Broderick - The spike: how our lives are being transformed by rapidly advancing technologies

Broderick treats technological change as the next step in human evolution and provides a compelling version of how we stand to change as a species in the next few years. Fascinating stuff from a capable writer of popular science.

Booklist

The Spike is the most exciting, provocative book of the year.... His dispatches from the way-out frontier of speculative research are exhilarating for the sheer marvel of what might be.

Microsoft Communiqu

Broderick [is] a seasoned and respected interpreter of science, whose strength is in seeing the connection between otherwise widely separated areas of knowledge.

The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

Since this chapter was written, these ideas have been developed in great detail by such writers... [as] Damien Broderick (The Spike, 1997). Damiens book will serve as a more imaginative sequel to the one you are reading now.

Arthur C. Clarke, in the revision of his
classic Profiles of the Future

A wide-ranging tour of some speculative and often exciting areas of technological development... I recommend The Spike to anybody deeply interested in the future.... As a guide to the technologies of tomorrow, the book makes a stimulating and provocative read. Warmly recommended.

Dr. Michael Nielsen, Extropy Online

A provocative account of cutting-edge science and technology that deserves a place on the desks of political leaders and public policy makers everywhere.... Things are happening incredibly faster than most of us think, and the winners are going to be those who get used to the idea and work out in advance what has to be done in order for us to cope.

Dr. Race Matthews, The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

In The Spike, the science and technology rushing history towards its singularity and beyond are presented by Broderick in a masterpiece of clarity.

Alan Olding, The Australians Review of Books

How Our Lives Are Being Transformed
by Rapidly Advancing Technologies

Damien Broderick

A T OM D OHERTY A SSOCIATES B OOK
N EW Y ORK

THE SPIKE: HOW OUR LIVES ARE BEING TRANSFORMED BY RAPIDLY ADVANCING TECHNOLOGIES

Copyright 2001 by Damien Broderick

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

Book design by Jane Adele Regina

Graph by Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Forge is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Broderick, Damien.

The spike : how our lives are being transformed by rapidly advancing technologies / Damien Broderick

p. cm.

A Tom Doherty Associates book.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-312-87781-1 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-87782-X (pbk)

1. TechnologySocial aspects. 2. Technological forecasting I. Title

First Hardcover Edition: February 2001

First Trade Paperback Edition: February 2002

Printed in the United States of America

D 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4

To Vernor Vinge and Hans Moravec,

who galloped ahead up the Spikes slope
to fetch back the strange news

THE
SPIKE

I F OUR WORLD SURVIVES, THE NEXT GREAT CHALLENGE TO WATCH OUT FOR WILL COMEYOU HEARD IT HERE FIRSTWHEN THE CURVES OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, AND ROBOTICS ALL CONVERGE. O BOY . I T WILL BE AMAZING AND UNPREDICTABLE, AND EVEN THE BIGGEST OF BRASS, LET US DEVOUTLY HOPE, ARE GOING TO BE CAUGHT FLAT-FOOTED . I T IS CERTAINLY SOMETHING FOR ALL GOOD L UDDITES TO LOOK FORWARD TO IF , G OD WILLING, WE SHOULD LIVE SO LONG.

T HOMAS P YNCHON , N EW Y ORK T IMES B OOK R EVIEW , 1984

W ITHIN THIRTY YEARS, WE WILL HAVE THE TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS TO CREATE SUPERHUMAN INTELLIGENCE . S HORTLY AFTER, THE HUMAN ERA WILL BE ENDED.

V ERNOR V INGE , NASA V ISION -21 S YMPOSIUM , 1993

It rushes at you, the future.

Usually we dont notice that. We are unaware of its gallop. Time might not be a rushing black wall coming at us from the future, but thats surely how it looks when you stare unflinchingly at the year 2050 and beyond, at the strange creatures on the near horizon of time (our own grandchildren, or even ourselves, technologically preserved and enhanced). Call them transhumans or even posthumans.

The initial transition into posthumanity, for people intimately linked to specially designed computerized neural nets, might not wait until 2050. It could happen even earlier. Twenty-forty. Twenty-thirty. Maybe sooner, as Vinge predicted. This is no longer the deep, the inconceivably distant future. These are the dates when quite a few young adults today expect to be packing up their private possessions and leaving the office for the last time, headed for retirement. These are dates when todays babes in arms will be strong adults in the prime of life.

Around 2050, or maybe even 2030, is when a technological Singularity, as its been termed, is expected to erupt. That, at any rate, is the considered opinion of a number of informed if unusually adventurous scientists. Professor Vinge called this projected event the technological Singularity, something of a mouthful. I call it the Spike, an upward jab on the chart of change, a time of upheaval unprecedented in human history.

And, of course, its a profoundly suspect suggestion. Weve heard this sort of thing prophesied quite recently, in literally Apocalyptic religious revelations of millennial End Time and Rapture.

Thats not the kind of upheaval Im describing.

A number of perfectly rational, well-informed, and extremely smart scientists are anticipating a Singularity, a barrier to confident anticipation of future technologies. I prefer the term Spike, because when you chart it on a graph it looks like a Spike! Its exponential curve resembles a spike on a graph of change over time. Heres a picture of it:

As you see, the more the curve grows, the larger is each subsequent bound upward. It takes a long time to double the original value, but the same period again gets you four times farther up the curve, then eight times... so that after just ten doublings,

Historys slowly rising trajectory of progress over tens of thousands of years, having taken a swift turn upward in recent centuries and decades, quickly roars straight up some time after 2030 and before 2100. Thats the Spike. Change in technology and medicine moves off the scale of standard measurements: it goes asymptotic, as a mathematician would say. An asymptote is a curve that bends more and more sharply until it is heading almost straight along one of the axesin this case, up the page into the future.

So the curve of technological change is getting closer and closer to the utterly vertical in a shorter and shorter time. At the limit, which is reached quite quickly (disproving Zenos ancient paradox about the tortoise beating Achilles if it has a head start), the curve tends toward infinity. It rips through the top of the graph and is never seen again.