• Nick Bostrom
• Cory Doctorow
• Max More

Interview

– What are the crucial steps to fostering higher comfort levels and better understanding about the singularity, both amongst fans and critics?

There needs to be a more coherent narrative about why we should care about the singularity. It's an exciting mental game for those of us who love computation or for the gotterdammerungists who yearn for what Ken Macleod calls a “rapture of the nerds,” but honestly, does it matter? Ray's The Singularity Is Near makes it sound as if the singularity is an historical inevitability, not the outcome of directed striving.

In other words, if the singularity will arise no matter what I do, and if the outcome of the singularity is preordained, and if our lives after the singularity are unimaginable, then why should I do anything or care at all about it? Saying “We will go through the singularity in a half-century” is like saying, “You will rot in the dirt when you die.” It's credible, it might depress or exhilarate you, but it's not exactly actionable.

Ray's health book is different - it says, “This big thing is happening, you might live to it and beyond it, and you can get there by embracing this practical advice.” But more importantly, it tells a story about why you'd want to follow the health advice even if the singularity never arrives - that's the story of how adopting Ray's regimen will stave off senescence, prolong your life, and make you happier. Those are good things to attain, singularity or no.

We have a hard time motivating people to do stuff in the service of abstract nouns like “liberty,” but “singularity” is so abstract as to make “liberty” seem as concrete as “imminent car-wreck.” The singularity needs to be the mere abstract cherry on the concrete cake: the funny curiousity to consider as the end-point of a bunch of imminent, relevant, concrete changes in our lives that we need to prepare for and prepare the way for.

– What three important issues do we not understand well - what deserves greater attention? What forms do you think that “greater attention” should take?

I think that technical people have failed to appreciate how grave a sea-change it is that we are now principally designing devices designed to enforce policy set remotely - and enforce it against us. We're accustomed to tools that exist to do our bidding, but through the copyright wars, we've entered a world where devices increasingly do others' bidding to our detriment: your DVD player won't play a French disc or fast-forward past the FBI warnings, your computer won't take screenshots of stored TV, your phone won't work with a competitors' SIM card; your car won't let you pull its engine diagnostics, your toner cartridge snitches on you when its full - and your PC is infected with a rootkit put there covertly by Sony to stop you from copying music CDs.

Continued technical progress depends on open platforms. When technology responds to our desires, it's a tool of liberation. When it responds to others' desires, it's a tool of control.

Innovation in information science, information security, and, increasingly, biotech, comes from non-professional, non-incumbent, innovative participants who repurpose their hardware and software to do unexpected things unimagined by manufacturers. But in a universe of “trusted computing,” hardware and software aren't Turing-complete and universal; rather, they enter a world where everything not prohibited is mandatory.

– What are your principal agreements and disagreements with Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near?

The most compelling part of the vision in TSIN is that progress is accelerating, change is accelerating, and that accelerating change begets accelerating change.

The part which I am most skeptical about is that consciousness is tractable through modelling its many pieces: I can believe that we can certainly replace some parts of the mind with technological artifacts, that these artifacts will outperform their analogs on some axes; but I am skeptical that if you replace every piece with a machine analogue that the whole will behave in a way that is continuous with the consciousness of the entity that has been replaced.