There's a famous futurist named Ray Kurzweil, who has predicted that by 2050 we will have experienced what's known as the technological singularity. The singularity is a predicted event where a machine is created which has greater thinking power than all combined human brains, and therefore man and machine will be indistinguishable and progress will occur at an ever-increasing rate. This has its basis in Moore's Law, the general trend for computing power to double every 18-24 months, which has proved accurate since 1965 when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first described it.
Moore's Law has proven incredibly accurate, as this graph lifted from the Wikipedia article linked above shows. The graph is on a logarithmic scale, so a straight line indicates a continual doubling of the number of transistors in a computer's central processor (effectively a measure of how fast it can crunch numbers), every two years or so:
This applies equally across many aspects of computer hardware, including hard disk capacity and even the size of flash memory components, where the smaller the components the more you can fit into a given area.
As the graphs show, everything relating to computing power doubles every two years or thereabouts. There have been issues along the way, but so far every seemingly insurmountable technological hurdle has been passed with a novel approach. The next step for computer processing looks to be quantum computing, which involves using potential states and possible states to vastly increase the speed of calculations.
Anyway, you're not reading this blog for a lesson in how computers work, and if you are I would politely advise that you go and read a blog by somebody who knows a lot more about the subject than I do, so I'll move on to the point I'm leading towards.
There are several technological developments that have recently happened that I think are clues towards something far more engaging and far more immediately exciting than Kurzweil's vision of the singularity. As you read this, there's more than likely a device in your pocket or on your desk that is entirely portable and assuming you aren't up a tall mountain or in a deep forest is capable of accessing the internet. As well as all the pictures of cats doing silly things and naked people putting things in each other, the internet contains a very large chunk of all the useful information that humanity has ever amassed, and it's now all available at the touch of a botton or the swipe of an iPhone. Pub conversations need no longer involve hours arguing over a point of fact, because a quick delve into the pocket means that Google can be asked and the point answered conclusively, meaning more time can be spent on stupid philosophical debates such as the one you are now reading.
A second development that will doubtless catch on is that of implanted chips that can be used to operate devices, as used with men in coma states who have been able to communicate using the power of their thoughts.
Professor Kevin Warwick has offered himself up as a guinea pig for experiments in this field, most notably a chip implanted under his skin that is able to control lights, heaters and other computer-controlled devices.
More technological advances have scientists able to read minds using brain scans. The technology is in its infancy but the basic principle of reading minds by using brain scans is sound.
Lastly, the internet keeps getting faster and will continue to do so. The highest transfer rate yet achieved is 26 terabits per second, and whilst this would be shared amongst many users in the real world, it's approximately 5.2million times faster than the current UK average speed of 5 megabits per second.
Put these all together, and what do you get?
When all these are put together, we can expect within our lifetimes a device that is thought-operated and allows us to access the internet as quickly as we can access our memories. In case the implications of this aren't immediately clear, they are:
1 - All human knowledge accessible by anyone at any time
All the time we currently spend thinking about things other people have already thought of would quickly become freed up, and we would be able to find links and patterns between widely disparate fields of expertise. These links and patterns would lead us to breakthroughs in technology and understanding that are currently unimaginable, but would doubtless make the world of Star Trek seem pretty damn backward.
2 - Functional telepathy
If you can send an email with the power of thought, and your friend can read it the same way, that is 100% the same as any notion of telepathy.
So we're looking at a near future with just slightly more advanced versions of currently-existing technology that allow all human beings to communicate instantly with one another and pool knowledge in a vastly-increased way.
It's common today to hear talk of how little concentration schoolkids have, and for years the lack of hard facts taught at school has been a bone of contention amongst people who had to learn vast amounts of inconsequential details about kings and queens just to pass their history O-level. The thing is though that none of this matters as today's schoolkids are just a reflection of their environment, and the environment is moving towards all hard information being outsourced to the internet.
By creating an exponentially-increasing number of shortcuts to accessing information, we will have created a fourth dimension. I believe that the internet as it is now is the start of our journey to become four-dimensional beings, and once the situation I have described above becomes reality we will have access to such power and knowledge that viewed from our current position we would appear as gods.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, there's another very interesting concept that links into this whole idea very well. Assuming that it is possible to create a computer that simulates the universe, you arrive at the overwhelming probability that we are all characters in an advanced version of The Sims.
How's that then? Well, if a civilisation became advanced enough to make such a computer, it's pretty likely that they would run a huge number of simulated worlds. The Sims is the biggest-selling PC game in history, so it's fairly clear that people are very interested in running simulated worlds, and there's no reason that this would decrease as computing power increased. In fact, imagine the value to historians, sociologists, biologists and every other scientific discipline of being able to run a simulation of history from the very beginning and seeing exactly what caused what and when it caused it. In fact, if you accept the possibility that we will ever build a computer that powerful, you logically have to accept the extreme likelihood that we ourselves are simulations.
So here we are, in a probably simulated world, about to reach the stage where we can simulate our own worlds. It's back to there being turtles all the way down, infinite regression again.
I've previously hinted at the idea of infinite regression, but I think here is a good place to state it explicitly. Any religion runs into the question of what caused God, and the Big Bang theory runs into the question of what caused the Big Bang, unless of course it was God that caused it, and then you're back at the religion problem. Even if we accept that we are simulated descendants of a more highly-evolved version of ourselves, we still arrive at the question, what caused them to come into being?
We see our world in terms of cause and effect, limited by the one-directional march of time, but as I touched on in the last post, there is no objective reason that time should be go in one direction. It's only our subjective experience that makes us believe that time had to have a start. What about if the simple fact that we are experiencing the present is all that is needed for the creation of every future and every past?
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Moore's law is 50% accurate in technological advances, but also 50% the accepted advancement in marketing required to keep people buying new product. Intel and AMD agreed years ago they could have quadrupled the speed improvement but it was more profitable to raise the bar slowly.
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