Among futurists and transhumanists, the Technological Singularity is much talked about and written about. It is believed that this is a point in development when technological development becomes, in principle, uncontrollable and irreversible, which generates radical changes in the nature of human civilization. Usually its occurrence is associated with the emergence of the technology of strong artificial intelligence, which is able to improve itself - and ultimately can enter into the "unrestrained reaction" of self-improvement cycles, ultimately creating a superintelligence that surpasses the intelligence of all mankind (wiki).
It is also believed that we are on the verge of a singularity. That just about, it remains to wait a couple more decades, and it will happen. However, there is no strong AI yet. Various new technologies are emerging, but relatively slowly. The predictions of futurists are in no hurry to come true, or even turn out to be pipe dreams. And everything that happens looks as if nothing special will happen - neither in the next decade, nor in the next century ... Are our hopes in vain? And can we do something to really bring the Singularity closer?
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One of the key problems is that as we move forward, the person himself, the human brain, his ability to receive, process and issue information becomes more and more bottleneck. The gap between the capabilities of the human brain and the tasks that must be solved for the movement of progress is rapidly widening. Man is the smartest creature on the planet, but to solve modern scientific super-tasks, we are increasingly running into the bottleneck of the human mind: too low speed of receiving, processing and issuing information.
Sense organs
A person receives information from the outside world with the help of at least 6 senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, vestibular apparatus). Of these organs, only two are involved in obtaining abstract information and exchanging abstract information - sight and hearing (and partly touch - for example, Braille for the blind).
The widest channel for obtaining information is vision. It is believed that with the help of our eyes we receive about 80% of all information. According to rough estimates, the resolution of the retina of each eye is approximately 120-140 megapixels, the frequency of perception is about 25 frames per second. From the point of view of modern technologies, these are extremely high rates (you can estimate the video stream as about 6 gigapixels per second). You will not find video cameras with such a resolution on sale - if such cameras exist, then in single copies, they cost a lot of money and are used exclusively in research tasks.
Hearing provides us with about 16% of all information. The human ear is capable of perceiving signals with frequencies from 16 to 20,000 Hz and in a sufficiently wide range of amplitudes - from 0 to the "pain threshold" 120..140 dB. Also, sound impulses replacing each other with a frequency of more than 16 Hz, we perceive as a continuous sound. However, unlike vision, hearing is almost "one-dimensional", so the amount of information entering the brain from the hearing organs is somewhat less than from the organs of vision.
Brain
The brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons. In comparison, the latest processors have about 2 billion transistors, and a transistor is a much simpler structure than a neuron. However, the speed of transmission of nerve impulses between neurons is low: from 0.5 to 120 meters per second. On average, 10 pulses per second pass through one synapse, i.e. the operating frequency is about 10Hz. This is extremely low in comparison with the gigahertz frequencies of modern processors.
The incredible capabilities of the brain are provided only by unprecedented parallelism - unlike a single processor with only a few cores, a huge number of neurons work in the brain simultaneously. A single neuron can have up to 5,000 synapses on its body, and if you take into account the total number of neurons, even though not all of them are involved, there is enormous computing power.
According to scientists, the memory capacity of our brain is about 1 petabyte of information (for example, the Google search engine processes about 24 petabytes of data every day).
At the same time, the human brain consumes only 25 watts of energy, according to this parameter it can be called the most efficient computing device on Earth.
I / O channels
However, no matter how powerful the brain is, all this power is literally locked in the skull. The first problem is how quickly a person is able to exchange abstract (mainly textual) information with the outside world.
Let's start with a view
The average reading speed of a person is from 200 to 250 words per minute (for English), 128-180 words per minute (for Russian), depending on the language (data for non-hieroglyphic languages).
In symbols, the average speed is 1500 symbols per minute. If we conventionally take one character for one byte (in scientific and technical literature, which we are mainly interested in, there are usually more different characters than in fiction, but nevertheless in non-hieroglyphic languages we approximately fit into a byte), then we get a channel of 200 bit / sec. It is slower than the very first modems!
Speed reading technology does not increase this speed by much. For example, US President John F. Kennedy could read at a speed of about 1200 words per minute, which equates to about 800 bps.
Human speech perception speed
Research has shown that the optimal speech rate for reading audiobooks in English is between 150 and 160 words per minute. For personal conversation - 190 words per minute. As you can see, the speed roughly corresponds to the reading speed, so the use of the audio channel does not add any special advantages.
And if a person can always just watch and listen (if he is not sleeping), then purposeful work with textual information is a more difficult task. Indeed, can you read all the time, especially if it’s not an exciting adventure novel, but difficult scientific or technical literature to understand?
Information output speed
The situation is even worse with the channel for the output of abstract information from the brain to the outside world. The most common method in the modern world is typing on a computer keyboard. The average typing speed is 200 characters per minute, which corresponds to only 27 bps! Perhaps speech recognition programs would help a little here - after all, the speed of speech on average corresponds to the speed of speech perception, which is more than the speed of typing.
All this is quite good for a simple everyday life, like the life of our evolutionary ancestors - primates, and is quite suitable for a quality life for many generations of people; but not so good for Singularity goals.
Abstract thinking
The second significant problem is the fundamental inability of the human mind to work with complex abstract information.
When processing "abstract" information, the brain does not operate with such huge streams of incoming visual information that our eyesight provides, but is limited to a measly hundreds of bits per second. And this concerns not only the speed of obtaining information, but also the speed of its comprehension.
The brain's memory capacity is enormous, but a person's short-term memory can only contain about seven objects at a time.
Why is this happening? Biologically, man is still an animal. The human brain is still designed to ensure the survival of an individual and a species, mainly in the wild savannah. The human brain was not originally designed for reading, typing, working with complex abstractions. Our vision is capable of very quickly processing huge amounts of natural visual information - but this is necessary in order to quickly notice predators lurking in the jungle and other dangers, as well as to find a variety of food; but our reading speed is slower than the very first modems produced in the 80s of the 20th century! And the speed of issuing information is even less.
Just like people are bipedal, but the human skeleton is still not fully adapted to upright posture (hence many diseases of the musculoskeletal system) - similarly, people are intelligent, but still not fully designed for scientific thinking.
And this is the bottleneck of our civilization, blocking our path to the Singularity.
Imperfection of the biological nature of man
The biological nature of man also leaves its mark.
A person is characterized by fatigue, procrastination, exhaustion. The human brain cannot solve complex scientific problems 24 hours a day. People need rest, distraction, change of scenery. Our eyes are also prone to fatigue, we cannot read too quickly and too much. People periodically want to sleep, they may have a headache, they are susceptible to diseases ... The
peak of our development falls on the age of 20-40; before that - the period of childhood, when the brain is flexible, but there is not enough knowledge in it; after - a period of aging, when strength and health are less and less every day. And the majority plunges into family matters and problems, science and progress are no longer interested in them.
Battlefield - Civilization
Huge amount of knowledge
There is too much information. We, as a civilization, have tremendous knowledge, but our human resources are not enough, even to simply get acquainted with all this knowledge; the modern volume of information is so huge that it is physically impossible to cover it for a particular person even in his entire life; do not read, do not listen, do not view, do not realize ... There is a huge amount of knowledge in the world that is simply inaccessible - because it is buried somewhere, in all this heap of information. The result is duplication and a lot of unnecessary work that people often do without even knowing about each other.
Our libraries are full of books, but can we read these books? There are 130 million books in the world, but you cannot read even a hundredth of a percent of that number! There is simply not enough human life for this.
Information revolution
One of the most important components of the scientific and technological revolution, the computer revolution, has brought computers and the global Internet into our lives. Without exaggeration, the Internet is a breakthrough on the same scale as the emergence of writing once. It is believed that humanity has accumulated 2 trillion gigabytes of data, and the annual volume of Internet traffic is about 3 zettabytes. There are 4.54 billion Internet users, each of whom spends an average of 7 hours a day on the Internet. These are fantastic numbers, but what do we have in reality?
Human-centered information
Most of the information is of no value to the Singularity. Moreover, this information has a closed, unstructured nature, for it, basically, only one operation is available - copying and sending. Most of the traffic - video, audio, and images - is human-centric blobs with which a computer basically can't do anything meaningful.
But even simple textual information remains obscure for computers. Search engines are the most complex systems, in fact, only primitive crutches, adapted to primitive human text queries.
The problem is that almost all information in the world is people-oriented. The very people with all their human flaws, which we have considered above.
Printed and e-books are text in human language. Images, audio and video are generally oriented towards the human organs of sight and hearing, and for a computer are generally just a jumble of bits. All this information is focused on the human brain, which has inherited a different type of perception.
This is a huge problem. The computer operates with terabytes of information and has no idea about them at all. Yes, computers make it easier for us to work with special information - such as wiring diagrams, blueprints, or program source codes - but they cannot handle general information. Mostly they can only entertain us.
There is still a huge chasm between man and computer.
Avalanche of complexity
If we consider only scientific information, then here we are faced with another problem: the enormous, incredible complexity of modern scientific problems. The days when lone genius could make scientific discoveries in home laboratories are long gone. Modern science requires professional laboratories, sophisticated and ultra-expensive equipment, such as the Large Hadron Collider or the LIGO interferometer, and the well-coordinated work of a large number of professionals. This is impossible without the support of states or major transnational corporations.
Speaking about the Singularity and the most important tasks of Transhumanism - the victory over old age and death and gaining control over the biological nature of man, one cannot fail to mention the enormous complexity of biological systems.
One DNA molecule has an average of 100 billion atoms. And a biological cell contains on average about 100 trillion atoms. The length of all DNA molecules of a double set of chromosomes in one human cell is approximately 2m. The number of variants of conformations of one single molecule of a typical protein can be more than the number of atoms in the Universe (source: Introduction to General, Organic and Biochemistry).
Some examples of complexity
This is how Professor Mikhail Panteleev describes biological complexity
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In 2005, employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory managed to create a dynamic model of the ribosome, which synthesizes a protein molecule. It took 768 microprocessors to run for 260 days. During this time, it was possible to "shoot" 20 million frames, reflecting only 2 nanoseconds from the life of the ribosome.
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In 2011, Chinese scientists created a simulation of the H1N1 virus at the atomic level. A GPU Mole-8.5-based system with over 2,200 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs is capable of simulating 770 picoseconds per day in 1 femtosecond integration time steps for 300 million atoms or radicals.
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Of course, full modeling at the atomic level is not always advisable; in most practical cases, you can limit yourself to some approximations. However, the enormous complexity of biological systems manifests itself at higher levels.
For example, in 2013, it took 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of operation of 1% of the human brain (1.73 billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses) on a cluster of 82,944 10-petaflops K computer processors.
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And in the brain simulation projectin 2018, a modern supercomputer with a million ARM9 cores capable of processing 200 trillion operations per second can simulate only one percent of the total number of neurons in real time (1 billion, not 100 billion).
Yes, there is progress; and I have no doubt that pretty soon it will be possible to simulate a full-fledged bacterium at the atomic level, and a multicellular organism, and the entire human brain, and much more; and if the computing power of conventional supercomputers is not enough, quantum ones will help. The problem is rather different: in the transition from quantity to quality. In building a bridge, from the level of understanding of a person (who will not become fundamentally smarter) to those inconceivably huge amounts of information that are mechanically processed by modern supercomputers - without any understanding on their part.
In conclusion
This article does not reveal anything new; in fact, this is just an introduction to the problem and a different perspective on how to achieve the Singularity.
Most likely, the technological singularity will not arise on its own, as a simple result of the spontaneous transition of quantity into quality, of enormous computing power into some kind of superintelligence capable of endlessly self-improvement. It seems that we must put in some dedicated effort to achieve the Singularity.... Which ones? This is a separate topic, very large and complex. I deliberately did not include any mentions of possible actions here (although of course I have certain thoughts on this matter) - otherwise it would not have been an article, but a book :) But I hope this article will serve as some kind of introduction and a start for further research.