Second Life Education Research

Yesterday BoingBoing posted an NPR interview with Cory Doctorow and Vernor Vinge about the technological singularity (listen here).  The piece suggests that a technological singularity is on the horizon, one in which the human race will virtually become a new species, one which is bonded with technology in networked and augmented intelligence.

If you’ve read any of Vinge’s novels you’ll be familiar with the kind of networked technologies he predicts for the future (wearables, holographic projection of avatars into spaces all over the globe, touchy-feely technologies). However, this piece on NPR is much more concerned with the way we network through computers and the ways in which our own intelligence can be augmented by the technology we have available to us. For example, I can “remember” hundreds of phone numbers now because my memory is augmented by the memory in my cell phone.

Vinge and Doctorow see this evolution of technology use as a “singularity” because the true adoption of such technology will surely create such huge shifts in how we communicate, work, and socialize that those who are not part of it will see those who are as almost another species (Doctorow compares it to literate people vs illiterate people).

There are several points in the discussion that I’d like to pull out and comment on.

The NPR piece suggests that the singularity will affect all humans. I really don’t think that either Doctorow or Vinge believe this but it’s not state explicitly in the interview so I think it’s important to point out. If we see the advent of the printing press and the mass availability of literacy tools as a prior singularity, we can still find large segments of the human population who have yet to be affected by that singularity. One builds upon the last. A person can’t possibly embrace the technological singularity if he/she can’t read since the basic building block of any interactive intelligence will always be text. And of course, there will always be segments of the population who are wary of new advances or whose lives don’t create a need for the use of such technology.

The concept of a singularity also seems to suggest that the change will be sudden. However, I think all involved would agree that it’s actually a quite gradual shift that has been occurring for some time. I would even suggest that there are already people who are a part of this new “species” of networked and augmented humans. People who are intensely involved in social and collaborative networks online, people who are constantly in touch with resources of information available online, people who are never truly out of reach thanks to their devices….I would suggest that these are the “early hominids” of the new human, the precursors of the new species that Vinge and Doctorow suggest is on the horizon.

Most importantly, though, I think we should pay attention to the fact that this evolution is a voluntary one, one in which we must work to be a part of. Though there may be jobs that we won’t qualify for if we don’t stay abreast of technology, there will certainly never be anyone forcing us to embrace the evolution or magically giving us the knowledge we need to take advantage of it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 8:26 am and is filed under Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.