The singularity is near.


 

These are the famous words of Ray Kurzweil, who predicted the coming moment when technology will be so advanced that society will experience irreversible changes. He predicted that by 2029, artificial intelligence would pass the Turing test and reach human-level intelligence. Driven by Moore's Law, he thinks the "singularity" will arrive in 2045 when computers will be billions of times smarter than humans.

 

The Oxford Dictionary defines a singularity as "a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have advanced so much that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change." But if you remove artificial intelligence from the definition and focus on "dramatic and irreversible changes", the singularity is already here.

 

It began during the Industrial Revolution when mass production went into overdrive and ushered in the greatest wealth creation boom in human history. According to economist Brad DeLong, "world GDP per capita hovered around 90–200 from ancient times until the 1800s, then jumped to 300 in 1850, 679 in 1900, and as high as 6,539 in 2000. GDP growth paralleled rising life expectancy, declining poverty rates, increased energy efficiency, the ability to wage war, and the rise of democratic regimes.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION




Singularities begin with the flip of a switch. One moment you are outside of it, and the next you are swimming with the tide of its all-encompassing vortex. Once the Singularity gains enough momentum, it becomes a black hole and swallows everything around it. The singularity we inhabit began at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

 

Here's my thesis: The Singularity is already here and began in Western Europe in the late 1600s. Technologies like literacy and trade law laid the foundation for Singularity, but early industrialization began with an order-of-magnitude improvement in the cost of land transportation. Until then, moving goods and people across the land was expensive. The Dutch East India Company may have sailed from Holland to India and discovered Manhattan in 1609, but before the improvements in transportation during the Industrial Revolution, these distances could not be covered on foot. Economic growth was almost impossible because markets were so narrow and human activity so local. Even in the early 20th century, Chinese villages that were only five miles apart spoke radically different dialects. Without efficient transportation, people were trapped in poverty and unable to benefit from trade.

 

In an excellent series of essays (including this essay and this one ), Nick Szabo shows that small reductions in transportation costs have led to large economic improvements. Specifically, Szabo credits horses, steam engines, and steam railroads for a series of wealth-creating inflexion points. I'll take each one in turn.

 

Workhorses increased labour productivity and expanded the amount of land that farmers could cultivate, initiating further productivity-enhancing improvements in agricultural specialization. By replacing oxen with horses, transport speed was further improved, doubling the transport speed of the goods wagon. With steam engines, industrial machinery no longer ran on horse-powered genies or water mills. Finally, steam-powered railroads enabled mass transportation and connected mines and factories to large cities. With all these improvements, humans relied on animals and machines instead of their own backs and biceps.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY IS ALREADY HERE

The Industrial Age touched every aspect of the Western world. The process of moving forward in a quantifiable standard of living ushered in the Singularity, the evidence of which we see in the evolution of global markets, systems of governance, and the breakneck speed of technological progress. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on technology.

 

We have created technology to solve well-defined problems in the service of a well-defined future. But today we tend to build technology without a goal, without a plan for the future.¹ Some define progress as “more technology,” so we develop new technologies before thinking about how they will affect us. For example, look no further than Facebook. In less than 15 years, what started as a Harvard hot girl rating system unexpectedly became the epicentre of global communication as society became increasingly globalized.

 

Plus, you can't opt ​​out of technology even if you try. Marshall McLuhan once said, “We first shape our tools. Then our tools shape us.” Let's say you want to avoid using a car. You'd go to church with your friends after church on Sunday mornings, shop together at the local farmers market, and go home with food for the next 48 hours. But with the invention of the automobile, small local churches become megachurches next to the highway, and local farmers' markets that used to be within walking distance become drive-thru Walmart.

 

As technology wraps its fingers around society, you must either farm all your own food or succumb to the demands of technological singularity. In addition, the World Health Organization reports that nearly 1.35 million people die each year in traffic accidents. And yet we let the car dominate American life without questioning its side effects. When an accident happens, we blame drugs, sleepiness, alcohol, the weather, or faulty car construction instead of using the car. But parallel to the logic of singularity, people like Nick Land and Peter Thiel argue that accelerating the pace of technological progress is the only peaceful way forward.

WILL THE SINGULARITY CONTINUE?

We have already reached the singularity. These early improvements inspired by transportation at the start of the Industrial Revolution ushered in the gradual dominance of markets, democracy, and technology. Of the three, I have the most faith that markets and technology will continue to dominate, but I have less faith in the future dominance of democracy.

 

Regardless, we can't go back to the future. We've already encountered a singularity of irreversible momentum—where technologies like cars, computers, and nuclear weapons rule us more than we rule them.

 

Kurzweil predicted that the Singularity is near. But it turns out that the Singularity is already here.