OK. So let’s suspend our judgement and accept for a moment that the pace of innovation is, in fact, increasing exponentially. So it’s not that we have a limited understanding of the real scope of innovation in the actual world, especially where it stretches beyond our immediate experience. And not that we all simply hear more these days about what has actually been happening all along, since we have a few modern contrivances like news and BoingBoing and stuff. No, let’s assume the world is producing more innovative thingies. Faster. OK?
So. Is the adoption of those innovative thingies keeping pace? Is the rate of adoption of innovation speeding up exponentially? Because we’re assuming here that for every Really Good New Idea that appears this month, ten new Even Better ideas will appear next month. So I need to be a pretty perky adopter of new ideas, right?
Otherwise… well, where do ideas nobody hears about go?
I just today sat in two lectures on Queuing Theory, so maybe I’m hopelessly mired in the dregs of defunct industrial civilization. But, um, doesn’t somebody still have to make this stuff? Otherwise, won’t it, like, back up in piles until somebody pays attention to it?
Until, that is, we have self-making stuff. Besides, well… you know… the self-making stuff that lives on the planet already, I mean.
Or does the Singularity really just represent a deeply ramified crisis for mail-order catalog publishers and marketing?
No, seriously. If there are more ideas all the time (maybe, but I doubt it), and more information is washing over all of us all the time (I doubt that even more), then are we adopting and executing those ideas? Are we changing our fundamental behavior to cope with all the new information? Are we all becoming different from one another?
What, we aren’t already?
Caveat: Charles Stross’s Accelerando is a really, really good book that I recommend wholeheartedly.
Some of these new ideas show up on a new “reality” show, Made in the USA.
As Gibson pointed out “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed.” Which suggests that the rate of adoption is not the rate of creation.
Sterling, points out (tho I can’t remember the source) that it’s probably better to think of singularities, plural, rather that singularity, singular. And, since I’m always trying to pluralize everything, I tend to agree.
So, imagine Kurzweil is close to being right. One moment of singularity will be the indistinguishable-from-intelligent computer. It will produce trillions of design innovations a second, far too many to ever be produced.
However, the people making this stuff won’t be traditional industry, but 3D printers. The world of consumption will be personalized.
Which leads to your concluding question. “Are we all becoming different from each other?”
Yes. 25 years ago, if you wanted to talk to your co-workers about what you watched on tv last night, you had limited options. While some had cable or VCRs, most were reduced to 3 commercial channels and 1 public channel. Today, our view habits have been atomized. There’s a good chance no one watched the documnetary on Banana Slugs you watched last night.
While prediction is difficult, especially about the future, it seems we (at least the we in the industrial west) have more and more opportunity to have less and less of a shared culture. The American obsession with individualism is driving us all to The Oculas!
http://www.theoculas.com/
Sterling’s speech on the singularity “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” can be found here: http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/Seminars.htm
Pingback: Structure+Strangeness