Age of Chaos, Age of Gods & The Singularity

Perhaps the most elegant thought that was ever transmitted to me in my formal education came via a class I took from Jay Wentworth and Bud Gerber. It originated with cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, who was himself riffing on an 18th century Italian writer named Giambattista Vico. And it went something like this:

Vico had this idea that there were stages to history, and there were either three or four of them (it's been a few years, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details): The Age of the Gods, the Age of Heroes and the Age of Men, followed by a fourth thing called The Age of Chaos -- which, we are to understand, is not supposed to be particularly pleasant.

From Vico's classical, 18th century perspective, it's pretty simple to imagine these ages as a rising line: We begin in Bible times with the Age of the Gods, work our way up through Homer and the Age of Heroes and then the next thing you know we've got ourselves a republic and a middle class and BINGO! You're in the Age of Men, whether you like it or not.

Which makes the Age of Chaos particularly eye-catching, as it follows the Age of Men and seems to fit nicely into the church's message: As human beings move farther away from the original innocence and obedience of The Garden, our folly sets the stage for The End of Days. To the orthodox, of course, chaos is a Very Bad Thing Indeed.

Consequently, if you exist solely in that Judeo-Christian cosmos, where all myth takes place in linear time, in a universe in which time flows only in one direction, then there's your whole story: Perfection, fall, degradation, End of the World. Thank you for playing, and we have some lovely parting gifts for those of you who aren't being cast into the Lake of Fire for all Eternity.

Thompson believed that we were already in the Age of Chaos back in the 1980s (a belief he shared with all the televangelists of the day). But Thompson was a modern man, and for him myth could exist in all sorts of ways. Rather than seeing history as a rising or falling line, Thompson imagined it as a double helix: Not merely the Christian line, not merely the pagan circle, but the combination of line and circle, turning on itself, cycling around, reversing, creation and destruction giving way one to the other.

And when Thompson tried this out, he saw history in a new way: The same four stages, only on his helix, it's the Age of Chaos that always gives rise to the Age of the Gods.

As a 20-year-old, I understood that to mean that I had been born into very  interesting times. Looking back now,  one thought always strikes me: I had no idea. Because in the early 1980s, I had never even heard of Chaos Theory,  nanotechnology, gene therapy, Moore's Law, global warming, wikis, or Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.

And The Singularity (currently scheduled to occur around 2045)? Not a clue.

Lately I've been giving The Singularity quite a bit of thought, at least in this light: When every doubling in the Law of Accelerating Returns approaches infinity, how will human beings experience that reality? And I don't mean "cope with," because we will have created a transhuman civilization at that point. We may invent tools that allow some form of human intelligence to keep pace with that scale of change, but those who take up those tools will become, in any sense of the word except for the reproductive, a new species, more remote from homo sapiens sapiens than our species is from homo antecessor. You don't just  "cope" with that.

One possibility, of course, is that we'll have one of those joint-custody species splits, where the new transhumanoids and members of our species live side-by-side for a time, like our ancestors and homo neanderthalensis did. But how long will that last? Neanderthal and early homo sapiens shared Europe for roughly 15,000 years, but then again, Neanderthal's competition wasn't becoming infinitely more informed and aware every few days.

Another possibility, and one that strikes me as more likely, is that we'll simply experience the Singularity as magic. That's Clarke's Third Law, after all: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But I think the future that makes the most sense is simply this: As the human race approaches The Singularity, we'll experience the last days of The Age of Chaos with a savage vengeance. Change at the accelerating rates predicted by Kurzweil simply cannot take place in those pristine geometric progressions: Civilization and human psychology demands some level of  predictability. We cannot hum pleasantly along as a civilization when we can't predict the future confidently enough to train for jobs, take out mortgages, invest in sewer lines. And the net environmental effect of all this global civilization is looking rather dubious as well. To be blunt, the planet is going to survive our changing climate just fine: civilization, on the other hand, is in for a bumpy ride.

What, then,will be The Singularity's place in human history?  It occurred to me recently that future generations will mark it as the moment at which our species made the turn from the Age of Chaos to the Age of the Gods. That doesn't just mean that The Singularity will be the free-fall moment at which everything changes. It means  -- using terms from the mythology of 20th century science -- that The Singularity will be the event horizon of our civilization and our species.  One cannot peer across it to the other side.

It could be a beautiful thing: a magical age in which new understandings, new spiritualities and new human abilities unfold in splendid, free-form blooms.

But it is also likely that, from the perspective of most humans alive in 2007, the crossing of that threshold will seem horrific. We're certainly not comfortable with the practical questions that come with the rise of transhumanism today, and we live in a planetary culture in which a good portion of people do not yet believe in biological evolution: How are we going to prepare our brothers and sisters to deal with the concept that non-biological evolution is not only "natural" but practically inevitable?

Once the first humans cross The Singularity horizon, the majority of our species will become little more than surplus labor.  And what of our transhuman descendants, men and women for whom our quaint efforts at building a Web 2.0 culture will appear as cave paintings of a great archaic hunt? What will their moral reasonings create for us? How will they treat us, with their magic?

I always imagined that it would be a glorious thing to be alive at the moment when we move from the Age of Chaos into the Age of the Gods. But it never before occurred to me that the gods of the coming age might not be my gods.  Did Neanderthal celebrate the rise of the Cro-Magnon? Or did he shudder?

Magic. It seems such an entertaining, happy thought in our safe, explained, bounded world. But look back at our older myths, myths from the days before supermarkets and MRIs and interstate highways and blogs and central heat and air. To our ancestors, magic was something powerful and strange to be feared, to be held at bay.

Sweet dreams, fellow human beings.

Comments

[Agricola]

I hope I make it to 2045......I want to see it happen, even if I can't make the jump.

[Janet]

Nicely done, Dan. I just LOVE this stuff.

[Daniel]

We'll be in our 80s, which might not be very old in 2045. Gives me a great image: Us spectating at The Singularity, complaining and bitching the whole time.

"Back when I was a kid there was only ONE reality, and it was physical and we LIKED IT."

[jmsloop]

Hmmmmmmm . . . I think about these issues a lot. I talk about them a lot to the degree that I teach several courses about the interface between technologies and bodies. My guess is that you'll see far less fear and loathing than you're estimating. Sure, there will be some, and it will be expressed in all the usual culturally symptomatic ways. In our current climate, we could look at a variety of films--from Terminator to the Matrix series--that express some anxiety about the ongoing interface. At the same time, it is still happening, and what seems outrageous to all of us one minute becomes quickly "normal."

Here's an example: I started teaching my course on these issues 17 years ago. At that time, we were at best using Usenet groups for discussion; we were only beginning to see the idea of "picturs" online coming to fruition. Many of the students never communicated that way; none of them had cell phones. When I talked about a future where people would routinely talk to others globally whom they never physically met (We're not talking big advances here gang but something that was just about to occur) the students protested that it would never work, that no one would take part in a "fake reality." What was fake reality quickly became real reality, only different. And the changes from then on were only faster and people quickly assimilate every change.

Yes, people may say they don't believe in evolution, and they may say they "want the real," but they simultaneously evolve, they simultaneously use GPS, cell phones, etc. We are all already cyborg; we always already evolve; we just don't call it that because it quickly becomes the real, the natural.

To your point about people becoming so much surplus labor: much of the world already is, but they don't think of themselves that way. Their ideology and sense of purpose remains intact; it has to in order to survive.

Yes, there are changes afoot; yes, these changes are massive. My guess, however, is 1. we won't make it as a species anyway, 2. even if we do, everyone will adjust far far more seamlessly than you imagine.

We don't fear the rise of the other; we simply become the other without realizing it.

Resistance is indeed futile; and you wouldn't want to anyway.

[Daniel]

Honestly, that's why The Singularity intrigues me: I think that if you take the concept on its own terms, it is LITERALLY saying that the rules change utterly. And one of those "rules" deals with prognostication, which is to say that human beings aren't really so much in the business of predicting futures as running probabilities on everything they remember from the past. When we think about the future, we're really just making analogies.

I love what you wrote, John: "We don't fear the rise of the other; we simply become the other without realizing it." I suspect that is true: It's what my experience tells me to believe.

But I think The Singularity encourages us to imagine outcomes that cannot be extrapolated from human experience. Toffler made a lot of money in the 1970s talking about future shock, but that's nothing compared to the concept of techno hyper-development. A lot has changed in the 17 years you've been teaching, but how would that change have been different if, instead of 17 years, all of that advancement had taken place in one year?

Same stuff, different time scale. Not disruptive enough? Then what if it all took place in six months, three months? At what point does the scale of a thing or the rate of a thing change the nature of a thing?

I can't think of an analogy to that, except for this, and it's kind of the wrong case: when advanced societies discover neolithic societies, as happened in the 20th century in remote areas of the globe, one of two things transpire. Either the less-advanced culture is obliterated within a generation, or the culture is cordoned off and preserved, separate from the larger civilization.

Agreed that we are already cyborg. Stipulated that Google and Wikipedia and the various wonders of teh Interwebs already serve as an almost instantaneous replacement for the memorization of voluminous facts. But there are still physical interfaces. The next species in our genus will be indistinguishable from its technologies, with different life cycles, different genetics, different ideas about physical maturation and education.

When we talk about "the digital divide" today, there is still the sense that individuals in a techno-adept culture, even if they start from a disadvantage, may overcome that penalty of birth within their lifetimes if they act decisively while they are young. But as the final acceleration begins, and as the real separation becomes observable, the choice becomes real, immediate and irreversible.

I remember that it took people years to accept that a microwave oven wouldn't make you sterile. My kids had cell phones before I did. We feel our way toward new technologies. Think about the iPhone: As excited as we were, we didn't rush out and buy one, because it's just a gadget. Lasik surgery is here and it could fix my eyesight right now. It will be years before I'll consider it.

But in about a decade, we'll probably have to start deciding whether to schedule medical/techno enhancements that will make us measurably smarter. And those of us who haven't had them will make the steroids argument: It's not fair. What about the children? And while we're arguing over that, the cyborg enhancement train is going to leave the station and quickly accelerate to warp speed.

The explosion of bandwidth is violently remaking the news industry. But the rise of a new class of cyborg humanity is going to do the same thing to academia.

I think we're mostly in agreement, but I have so much less to lose in taking the wilder course of thought. Maybe that's my role.

[jmsloop]

Yes, we're probably more in agreement than not. Honestly, my reaction was simply a result of having heard years of people fearing a future "human being" by imaging the person they are today meeting someone from the future. Of course, meeting a "normal" person from 50 years ahead would scare the "me" of today. However, if I were to live 50 years, that "normal" person wouldn't seem so odd to me, as I would be a very different type of human by then.

When I first started teaching Gibson's "Neuromancer" years ago, the students could hardly get their minds around the concepts. However, they all agreed that they didn't like Molly and didn't think of her as human (There was little debate the first two years I taught the course; the students thought her eye-inserts, finger blades and jacked-up nervous system disqualified her as human). Now, if I teach the book, there is no debate in my class; Molly IS human. "Of course, she is . . . . "

It's not just that the simulacrum becomes the real, then, but that the real becomes even better than the real thing, baby.

[jmsloop]

Oh, and I skipped the one thing I meant to add: You're right about it being the RATE of change that is significant. And, yes, it will cause some problems, just not the problems we can imagine from here.

[jaz]

Hmm... interesting bit about how we move away from the Garden.

Have you read "On the Marionette Theatre" by von Kleist?

[Tim]

Great post, Dan, and great comments Sloop.

I thought you might enjoy this blog, especially this post: On Becoming a Neuron.