A Singularity in Our Future

The technological singularity is the theoretical emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.[1] Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood.

Proponents of the singularity typically state that an "intelligence explosion", where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.

Wikipedia

I've been following the Singularity Movement through Kurzweil's blog for years. It has been facinating and curious to me.  Much of what I read and hear seemed too complex for me to understand but I knew I could pick up the developing patterns. 

So this past weekend I attended the Singularity Summit in San Francisco to come face-to-face with the thinkers and makers of the movement.  I was curious to think about my own role in the coming years as the possibility of the Singularity unfolds and embeds itself in key decisions of governmental and corporate policies, strategies, as well as the everyday behavior of "we, the people."

I was attracted by the words for the Summit --

The Singularity is an event that could transform the world to its foundations in a way only comparable to the emergence of life itself. As converging technologies lead us towards the Singularity, we must ask ourselves: what is our own responsibility to ensure these technologies are used wisely and benefit everyone? We hope that the discussions here help you find your own answer to that question.

So having attended, what is my answer? I sat and listened with about 300 others to the 20 speakers. I was definitely one of the oldest people attending.  I met professors in philosophy, AI, humanities, linguistics, biology and computer science, all there to listen, to absorb, and to further their own thinking. But it was the youth I was most excited by.  There were a handful in their teens, but most seemed to be younger than 35, many in their early 20s.  My friend, Sharon, who attended with me, and I were freely invited into small conversations with these young minds. They were open in their enthusiasm, visionary in their vision to improve the state of the world, and passionate in their explorations and doing-ness.  Many participate, as fellows or staff or students, in Singularity University programs which has the express purpose of graduating students who will go forth and bring solutions to a billion people!!! So I asked them if this was an impossible goal and their answer was a universal, "No, we're on it" as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

I felt significant changes in my beingness as I listened and conversed. I seem to lose my place, the me I felt I knew. Many of my talents and ways of thinking about myself seemed to become inconsequencial. At times I recalled the feeling of being in an isolation tank ... floating, drifting in and out of reality.  I found myself asking myself, "Who and what am I"?  For the first time, I saw myself within the Singularity movement, not standing outside.

When one of the speakers announced that there was a Singuarity volunteers web site, I immediately went to  and realized that I had no expertise for any of the volunteer jobs but one.  I could spread the word in a responsible manner.  My friend, Christine Peterson, from the Foresight Institute reminded us all that the Singularity movement is not foriegn to govenments or corporations. It is being actively explored by those with money and power.  Our work as ordinary citizens then is to step up and learn as much as we can, to inform ourselves and to take part in shaping the Singularity movement into technologies and thought processes...into art and science... that are used wisely and benefit everyone. 

Traditionally, we have let the governments and corporations do the work for us and look at the mess we are in! Now it is our turn.  So as I play with the essence of the Singularity movement, what can I grok? What matters that I can do? Our future is not without risk but I don't think it is useful to spend my energies being fearful or fighting the movement forward. That is not me. I sense that Singularity plays some part in our emerging paradigm. Singularity is part of the core seeds we are sowing now that will play out well into a future of some sort.  I plan to advocate that the best aspects of our humanity join with the movement and insure we have a collective, active partnership with technology moving forward.  In some ways, I think this is nature's most elequant and challenging design evolution.  Should she succeed, perhaps we will come to know ourselves for the first time. 

Syntopical Reading

"Don't go looking for ideas directly. Instead, go in search of the seeds of ideas: the elements from which ideas can grow."  The Universal Traveler, 1972

When we first started our work with corporations, the executive teams consistently told us "As executives, we don't have time to read, and our employees don't read."  No time for reading? No interest in reading? With a world going through tremendous changes, how was it possible to discount the essential importance of reading widely and often?

Matt was teaching a course called "Redesigning the Future" and he handed out a reading list of 500 books, necessary for understanding the complexities of the world.  The authors Matt called on were not those on the NY Times best seller list.  Rather, they were selections that reached way back in time, and also took the reader's imagination into the future. They were fundamental to understanding the new emerging sciences and world cultures to seeking out new patterns and possibilities.

To us, reading was an essential aspect of a new way of working.  We drew on Mortimer Adler's book, How to Read a Book to help us design a useful module to help participants work their way into reading.  In particular, we were interested in his Syntopical Reading section. While Adler was mostly focusing on an individual doing syntopical reading, we knew we wanted to make it a group exercise. 

Then we watched the power of this module come to life.  We adapted it for many occasions and several times our Syntopical Reading exercise transformed an organization.  The power and purpose for reading has slowly found its way back into many organizational worlds. 

Here are general instructions:

1) Provide each participant with some simple suggestions for how to read a book in an hour.  (adapted from Adler's body of knowledge)

2) Ask participants to choose a book that they want to read from the library. Suggest that they can read any book that looks interesting and to not to choose books too closely related to their field or product lines.

3) After reading, have the participants divide into groups of 7 or 8 and have them form a circle. 

4) Now, ask each participant to become the author of their book.  Each in turn states their name as author and tells us the name of the book they wrote, why they were compelled to write the book, and as author, what did they want to suggest to the organization... ideas that could make a significant difference.  Each author had five minutes to create their story. 

Be sure each participant assumes the role of author rather than talking about the book they read.  With this kind of story telling, the ideas expand, and often hidden design assumptions reveal themselves.  For instance during the second day of an event we asked cosmetic company participants to choose books for overnight reading.  Participants wandered through the library choosing good night reads.  One chose When Elephants Weep. Little did we know he was head of research for the company. As he assumed the role of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the author, he put his whole heart and mind into telling his organization why they should immediately stop animal testing. They did, within the week! Probably no amount of interest groups or consultants could have been so successful so fast.  But when their colleague, speaking as an impassioned expert, made his case, everyone listened. Something they had held onto for years, fell away within a five minute presentation.  But there is more to the story.  Other authors, spoke of values, integrity, changing ways of working, technology improvements, biology, complexity, etc.  Many of these presentations, while not directly about animals connected with the the elephant's intelligence in a variety of ways, reinforcing the idea that there were better ways to learn about their products than test them on animals. Suddenly the entire organization became more self aware, more eager to learn about themselves and to shed some long held beliefs. 

I could write many more such stories and if you've done this exercise you too probably have things to share. It is powerful. 

What I've learned through my years of developing our process and method is how easy it is to have people make fundamental, often transforming changes when they can do it for themselves.  We just need to provide interesting, challenging, and inspiring exercises chunked together through interesting iterations of design.

Scan and Play

“If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity.Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas.Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”

David Bohm with David F. Peat, in their book, Science, Order, and Creativity, 1976

One of my author mentors, Draper Kaufman, in his book Teaching The Future, 1976 writes about how teachers, administrators, and parents had no idea how to think about the future;yet, here they were training young people to live in the future.  When asked, many assured Kaufman that "the future would be just the same, just more so."

Matt and I met Kauffman when I invited him to The Learning Exchange to talk with teachers about how to think about the future.  Later at dinner he told the story of one of his classes for high school teachers where he gave each teacher the assignment of completing a story. Each was given the first paragraph and asked to write out the rest of the story. After the teachers turned in their stories, he told them that half of them had the first paragraph as past tense and the other half in future tense.  Those that had the past tense assignment wrote far more than those with future tense.  When asked why, those with future tense admitted that they did not know how to think about the future.  They were not experts, they could not imagine, they didn't want to be wrong! Wrong? It was all made up. Those that wrote longer stories about the past used their imagination and there was no right or wrong! This is why Matt and I developed the Backcasting module.  We wanted ordinary citizens to practice living and working with the future. 

Our "first paragraphs" always spoke of success, sometime in the future. Participants were asked to look back in time and remember the parts they played in the success.  This is one of the most important and fun modules of our entire body of work.  We have watched thousands of participants dream, envision, and include themselves in stories of success ... great deeds accomplished; barriers overcome; simple solutions finding their way into stagnent cultures.  Today, backcasting is an often used module with many, many organizations who have never even heard of where the idea originated and for what purpose. 

Another early module to help people get over their fear of the future is our TimeLine scenario exercise.  In 1983 almost every event we did had as part of its SCAN, the development of a 50 year time line.  We marked off our long walls with dates across the top and general subjects down the side.  Participants were asked to come to the front of the room and state something that happened within this 50 years.  It was backcasting from 25 years in the future.  Participants jumped around with in this time frame.  First well known markers were noted: 1984, WWII victory, Man on the moon, Kennedy assignation, etc. These prompted other memories and spontaneity. Things like "No more war by 2010, new forms of energy by 2000; political unrest, etc.  Over an hour or so, the time line filled out with amazing patterns beginning to emerge and tell a story. Participants were seeing, some for the first time, that neither the past nor the future can be seen as a lits of ideas without context or cultural awareness. Although initially scary for some, as the board began to fill, all jumped up with ideas they wanted to get into the story.  By the end of a three day workshop or event, participants grew to like the future and to see the roles they could play in shaping it.  Here with our process, was a place to practice thinking and playing with the future. 

Today, it is not so rare or scary to play with the future.  And finally, slowly, as a nation, a world, we are learning to think longer term. Most important to me, is the notion that ordinary citizens are learning that the experts don't know as much as they know as a group.  When a group of people work with future, imagine it, move ideas back and forth among them, there is amazing accuracy of pattern and general happenings. 

Nothing is more important to a healthy, transforming process than providing good scan modules where there is no right or wrong and everyone participates from their own vantage point. 

Both of these modules do well with a larger number of participants. Diversity in mind sets, cultures, ages, educational backgrounds, and fields of inquiry give dimension and character. And both of these modules are great openings for a group who has no experience of each other, no common language, no group vision. 

"The future is rational only in hindsight." MG Taylor Axiom, 1983