How I learned to stop worrying and love the imminent internet singularity

ABSTRACT

In 1993, Verner Vinge [3] introduced the notion of the Singularity -- a step function to nearly unlimited technological capability -- which would be realized if the acceleration of scientific progress continues to produce such things as strong AI, nanotechnology, and super-human intelligence. Since its introduction, the idea of the Singularity has been met with both evangelism (by Ray Kurzweil [2]) and apocalyptic warnings (by Bill Joy [1]).In this talk, I will introduce a more modest version of the idea, which I call the Internet Singularity. Like the original, the Internet Singularity suggests continued acceleration of progress, but makes greater emphasis on our ability to improve science, analytic methods, and engineering on data as opposed to the physical world. I make the case for the Internet Singularity in four steps.First, there is a general trend of more capabilities being more available to more people. These increasing capabilities span content creation, community, and commerce, yielding more power to today's "amateur" than yesterday's "professional". As a result, the boundary between producers and consumers is becoming increasingly blurred over time.Second, in many parts of the Internet we see power law distributions with a heavy tail. One implication of heavy tail distributions is that the aggregate impact of "small" participants can be greater than that of the "large" participants.Third, with the Internet comes entirely new means for authoring new and derivative works: aggregations, mashups, tagging, remixing, etc. The greater emphasis on collaboration and sharing yields direct and indirect network effects. Network effects, can produce entirely new utility, making online activities potentially more efficient or valuable than the offline equivalent.Fourth, on the Internet, advances are effectively decoupled from the physical constraints of the offline world: startups costs are smaller; customer, collaborator, and audience pools are dramatically larger; and improvements happen in more of a continuous rather than discreet manner. As a result the effective "clock cycle" of progress is potentially much faster online.Putting these four pieces together reveals a compelling pattern: more people contribute to the collective pool; the collective pool contains entirely new value that is derived from its data; and the new value from the data increases individual and aggregate capabilities. In combination, these components mutually reinforce one another, forming something of a virtuous cycle. This is the Internet Singularity.Conceptually, if we consider engineering to be the ability to create artifacts, mathematical analysis to be the ability to analyze numerical properties, and science to be the pursuit of knowledge, then each of these activities -- when focused on digital objects as they exist on the Internet -- can be amplified in a manner consistent with the Internet Singularity.The implications for the Internet Singularity are profound as they suggest nothing less than the evolution of the scientific method itself. Moreover, these trends also imply that now may be the best possible moment in the history of the universe to be a computer scientist.

REFERENCES

• 1: Joy, B. Why the future doesn't need us. Wired Magazine, 8.04, 2000.
• 2: Kurzweil, R. The Singularity is Near. Viking, New York, 2005.
• 3: Vinge, V. The Coming Technological Singularity, http://rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.2 Social Issues

General Terms:
Experimentation, Theory

Keywords:
internet, scientific computing, technological singularity