moss.geek.nz

It’s time for a Monday Musing – a vaguely freeform stream of my consciousness and what’s been bugging me recently. I wouldn’t expect high values of sense from me just yet. This is also an exercise in getting my words to approach my ideals and meanings.

Today, I bring you a ramble about Singularities. Yay!

So, there’s this concept of a Singularity – a point in time where change becomes so ascendant that we move into a zone beyond where we can no longer adequately predict the immediate, mid or long term future.

It’s traditionally found fulfilled by high technology or mysticism, and plays nicely into our bred-in concepts of apocalypse and rapture of the Christian religious umbrella.

Today, I was in my calculus lecture studying optimization of functions of two or more variables, and it stuck me that most common analogies and showings of a singularity-scenario posit a one dimensional graph of “Change” or “Level of Technology” as a line in two dimensions, typical of an exponential function – as if this is a suitable model for fundamentally interconnected and disparate forces that make up our world.

Really, a Singularity-scenario is not just a following of Moore’s Law to some hypothetical line where computation outweighs certain inputs, or when we reach certain mathemagical theorems of completeness or unification. It would have to be a complex maxima of almost all states of life.

It’s sad to say that we quite possibly already live in such a situation. We are continually pushing the bounds of our ability to sustain ourselves at the levels to which we have been accustomed to or expect to be at.

You only need look at the complete meltdown of economic systems; many of which have become so far removed from reality that money is no longer a mapping of a real source, it is a map of a map, a thoroughly removed product. It seems that the only thing money can strongly type nowadays is debt, and we must rely on morality and ethics and psychological marketing in order to induce in us all a drive to repay our debts. It seems the finest economic lessons of the 21st century will arrise from massively multiplayer online games; even the simplest of kill-spider-get-money systems eventually develop a complexity to rival early monetary systems and provide ample data and capacity for research.

It needs to be seen what lifespan remains on the infrastructure and superstructure of our civilisation we have left to run with. We find ourselves in our modern sensibilities stymied by entirely “fictional” but rational economic limiters on our ability to create new infrastructure or even to maintain that which we already have. Humanity as a whole does not live with the natural world, we overtake and adapt it to us rather than the other way around. If we wish to continue down this track, it will be required for higher and lower sectors of economic drive to be re-aligned into what is needed for our continuation.

Remember that we are products of an immensely complex interconnected system. We are highly specialized to the point where we take decades to learn our place in a modern world, and then work on very small pieces of the overall puzzle. In each of our own ways, we become our own rapturing nerds, focusing ourselves around a world view which is unique to our individual experience.

I don’t believe that any human is capable of grasping the entire picture of where we are, nor how fast we are going – we exist in an uncertain state, in an uncertain time, with an uncertain future. Each one of us is living in our own personal Singularity – none of us can state what is happening now, or what will happen tomorrow.