civilization, WAQF IKHLAS, Islam and Christianity, Hakikat Kitabevi, Istanbul, 1989, p.192.

9. WAQF IKHLAS, p.213.

10. It was Muhammed bin Musa Harazmi who calculated the attitude of the sun and the length of equator.

11. WAQF IKHLAS, p.216.

12. FERRERA, Jean, ‘Les Universites du Petrole’ (Jan. 1978), p.724. ‘Science et Vie’ (quoted in WAQF IKHLAS, p.215.)

13. The German ILA NIEO proposal, in BULAJIC, M., ‘International Protection of Intellectual Property in the context of the Right to Development: Comment on the German Proposal’ in CHOWDHURY, S.R; ERIK, M.G.D., PAUL, J.I.M., The Right to Development in International Law, Martinus Nijhoff, 1992, p.298.

14. Quoted in BULAJIC, M. International Development Law, Martinus Nijhoff, London, 1986, p.326.

15. However, he also accepts that modern Western technology ‘owes a great debt to medieval Arab thought transmitting and developing the heritage of Ancient Greece’, ibid.

16. See for example Nyhart, J.D., ‘International Law, Technology, and the Implications for Deep Seabed Mining’ in JOYNER, C.C. (ed.) International Law of the Sea and the Future of Seabed Mining, Accent Publ., Virginia, 1975, p.13.

17. YUSUF, p. 702.

18. See Our Common Future, pp. 4-5, 29, 76.

19. BEJAOUI, p.232.

20. BULAJIC, International Protection of Intellectual Property…, p.297.

21. cf. BULAJIC, p.297.