31 December 2005



Editor’s Note: For a perfectly good series of reasons, we are recycling this morning. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? More from the Brave New Year. Vic

I am confused, but I maintain it is not my fault. It is the press of events, the acceleration of the Holidays. The festive days fall on the Weekends this cycle, and it is Saturday that is the last day of a very strange year. Tomorrow should be the day for stillness and hangover recovery, and I suspect it will be, but then we are in a bonus holiday on Monday, and more excess to greet the New Year.

The radio is playing the list of events as I peck at something else. The soft voices start with big waves and a woman in a persistent vegetative state, and then a Gold Star Mother against the war, which blends in a murmur into accounts of interrogation, and elections, and eavesdropping and hurricanes. I’m distracted, working on transcribing the travel journals of my Great-Grandfather. He made the Grand Pilgrimage to Europe in 1903, which was one of the last years that made any sense. His tattered books surfaced in the wreckage of another move, and I find them compelling.

I prefer the simplicity of his time, though he writes about astonishing technology, like refrigeration and the mighty coal boilers that powered his liner across the Atlantic. He thought he lived in an age of marvels, and he was not wrong.*

What is going on here in this century is enough to boggle the mind. I think the radio claimed that the next big thing in Washington will be a wild chase for the leakers of information about the practices of the National Security Agency. What is NSA up to? The talking heads seem unsure. I think Fort Meade is attempting to divine the intentions of murderers from the torrent of electrons that is firing across the global web in a manner that begins to replicate the synapses of the human brain.

I think the commentators haven’t the foggiest idea of what they are talking about. That includes me, of course, but at least I dallied with some of the technology they are attempting to describe when it was in its infancy.

I will assert that I have a clue about what is actually happening. It is new territory, and it is about how we look at rapidly evolving means of data transfer. In our digital world we have created a pervasive penumbra of information that both connects and cloaks everything we do, and write and say.

It is hard to grasp this connectedness, this global linkage. Nothing is what it was a few years ago. Even our vocabulary lacks the precision to describe what is actually occurring. We use terms from the 1950s, that could as well apply to the technology of a century ago. “Wire tap,” indeed- as if there were wires, or a physical tap applied to them!

Our phone conversations are wireless and digital. Our computers whisper to one another in data packets that do not necessarily travel together, are broken and routed and reconstructed at the distant end.

We will have to find something simple and understandable in this latest scandal, because what is really happening is far too complex to comprehend out on the cutting edge of technology and possibility. Our laws do not accommodate what has come to pass. In this new world there are no borders, and U.S. citizens are in league with murderers. A conversation between evil people might bounce from Pakistan to satellite, to London and on to Ohio as pulsing bits of light, and back again, as the data packets travel independently through Ottawa and Paris.

it is happening too fast for me to think about. But some are pondering the consequences. A pal sent me a link to a web site devoted to visionary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has a theory that explains things.

I mistrust theories as a general thing, even as the creationists mistrust Darwin. But Ray’s theory is reasonable enough. He takes a thing that we know is true, and carries it in both directions, from the present back to the past, and then forward into the mist of next year, and the near ones after that.

If you even vaguely follow information technology you have heard about Moore’s Law. It was devised as a working theory in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, the outfit that makes the silicon chips that are the heart of our personal computers. He noted that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled each year since the IC had been invented, and he postulated that the trend would continue for the foreseeable future.

He was pretty close. In subsequent years, the pace slowed a bit, but data density continued to double every eighteen months. This pace is expected to continue, at least until the uttermost end of physical possibilities are exhausted. By which time, of course, the next breakthrough will arrive, and the chips will go three dimensional and begin to replicate the capability of the human brain.

And then rapidly surpass it. That is where Kurzweil puts it all together with a Unifying Field Theory he calls The Singularity. He says it is near, and I find it plausible. The industry calls it “Convergence,” saying that all our phones and beepers and PDAs and computers will eventually reside in the same box.

I have seen enough deranged men on the street with placards claiming that the end is near. Since we all grew up with the Bomb, the assertion didn’t seem unreasonable. Kurzweil is not deranged, and he doesn’t think the end is coming. He explains that The Singularity is simply an expression of the natural and accelerating process that began when the hominids first used stones as tools, and later as they played with the applications inherent in fire.

Things are just moving faster. If you look at stone tools and fire on the spectrum of human history, the data points are fairly far apart. But look at the last century for evidence of the acceleration. The Wright Brothers flew in 1903, and by 1969 humans were on the Moon.

I’ll let you visit Mr. Kurzweil on your own. He says we haven’t noticed because we have not stepped back and looked at how steep the curve of development really is. He has some speculation on what the consequences of The Singularity may be, but he is an optimist. He doesn’t think the machines will rule us, or the nanotechnology will bury us in gray slime. He rather thinks that the machines will be us, and us them.

A merging of humankind and machine, the center balance point moving from carbon-based biology to a hybrid construct. Imagine machines capable of love

It is pretty unsettling, but the speed with which The Singularity will come, at least to some of us, places it within our personal event horizons. Our lives.

I don’t know precisely how it will work, or whether it will hurt or not. Perhaps it will be like the Rapture. But that isn’t important. I can’t program my cell phone either.

Happy New Year.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

* I completed the 1903 Grand Tour transcription project. It is posted at the web site. The next step is to integrate the original postal cards. Maybe I will get to it sometime. It is a singular look into a gone world.