A Singular Universe of Many Singularities: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context

Eric J. Chaisson, Harvard University

Nature’s myriad complex systems—whether physical, biological or cultural—are mere islands of organization within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding chaos. Energy is a principal driver of the rising complexity of all such systems within the expanding, ever-changing Universe; indeed energy is as central to life, society, and machines as it is to stars and galaxies. Energy flow concentration—in contrast to information content and negentropy production—is a useful quantitative metric to gauge relative degree of complexity among widely diverse systems in the one and only Universe known. In particular, energy rate densities for human brains, society collectively, and our technical devices have now become numerically comparable as the most complex systems on Earth. Accelerating change is supported by a wealth of data, yet the approaching technological singularity of 21st-century cultural evolution is neither more nor less significant than many other earlier singularities as physical and biological evolution proceeded along an undirectional and unpredictable path of more inclusive cosmic evolution, from big bang to humankind. Evolution, broadly construed, has become a powerful unifying concept in all of science, providing a comprehensive worldview for the new millennium—yet there is no reason to claim that the next evolutionary leap forward beyond sentient beings and their amazing gadgets will be any more important than the past emergence of increasingly intricate complex systems. Nor is new science (beyond non-equilibrium thermodynamics) necessarily needed to describe cosmic evolution’s interdisciplinary milestones at a deep and empirical level. Humans, our tools, and their impending messy interaction possibly mask a Platonic simplicity that undergirds the emergence and growth of complexity among the many varied systems in the material Universe, including galaxies, stars, planets, life, society, and machines.

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Socio-economic preconditions (extended abstract)

Steve Phelps, University of Essex

Extendible AI: the economic perspective

Many formulations of the singularity argument are contingent on the existence of “extendible” methods for Artificial Intelligence (AI) [Chalmers, 2010]. One of the most promising extendible AI methods is that of multi-agent systems [Weiss, 1999] a field of distributed AI [Minsky, 1988]. Superficially this approach appears to be directly extendible since in some cases we can increase the intelligence of the system by increasing the number of agents. However, in order to make these methods truly extendible we will need to be able to scale up these systems to many billions of components. Building multi-agent systems on this scale, however, entails solving many complex economic problems [Clearwater 1996].

The impact of expecting a singularity (extended abstract)

James Miller, Department of Economics, Smith College

Expectations of the Singularity

Several of the possible paths to the singularity have signposts indicating their destination. For example, let's say that within fifteen years someone makes a computer simulation of a chimpanzees' brain and puts this brain in a robot's body and this artificial chimpanzee acts just as a real chimp does. If this occurs then many technology opinion leaders will understand that if we can create a computer chimp we can create a computer man. And once we have a simulation of a human brain we should eventually be able to increase the speed of this simulation a million fold, make a million copies of the simulation and usher in the Singularity.