It’s Official: The U.S. Government is Preparing for the Singularity
Posted by: Chris Williamson in Singularity News
Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think (PDF)
I can’t believe this is from the government. This is actually a pretty damn big deal. So far The Singularity has been on the minds of only a handful of cutting-edge scientists, futurists, and super-geeks.
But this is different.
The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) is made up of 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats from both the House and Senate. They are in charge of producing the information that the U.S. government uses to make high-level economic decisions. They study taxation, IMF reform, Federal Reserve policy, federal expenditures, energy, etc.
Nanotechnology has been on their radar for a while, but here is the first paper I know of where the term ‘Singularity’ is used. It means that they are now taking a serious look at the issue of accelerating technology. They describe it very plainly:
“The economic pressures in the electronics industry have forced the development of new lithographic techniques that continue the steady reduction in feature size and cost.”
Yeah, Kurzweil could’ve told ‘em that a loooong time ago!
They also list a timetable of five distinct generations of nanotechnological development:
2000-2005: Passive Nanostructures
2005-2010: Active Nanostructures
2010-2015: Systems of Nanosystems
2015-2020: Molecular Nanosystems
and lastly:
2020 and Beyond: The Singularity - They state here that
“every exponential curve eventually reaches a point where the growth rate becomes almost infinite…If technology continues to advance at exponential rates, what happens after 2020?”
They then posit:
“…some observers forecast a period at which scientific advances aggressively assume their own momentum and accelerate at unprecedented levels…beyond the Singularity, human society is incomparably different from what it is today”
And what *really* sets this paper off is this:
“Whether or not one believes in the Singularity, it is difficult to overestimate nanotechnology’s likely implications for society. For one thing, advances in just the last five years have proceeded much faster than even the best experts had predicted.”
Government has a hard time looking past 5 minutes in front of it’s face. Technology is accelerating so fast that government, which isn’t designed to prepare far into future, is helpless in doing any planning at all. Of course, who 20 years ago could’ve really foreseen the impact of the internet…maybe, like, a handful of people could possibly even imagine, and it was a cloudy imaginable future to even them!
And just to finish up here, the best economic scientists working for the government of the United States of America just released a paper that states:
“Whether or not one believes in the Singularity, it is difficult to overestimate nanotechnology’s likely implications for society”
They use ‘belief’ only because its not fact *yet.* If I had any doubts about creating this blog when I launched it last week, they are gone now! It needs to be here and you need to learn as much about this concept as possible! Click HERE to buy Ray Kurzweils “The Singularity is Near” I’m outta here!
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