Transcript Slide 1

Accelerating to the Singularity
Singularity University: Preparing Humanity for
Accelerating Technological Change
Founding Meeting
September 20, 2008
Professor George F. Smoot
University of California
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Von Neumann’s Singularity
A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when
technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future
after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict.
Innovation: Society changing development
In 1958, Stanisław Ulam wrote in a tribute to John von Neumann of a
conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of
technology and changes in the mode of human life, “which gives
the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the
history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them,
could not continue.”
The Paradigm Shift Rate
is now doubling every decade.
Implies Singularity is very near,
within your lifetime
Relevant time scale is the paradigm shift rate.
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What is the Singularity?
• The time between major innovations
decreases by large factors every innovation
period.
• We are now at 10 year time scale.
• Next major scale is 1 year.
• After that is 1 month.
• After that 1 day, then 1 hour, then 1 sec.
• When it reaches 1 millisecond, this is beyond
current human ability to register/comprehend.
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• Enhanced abilities will be necessary.
Singularity University
founded to:
• Prepare Humanity for this accelerating technological
change
• Connect present and future leaders and innovators
to these accelerating, transformational and
convergent technologies
• Find a path that allows this process to develop in a
way that benefits and improves the welfare of
humanity - new heights of intelligent wisdom,
material (economic) progress, and longevity
• illuminate the path to our new future.
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Courses
• Graduate and Postgraduate level
• Masters Degrees
• C-Level (e.g. CEOs, CFOs, etc.)
– 3 day course
– 10 day course
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Main Program Offerings
M.Sc. in singularity
technology studies
(MSS)
M.Sc. In Singularity
management
(MSM)
Singularity Studies
Program (SSP)
12 Months on
Campus
-Scientists, engineers
- Technical
Management
9 weeks in worldwide
rotation (during
summer break)
- Young professionals
- Hi-potentials
Singularity
Management
Institute (SMI)
Executive Course
(ESC)
1 week in worldwide
rotation moving with
SSP
- Middle management
in tech sector with tech
background and
experience
1 week on Campus
- Middle management
in tech sector with
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legal/finance/marketing
12 Months at Campus - Business, policy
- Project/Business
Management interest
Singularity Studies Program (SSP)
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What about saturation of a technology?
Exponential growth ends in saturation.
The famous S-curve.
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Information Technologies (of all kinds)
double their power (price performance,
capacity, bandwidth) every year
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A Personal Experience
Measure
MIT’s IBM 7094
Notebook Circa 2003
Year
1967
2003
Processor Speed (MIPS)
0.25
1,000
Main Memory (K Bytes)
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256,000
Approximate Cost (2003 $)
$11,000,000
$2,000
24 Doublings of Price-Performance in 36 years, doubling
time: 18 months not including vastly greater RAM memory,
disk storage, instruction set, etc.
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Moore’s Law is one example
of many….
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The Biotechnology revolution:
the intersection of biology with
information technology
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Every form of communications
technology is doubling
price-performance, bandwidth,
capacity every 12 months
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Miniaturization:
another exponential trend
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Nanosystems bearing
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Nanosystems smaller bearing
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Respirocytes with Red Cells
Copyright Vik Olliver, [email protected].
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Microbivores II
copyright Zyvex (Katherine Green)
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Recent Milestones
2008 Computer as intelligent as a Mouse
2009 Computer as intelligent as a Rat
2010 Computer as intelligent as a Cat
Scientists, at IBM Research � Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley
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National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds
scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.
The Singularity is Near by
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Reverse Engineering the Brain:
the ultimate source of the
first templates of intelligence
How do we find a source for wisdom?
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The Cerebellum
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Gathering data from multiple
studies, Javier F. Medina, Michael
D. Mauk, and their colleagues at
the University of Texas Medical
School devised a detailed bottomup simulation of the cerebellum.
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Their simulation includes over
10,000 simulated neurons and
300,000 synapses, and includes
all of the principal types of
cerebellum cells.
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Beginning of Connection Mapping
• 3D reconstruction of projection fibers in a human brain. Fibers
were reconstructed from a DTI dataset with 2.2mm isotropic
resolution. The cortical-brainstem connections are shown in
light blue color and a subset of fibers that connect the motor
cortex and the pyramidal tracts in the caudal pons level are
painted white. Red purple , red and blue purple indicate
anterior, superior, and posterior thalamic radiations. The light
green, green, and yellow structures are globus pallidus,
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caudate, and thalamus. Ventricles are shown in gray.
Mapping the Connections down to
the individual neurons
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The Law of Accelerating Returns is
driving economic growth
• The portion of a product or service’s value
comprised of information is asymptoting to
100%
• The cost of information at every level incurs
deflation at ~ 50% per year
• This is a powerful deflationary force
– Completely different from the deflation in the 1929
Depression (collapse of consumer confidence &
money supply)
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Solar Energy
• Emerging nanotechnology will accelerate
progress of cost of solar panels and storage –
fuel cells
• Tipping point (cost per watt less than oil and
coal) expected within 5 years
• Progress on thermo-solar
• Doubling time for watts from solar < 2 years
– We are less than 10 doublings from meeting 100% of
the world’s energy needs
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What does this imply ?
• We live in an accelerating world.
• Increasingly rapid changes are ahead.
• Many are roughly predictable but some
real surprises
• World is global and flat now and it is
getting increasingly obvious
• Demographics have major implications
• Technology developments even more
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Contemporary Examples of
Self-organizing systems
• Machines are rapidly improving in pattern
recognition
• Progress will be accelerated now that we
have the tools to reverse engineer the brain
• Human pattern recognition is limited to
certain types of patterns (faces, speech
sounds, etc.)
• Machines can apply pattern recognition to
any type of pattern
• Humans are limited to a couple dozen
variables, machines can consider thousands
simultaneously
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2010: Computers begin to disappear
• Tablets and phones and then
• Images written directly to our retinas
• Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the
Internet at all times
• Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the
environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
• Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
• Augmented real reality
• Interaction with virtual personalities as a
primary interface (They also do our research
and other work with little guidance.)
• Effective language technologies
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2029: An intimate merger
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$1,000 of computation = 1,000 times the human brain
Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
Computers pass the Turing test
Nonbiological intelligence combines
– the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human
intelligence, with
– the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine
intelligence
• Nonbiological intelligence will continue to grow
exponentially whereas biological intelligence is
effectively fixed
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Nanobots provide…
• Neural implants that are:
– Noninvasive, surgery-free
– Distributed to millions or billions of points in the brain
• Full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the
senses
– You can be someone else
– “Experience Beamers”
• Expansion of human intelligence
– Multiply our 100 trillion connections many fold
– Intimate connection to diverse forms of nonbiological
intelligence
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Average Life Expectancy (Years)
Cro Magnon
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Ancient Egypt
1400 Europe
1800 Europe &
U.S.
1900 U.S.
2002 U.S.
2010
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PDF and priors mean if you are older,
you are likely to live longer because of childhood mortality.
Now can expect to live longer because of technical advances
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