Below is a message from my uncle Russ. He likes to send me these kinds of E-mails once in a while. He even wrote a guest post for my blog, which actually got the 3rd highest traffic of any post there. He was trained as a logician and lives in Utah, where he goes on long walks with mathematicians and collects out of print books on interesting things. When I visit him, he'll sometimes give me some of his books. I eagerly devour them.
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Amber,
I don't know if you've read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. While rereading it, I came across the following, "The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality." p 9.
Since Kurzweil believes that this happening at an exponential rate, he believes that by mid century--only 40 years from now--the Singularity will have been achieved. By then, most cyborgs, which will be all of us, will take classes in cyborg anthropology (or more likely, simply download the information) to understand themselves and their capabilities.
Russ
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To which I responded (completely by iPhone):
Russ,
Thanks for this. I like to look at the Singularity from an anthropological perspective. There have been a lot of social scientists who have written about what could be called a Singularity in a sober and researched way. I'll go over a few of them here. The best example would probably be from sociologist Emelie Durkheim. He wrote that as society progresses, interactions go from mechanic to organic. This is easily seen in large cities at night, where cars resemble blood cells, and highways resemble arteries.
During the beginning of the industrial revolution, heavy machinery dominated the landscape. It cost a lot and took a lot of energy to build. What it gave back was small in terms of movement and power. Over time, innovations shrunk the size of machines and turned interfaces into liquid. Liquid interfaces like we have today on TV monitors, cell phones and laptops make what was formally tangible hardware capable of being downloaded from the air around us. A formerly physical interface as become liquid. In the future, this liquid interface will evaporate further, becoming air.
Already much of our data is stores in the cloud. Twitter's high-speed stream of data is the quickest to evaporate. Updates are not stored over time; they are dumped. This is the essence of technology, which seemingly moves from solid to liquid before finally evaporating. Sociologist Marshall Berman wrote a book precisely about this called All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - the Experience of Modernity. In addition, Zygmunt Bauman wrote a book called Liquid Modernity, which described the liquidation of capital - of economic flows and innovation. Henry Shivelbusch wrote The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space
, which concerned the altered perception of time and space at the dawn of the train industry. Before trains, there were no time zones.
The compression and experience of space and time are becoming increasingly important. As technosocial humans we are no longer living in one place at one time. Time has compressed itself so far that we now have time within time, and space within space. While you sit in your apartment, you are experiencing your local time and space but also the digital time and space.
By opening up the terminal or browser window, you can experience an entirely different time and space. Geography can be rapidly switched with the touch of a button. This 'fractal time' annihilates geography, allowing the punctuation of one space with another space, one piece of time with another. My iPhone collapses multiple social geographies into one. Facebook, Twitter, SMS, Voicemail, websites, news, incoming calls, notes to my future self, apps, ect. Each digital geography has a different set if natives, some imports, and some immigrants. Each space has different social norms and different ways of presenting oneself. Each space has different social classes and entrance requirements. But with a computer or iPhone, the travel time between those different geographies is almost instantaneous.
In the same way that a cell phone opens up a wormhole between two users for a limited amount of time, social networks open up wormholes to each other through text, creating invisible, 4th dimensional wormholes from person to object to person to object through text. People begin to become hyperlinks, text begins to become social objects, developing personality and having social value.
In the end, all text becomes linkable, all history becomes linkable to the future, every moment capable of being saved, reported, commented on and played back in slow or fast motion. Each reported moment becomes social capital, increasing the amount of embeddedness that networks and nodes have with each other.
As node distance decreases, communication becomes more liquid, and digital geography between two people, thoughts, ideas, or groups becomes more instantly traversed. There become a range of those who are connecting more tightly together and a series of those who remain loosely connected in the analog space. Envision a conical basket whose weave is becoming tighter at one end while the other end remains loose and unconnected, fibers sticking out of the unfinished side of the basket. As time progresses, even these loosely connected fibers begin to weave themselves together, finishing the basket at some point in the future when almost evereything is connected. As in real life, the most connected points of the basket are the strongest.
In economics, in hive culture, in business, in the information society, these connected humans and objects exchange processes, including shorter routes to a given point. Connectivity leads to optimization. Redundant routes become absorbed. Shortcuts run across nearby fibers. All is hyperlinked together at the tight end of the basket. The singularity is the end point of that basket. The point at which all fibers are weaved together so much that difference is obliterated and communication becomes completely transparent.
I find that the only way I am able to write is if people ask me questions. So please write me more. You ask me through Twitter @caseorganic or comment below.
Amber Case
Cyborg Anthropologist
