Photo: cluster of neural cells by Su-Chan Zhang, University Wisconsin-Madison

As in thrall as we may be to the firehose of new stuff drenching us in the here and now, occasionally we want to look a little further over the horizon. Two thoughts collided in the collective Labs brain a short while ago. By ‘collided’ we mean we saw a consequence of the relationship between the two that made us sit up and think:

1.    The mass socialization of technology. 300 million + Facebook users can’t be wrong. We’re still in awe of how mainstream the adoption of technology has become and just how networked the world is. Increasingly the ‘loop’ never seems to close.

2.    How ill-equipped we are to cope with the deluge. Natural human processing power is sadly finite and struggling to cope. Certainly, we know we’re not alone in adopting coping strategies like continuous partial attention and ignoring much beyond tomorrow or next week. Steve Rubel at Edelman also has written extensively on the attention crash and its relevance for marketers.

Courtesy of xkcd web comic

The heady mix of excitement and uneasy tension brought about by these two things has felt irresolvable and on an accelerating curve. Sure, we can help speed our path through the data with better micro tools (“there’s an app for that…”) but they invariably lead us to consume more, faster; giving us the sense that we’re simply accelerating to the point where our brains implode are placed under too much stress. We’re not wannabe priestesses and priests of Zen around here, but is there a longer term, more profound step change to be made where technology actually enables a more balanced life?

An answer began to emerge when we read a thought-provoking piece in the NYT by John Markoff subtitled “Artificial Intelligence Regains Its Allure.” AI. Cybernetics. Nanotechnology. Post Humanism? Sounds eccentric, but stay with us. Markoff’s assertion that a groundswell of attention and respect has been building around AI, in particular around an idea dubbed the Technological Singularity, made us curious.  In a sentence, the idea is that once we create an an artificial intelligence greater than our own, it follows that any resulting ‘Superbrain’ will be capable of augmenting itself extremely quickly to become even more intelligent and so on, leading to an explosive growth in intelligence that is (literally) beyond our imagination.

The surge in interest around the Singularity has led one of its most earnest proponents, Ray Kurzweil, to produce a film about it, due for release in early 2010:
Click here to view the embedded video.

Whether this turns out to be science fiction or science reality, we figure it’s time we paid more attention. As the futurist Alvin Toffler puts it: “It’s not only OK to think about the future but, the more you do, the more ideas you’ll have about the present.”  Back to that in a bit.

Our interest has a lot to do with timing.  The idea that machines might become self-aware and/or that humans might dramatically augment their intelligence is not new, the simple difference is that it may happen well within our lifetime. Indeed, the shrinking time frame was the thing that grabbed our attention first.

“How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species – to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.”
Bill Joy, Why the Future Doesn’t need Us, Wired, April 2000

“We have a lot of debates about that [when a computer is expected to pass the Turing test and demonstrate intelligence equal to a human's]…some people at Google say not for 100 years, but I’m more optimistic. I’d give it 20 years. Partly due to the improvements in technology. And partly” – he laughs – “to the decline of humans.”
Sergey Brin, Wired interview, August 2009

Inevitably, the questions start to pile up at this point. Given this topic can be the territory of “futurist-nutjobs” (thanks @brainpicker for the technical term), we’ve fileted the background reading we found most useful into a separate Labs post here, which you’re welcome to check out if you want to delve deeper without the full, sand-blast-your-neural-cells experience we endured to bring this to you. We’ve included how the Singularity may come about, examples of companies from start-ups to Google taking it seriously, Kurzweil’s logarithmic graph that depicts the pattern of exponential change leading to the Singularity, what the sceptics say and what the alternate scenarios may be.

Rewind to 2009.  Whether or not everyone can agree upon what a Technological Singularity is, let alone whether or not it will occur, most seem to agree on this: we are already transitioning to an era when we will need to develop new cognitive habits, our brains augmented, aided and abetted by technology to achieve this: an Age of Augmentation, if you will.

We particularly like Jamais Cascio’s thinking here.  He describes a technological evolution focused upon how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we’ve created, what scientists term “fluid intelligence” – “the ability to find meaning in confusion and to solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge:”

“Fluid intelligence doesn’t look much like the capacity to memorize and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower. But building it up may improve the capacity to think deeply that Carr and others fear we’re losing for good. And we shouldn’t let the stresses associated with a transition to a new era blind us to that era’s astonishing potential. We swim in an ocean of data, accessible from nearly anywhere, generated by billions of devices. We’re only beginning to explore what we can do with this knowledge-at-a-touch…

…Strengthening our fluid intelligence is the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.”

Looking further out again, a Technological Singularity provokes some extraordinary questions vexing scientists far smarter than we are.  Whether wholly artificially created or partially human, the debate centres around how to ensure a super intelligence uses its intellect for good, not evil.  The prevailing wisdom as brought to us by Hollywood in the Terminator films, A.I. and I, Robot suggests a super intelligence will, de facto, leave the human race behind or destroy us “for our own good”.  Putting Hollywood to one side, one argument rather chillingly asserts that a super intelligence would be immortal, have no need to procreate and hence have no evolutionary need for love….. Certainly a killer question must be: how can a super intelligence be created that has a capacity for altruism?  In other words “a friendly artificial intelligence” (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, the Singularity Institute)?

Back to the present.  Where does this leave us personally and with the brands we work with? (Prepare ourselves to Cyborg-it up in order to cope with the data glut, or pack up and run to the hills?) What role can or should a brand play in either scenario?  What should we be thinking about now to prepare for the future that might be closer than we think?

We’re still pondering, but our early thoughts below:

1. Join the debate: in an increasingly networked world, everyone can & will have an opinion about the role of technology in their lives.  Brutally, it’s likely there will be considerable angst along the way. Brands can help people navigate the practical and philosophical questions, provide tangible tools to help.  They can also invest appropriately. (‘Technological Responsibility’ will become the new corporate buzz word).
2. In an AI world, more and more low level tasks will be automated, completed by robots. Certain choices will become commoditised or outsourced: the typical example – repeat purchase items / FMCGs ordered by your fridge software or managed entirely by your food retailer. Brands will need to think about upgrading the importance/value/cost of what they offer to qualify for human attention & decision making in the first place.
3. Tech augmentation of your product – let your mind run free. How would you integrate healthcare tech usefully into a razor or cereal packet? How can your product take low level decisions helpfully away from your consumer?  Direct Debit – the first electronic example of this, but what else?
4. Counter-culture: for now at least, there’s room for brands to be marketed as tools to help Neo-Luddites swim against the tech tide.  Guinness, Magners, KitKat – ought to be creating virtual & real walled gardens for when you want to kick back and relax, away from the torrent of data.
5. What’s your starting point? Are you part of the hive, a contributor to Google’s all powerful ‘collective intelligence’? Or spokesperson for the outlier, the individual?
6. Decide which side you’re on: are you trying to humanise technology or add technology to humans?

However it all turns out, it strikes us we need to stay curious and lean into this, not lean back.  As Chris Anderson put it recently:

“This was one of those freaky moments when the future sneaks up and smacks you….Technology wants to be invented and we are almost powerless to stop it. We are hard-wired to create the future, be it good or bad. Invention is its own master.”

Please let us know what you think and check out our other post ‘I Think, Therefore I am (a Self-aware, Superhuman Cyborg) for more on this.  In the meantime, we leave you with this, awesome cyborgian stuff from Kraftwerk way back in 1977:

This post exists to house the material we digested to write the “The Coming Age of Augmentation” Labs post which follows this one.

We have to come clean first. Yes, we do like tech innovation and even sci-fi.  We count amongst our Labs midst a few fans of Philip K Dick and one who still reads Yevgeny Zamyatin, so we may appear to be on less than entirely rational, objective ground here.  Then there is the fact there is something fabulously seductive about the language and imagery used to describe prospective real & imagined scientific frontiers: Dystopia, Utopia, Rapture (of the Nerds), the Singularity, that extraordinarily gripping, nightmare sequence in Terminator 2 when the playground is blown to smithereens… But we’re drifting from the point.

Here we’d like to create a virtual library of all the very best content about the Technological Singularity and related topics. Please add links to other good stuff worth reading in the comments. We’ve arranged the content here on a make-shift scale from Tech Evangelist all the way to Sceptic, starting with the former. Here goes -

THE TECH EVANGELIST VIEW

How the Technological Singularity may come about is best explained by the father of the term himself, Vernor Vinge, in his fantastically dystopian-utopian 1993 paper. The key passage in this respect is as follows:

“There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

* There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
* Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
* Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
* Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.”

There are more and more examples – as the journalist and author John Markoff has taken considerable time to explore here and here – that companies from tech start-ups to Google (see below) & Sony are taking this stuff seriously.

In a more alarming twist, we are also seeing students seeking to augment their intelligence with neuro-enhancing drugs like Adderall.

A long term pattern of paradigm shifting events modelled by Kurzweil suggests an exponential trend:

Kurzweil's logarithmic graph of paradigm shifting events

Kevin Kelly’s ongoing (extremely thought-provoking, brilliant and chewy in equal measure) project, The Technium, also delves deeply into a future where he sees technology driving evolution and the creation of a superorganism born of the world’s networked computers:

“As even people who don’t believe in evolution will tell you, if you speed up the history of life and compress all its change into a few hours, it greatly resembles an intelligent mind at work. Since technology is the current major vehicle for the evolvability of evolution, the future of technology also begins to resemble a mind. Or to put it another way, the mindful aspects of technology begin to dominate.”

Although he explains why he finds the term ‘Singularity’ misleading, he includes it in a post in July 2009 as one of ‘five unstoppables reigning in popular imagination right now‘.

Faris riffs on collective intelligence and the semantic web back in March 2007 and discusses how ‘people and technology are blurring in both directions‘ in August 2009.

And Google certainly seem clear that harnessing collective intelligence on an unprecedented scale is core to their strategy for growth:

“If there’s anything Google seeks to solve, he [Brin] explains in the restaurant, it’s the vastly ambitious challenges that others dismiss as irresoluble. “I feel like we have an obligation [to tackle the big problems],” Brin says. “There are not that many companies with the technical resources we have that would tackle these things. When there are challenges that are viewed as impossible, those are areas that we have almost an obligation to pursue.”

David Rowan on Sergey Brin, Wired interview, August 2009

“I like the emergence of – the marketing buzzword is ‘collective intelligence’, the emergence of the sum of what Facebook, Twitter, Google, the blogging sphere, what is really the beginning of a much deeper understanding of what’s really going on in the world. And I find it fascinating that this is what’s happening now, and Google is in a position to find it, sort it, rank it, organise it in a way that people who are busy can take advantage of. That’s how we see our customers go forward. And there’s a lot coming.”

“… it’s the model where the sum of what Google does becomes the third part of your brain – you know, there’s a left brain, a right brain and there’s a third part where that collective intelligence that Google can help bring to you really helps you get through every day: the history of places, what you should do, collecting things for you, telling you what’s relevant – the things that computers do best that humans are not good at. And that will leave humans to spend more time doing what humans do best, the things computers are not very good at.”

Eric Schmidt, Wired interview, August 2009

THE ‘INBETWEEN’ VIEW

“At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved – if it can be achieved at all – within the next few hundred years.”
Arthur C. Clarke, 1983

Jamais Cascio also writes eloquently for Fast Company about the Technological Singularity and for the Atlantic magazine about mankind’s need to ‘Get Smarter‘.

We also liked the honesty of Kevin Kelly in his response to a comment on his blog:

THE NEO LUDDITE VIEW

For the neo-Luddites: re-watch the deeply reassuring Johnnie Walker ad, ‘Android’

In a mind-blowing and brilliant article for Wired nearly ten years ago in 2000, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems certainly thought there was major cause for concern.  His very personal and powerful piece argues very simply that we cannot anticipate what a super intelligent being might engineer and that we may not survive the encounter.

“Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?

The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. Yet in his history of such ideas, Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

And goes on to say:

“A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses…But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.”

THE SCEPTIC VIEW

Doubt around the likelihood of the Singularity taking place tends to be two-fold:

1.    The unlikelihood of a super-human intelligence being created successfully

“Our understanding of language and our ability to reason and think is in part a product of our ability to interact with the world around us and experience the world through our senses. Even if computers had the same experience, I don’t think they would be able to develop the same sort of connections we can make.”
Vint Cerf in Wired

2. The fear that, without a built-in human sensibility, a super intelligent software intelligence will wipe us off the planet and hence further major tech advancement will be halted to prevent this happening. At its (criminally insane) extreme, the infamous Unabomber’s point of view – reviewed here by Kevin Kelly.

THE ALTERNATE SCENARIOS

Vernor Vinge plots alternative scenarios with his 2007 piece ‘What if the Singularity does NOT happen?‘

FURTHER READING

The Coming Age of Augmentation – BBH Labs related post

Singularity Summit 2009 reading list

Cyburbia, by James Harkin – Cyburbia.tv

New Statesman, science fiction classics: ten of the best

Update 03.11.09: Katy Lindemann ‘Robots FTW!’ blog post & Interesting 09 slideshare

Update 02.05.10: Gary Wolf’s NY Times article ‘The Data Driven Life‘ (featuring GW and Kevin Kelly’s ‘The Quantified Self‘ site, also worth checking out). Particularly like this quote from the article:

“Until a few years ago it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers….Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.”

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A thank you to Faris Yakob whose shared fascination with AI has inspired us and to Adam Glickman for the same, in particular for directing us to the second John Markoff & Sony articles cited above and for his own Labs post here.