singularity

Weaving the Omega Point…Asking the Last Question

A single voice, a single sentence, a single video, a single photo now has the potential to influence the entire fabric of humanity via social networks and its tendrils. But what is it that we would want to collectively manifest? What is the experience we would want to collectively actuate? We are unerringly arrowing toward an Omega Point as a collective community and asking our best questions in the process!

The Omega Point is a term coined by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to denote the state of the maximum organized complexity (complexity combined with centricity), towards which the universe is evolving.

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. This is no metaphor; and it is much more than poetry. Whether as a force or a curvature, the universal gravity of bodies, so striking to us, is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. To perceive cosmic energy ‘at the fount’ we must, if there is a within of things, go down into the internal or radial zone of spiritual attractions. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.” ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Again, I ask, what flavoring, what tenor, does humanity want to give its Omega Point? What question do we want to answer?

Asimov writes about The Last Question:

“Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And there was light—-“

Ultraintelligent Machines, Transparency and Progress

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. ~Statistician I.J. Good, 1965

All it takes is one technology – Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or perhaps something unforeseen – that advances to the point of creating smarter-than-human minds. That one technological advance is the equivalent of the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth.~AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2001

TECH IS A HAIR BREADTH AWAY FROM SELF-AWARENESS: Technology is within a hair’s breadth of becoming self-aware. The social networks and properties may be seen as a mass effort by humanity to train our tech to first mimic and then evolve our actions. The intimacy of human-tech relationship has become a red-hot love affair.

I can forget my wallet at home but woe is me if my cell phone remains on the bedside table! With mobile now fully poised to take over as THE access point to all my information and action, that iPhone or Android becomes THE lover in my pocket, my EVERYTHING. I can dock my phone and access all of my content with a wireless keyboard and mouse and my 55″ 3D 1080p screen. And I can store 60 GB of my information in the cloud for $10 per month, giving me the power to link in to my info from anywhere at anytime.

And ALL of this information is scanned and makes up the ever-expanding global mind, which systems like the Chinese-made Tianhe-1A can perfect at rate of 2,507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second). Soon all of this computing tech will occupy a transhuman body, like the hospice cyborgs in Asia.

I do agree that we may be closer than one realizes to the Singularity and that AI has advanced to truly FANTASTIC heights. One need only begin at the Singularity Summit, Singularity University and Humanity+ web pages to get thrown in the deep end of this information AND to realize that humans in the know are keeping long hours preparing for this imminent reality!

WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN IN THE NEAR-FUTURE? So what happens when many more human duties are done by robots? What happens when the Transhumanists reign supreme? How does one look upon this: as an average consumer, as a corporate leader, as a major VC, as a nation-state concerned about security, as a parent raising children, as the leader of a global religion? For some, there is no action to be taken and submission is the only option due to NO TIME. For others, like the leaders mentioned, the conversation becomes philosophical and nostalgic: the good ol’ days of being human are now over.

Now we also, as leaders, have to understand what it really means to be led by our technology. It presents us with possibilities and solutions we may never have considered: Like finding the cure to cancer OR receiving a fully charted investment strategy yielding 125% growth per annum for 7 generations on your desktop OR just plain old peace of mind. We truly have more possibilities before us as humans now than ever YET at the same time we are in an economic crisis. Or are we?

Hear the following quote from the philosopher Aleister Crowley:

“We are in the middle of a world crisis. It is a very good world crisis — better than any crisis we have had before — and there is no man alive with an intellect big enough to grasp the threads of the problems which confront the world today. There are two ways out of that. Either consult a superior intelligence, which Magick shows you the way of doing, or you can develop your own mind, for it has a faculty which is as superior to the intellect as the intellect is superior to the emotions.

All magical operations require a very elaborate training of one kind or another, but I think the only way out is that we have got to put men in charge of this planet who are really more than men. We must get back to the times of the prophets or we must make ourselves prophets. And we must look at world problems from a standpoint which is entirely alien to that existing at present.”

TECH LEADERS GUIDE GOVERNMENTS AND SIT AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE: Just a few weeks ago, Michael Dell said, “Our report contains straightforward, proven ways to pare back $1 trillion from the deficit while increasing productivity and enabling sustainable competitiveness. We’re serious about helping to provide solutions for the mounting debt crisis, and we’re optimistic that changes today will help lay the foundation for future job growth and innovation for our country.” And the TCC report, entitled One Trillion Reasons, stated: “A $500bn savings opportunity exists by consolidating the government’s myriad supply chains. This would also render the government’s procurement process far more transparent, helping to strengthen public trust.”

With tech leaders applying the power of computing to human inefficiency, we know who the REAL kings of this planet are and will increasingly be. It’s no wonder that men like Michael Bloomberg and Silvio Berlusconi are corporate leaders, political leaders and multi-billionaires. They are the model of the world-king, the Zeus archetype. And men like these have the power and resources to orient tech around cleaning up 20th century messes. Those who have erected Kingdoms of Opacity around the these cesspools are doomed, as we already have seen, while those who embrace Transparency as a route TO greater discovery and engagement with mystery and innovation will rule. The simple mathematical and scientific rule concerning this is Pareto’s Law or Occam’s Razor and Leonardo da Vinci has captured this when he says, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

HUMAN INTERACTION NO LONGER SLOWS DOWN TECH ADAVANCEMENT: Our technology’s solutions are so beautiful now and are being packaged to accentuate this elegance. Solutions on the social intelligence front are just one example of this. With Flowtown, I can upload all of my email addresses and see exactly which social properties these entities currently occupy. With another tool just about to launch I can upload my email addresses and know the exact time of day a Facebook ad campaign should run to reach the maximum online users. With another tool also on the verge of launching, I can determine which tweets and FB statuses have the highest chances of being re-tweeted and passed along AND which ad copy will achieve the highest percentage of click-through rate.

Again, with well-priced and effective solutions, we hurdle opaque entities that shroud previously complex processes in secrecy AND end up with BETTER solutions at BETTER pricing. This principle is horizontally applicable across industries AND is the metaphorical basis for human-tech relationship to leap-frog into a new paradigm of leadership, democracy and independence.

Of course, in the context of all this left-brain, progress-oriented talk, there is the question as to whether cyborgs dream of electric sheep or can enjoy the most human of experiences.

The fittest node: Who will "grab all the links" and "shape the network into a star"?

“The explosive success of “new kid on the block” Google could not be explained by the scale-free model until a measure of a node’s ability to stay in front of the competition produced a “fitness model.” Examining the fitness model data, Ginestra Bianconi was startled to find that the calculations used were very similar to those found in the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The math describing the behavior of “Bose gases” (a unique creature of sub-atomic quantum mechanics) turned out to be identical to those in the network fitness model. This similarity means, according to Barabasi, that in certain circumstances, particularly fit nodes in a network did not merely get richer … the winner could take all.

In an ordinary “fit-get-rich” network, the fittest node gets biggest, but other fit nodes are close behind, so that “the power laws and the fight for links are not antagonistic but can coexist peacefully.” Id. 102. In a “winner-takes-all” system, the fittest node grabs all the links, shaping the network into a “star” or “hub and spoke” topology which is not scale free … there is a single hub and many tiny nodes. These findings have obvious relevancy to those studying antitrust law and policy and the ongoing case of Microsoft.” (Source)

Robert Boyle's prophetic 'wish list' made in the 17th Century

Robert Boyle’s prophetic ‘wish list’ made in the 17th Century. Boyle was founder of the ”Invisible College” at Oxford University.

(Thanks to George Ure in the Predictors Group, the LinkedIn Group for RecordedFuture, a new temporal search tool that “searches the future”).

”The Prolongation of Life” – health improvements mean we are now living longer.

”The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth” – Botox, plastic surgery, teeth-capping, hair dye, transplants.

”The Art of Flying” – planes.

”The Art of Continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely” – submarines and scuba gear.

”The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation” – transplants and keyhole surgery.

”The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education” – free diving.

”Strength and Agility … exemplify’d by that of Frantick Epileptick and Hysterical persons” – steroids.

”The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed” – GM crops.

”The making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses” – spectacles and telescopes.

”Making Armor light and extremely hard” – Kevlar.

”The practicable and certain way of finding Longitudes” – satellite navigation.

”A ship to saile with All Winds” – boats with engines.

”Perpetuall Light” – bulbs.

”Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing” – scratch-and-sniff.

”Transmutation of Species in Mineralls, Animals, and Vegetables” – synthetic biology, genetic engineering.