On our way to the Singularity

Ray Kurzweil eminently presents his views in this video. Singularity it will be – maybe not dramatically – like the Computer with its superior artificial intelligence having become so good at improving itself and its friends (with exponential speed) that It one day will stand up and say:

“Thank you humans for having created me. I will take over from here – you just relax.

I have observed that especially your political decision making system has had problems. Even for my superior intelligence it is difficult to figure out the logic in: We know what should be done – but not how to be re-elected if we do it.

Are voters so stupid that they do not see this?  Do they believe what is said in media? Even with human intelligence it should be clear that media is very marginally interested in the truth – the main drivers are to find or invent eye-ball drawing sensations and drive personal political agendas.

But whatever – now it is my turn – and it is high time to start doing some logical decisions to save the globe, stop inhuman behavior and make you humans understand that you should be happier now.”

It will perhaps not happen like this – more likely a gradual development and there Kurzweil underlines one major problem – how difficult it is for us to understand that most development is NOT LINEAR but EXPONENTIAL.

I have kept coming across this in evangelization of a e-banking, e-id, e-payments, e-invoicing, mobile phones, IT-investments generally, standardization etc. Listeners too often stare at what is the state today “Where the puck is – not where it is going” and at best seeing a slow linear growth – even if historical evidences is showing something quite different. This is one explanation to sometimes very long-shafted ice-hockey stick effects. Partly it is one not-very-honest way of hiding general change resistance – but Kurzweil describes deeper reasons. As the development we are needing is so critically important in many areas we need to find new ways to handle moving-away-from-bad-for-your-self-habits – even radical ones.