Emerging Memetic Singularity in the Global Knowledge Society

Checklist of memetic constraints on emergence of a coherent response to global crisis.

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The checklist immediately below is an effort to identify factors inhibiting emergence of effective consensus in response to global crisis. Together the factors constitute a context within which many plans and initiatives will be proposed. Their proponents and supporters will solicit discussion, wider support and consensus on implementation. The context is such that the emergence of coherence is improbable.

The checklist follows from various earlier explorations (Considering All the Strategic Options: whilst ignoring alternatives and disclaiming cognitive protectionism, 2009; Engaging with Globality -- through cognitive lines, circlets, crowns or holes, 2009; Coherent Policy-making Beyond the Information Barrier, 1999; Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory: a critique of the Club of Rome Report: No Limits to Learning, 1980; Limits to Human Potential, 1976).

Historically these were a preoccupation of the Union of Intelligible Associations and are now a focus of Global Sensemaking.

The elements of the checklist are seen in a subsequent section to be features of a singularity, understood in a variety of ways in the web resources cited. Such a singularity may also be understood in terms of a range of essential unrelated understandings of "end times" -- like the "end of history" or the "end of science" -- explored in another section. All these approaches are then explored metaphorically in terms of the "event horizon" characteristic of the astrophysical black hole which has a singularity at its centre -- and therefore implying a form of cognitive black hole and singularity.

• progressively higher proportion of the population and interest groups with active websites, blogs, lists and special concerns, including communication strategies in response to their preoccupations
  
  
• progressively higher proportion of original thinkers with unique and innovative ways of framing the challenges
  
  
• progressively higher proportion of information constrained by language (or jargon), copyright, commercial cost of access, etc
  
  
• progressively higher proportion of purportedly highly significant knowledge that is held secret (classified), is little known, or is held to be incommunicable ("unsaid")
  
  
• increasing constraints on available individual attention time for the range of extant knowledge (namely information overload), even with personalized search engines, visualization tools, synthesizers, etc
  
  
• increasing commitment to "maintenance" information (responding to short-term priorities), precluding openness to new information calling for learning (notably with respect to longer-term challenges), even under conditions of emergency
  
  
• increasing constraints on learning the increasing number of new applications purportedly designed to alleviate the above challenges
  
  
• distortions introduced by ranking processes to highlight significance (as promoted by special interests), variously based on commercial criteria, ethical and libel sensitivity, political filters, accuracy, popularity, security, etc
  
  
• ever increasing automated information processing with ever diminishing capacity for human confirmation of its validity (namely the focus of technological singularity concerns)
  
  
• increasing indifference, insensitivity and habituation to the conditions and suffering of distant others -- whether real or virtual, human or non-human
  
  
• increasing challenge, in the above context, of detecting and communicating with people of influence -- even on matters of urgency
  
  
• increasing challenge for people of influence, in the above context, of communicating effectively with potentially supportive others -- in order to get "traction"
  
  
• radical loss of confidence in "authorities" (including people of influence), sources of information, and in the capacity to authenticate information
  
  
• increasing constraints on feedback processes, even with regard to what is perceived as urgent
  
  
• increasing occurrences of destabilizing memetic enthusiasm and panics ("memetic pandemics")
  
  
• diminishing capacity to match accessible information with reality (as with the processing capacity of intelligence services), except by extreme, and potentially dangerous, selectivity (eg bias)
  
  
• increasingly hyperactive tendencies to frame information and its sources as "positive" or "negative", inspiring "hope" (hope-mongering) or "anxiety" (doom-mongering), with necessarily little capacity for objective assessment
  
  
• increasing tendencies deliberately to exploit and exacerbate incoherence -- most evident in definitional game-playing, conceptual gerrymandering, news managemernt ("spin"), demonisation, etc
  
  
• multiplication of contradictions and paradoxes undermining any conventional sense of coherence
  
  
• fragmentation of knowledge society into zones (islands) of relative coherence in an ocean of relative incoherence
  
  
• increasing number and variety of categories through which it is required (on forms) that bodies and initiatives be adequately identified for related or unrelated purposes
  
  
• disparity between the assumption (naively) made by any one constituency of the singular connotation of terms ("democracy", etc) and the increasing variety of connotations implied by the range of constituencies using those terms
  

What other trends does this set suggest and how would its completeness be recognized? With a population recognized to be "ageing", it might be asked whether the challenges of ageing, notably erosion of memory, are to be understood as increasingly reflected in collective memory. In the "blip culture" seen to characterize the future according to Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave, 1980), it is increasingly unlikely that trends of any kind will be collectively registered as meaningful (Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory, 1980). Collective existence in a "blip" context already suggests one form of "singularity".

The following understandings of singularity, with the web resources cited, may suggest other trends -- as with the understandings of "end times" that follow thereafter.

Technological singularity: There has been considerable discussion of technological singularity as a hypothesized future point that takes place during a period of accelerating change, sometime after the creation of autonomous intelligence or superintelligence -- estimated by some as 2035. Soon after that a "singularity" will be reached, when artificial intelligence will so far exceed the human brain that ordinary mortals will no longer be able to keep up.

Optimistic predictions regarding a technological singularity have been made by Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near: when humans transcend biology, 2005) and also presented as a documentary film (The Singularity is Near: a true story about the future, 2010). He predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become trillions of times more powerful and increasingly merged with computers. This will be the dawning of a new civilization, enabling us to transcend our biological limitations.

Kurzweil has also recently created a Singularity University with Google sponsorship at NASA's Ames Research Center (David Gelles, A crash course in emerging technologies, Financial Times, 24 April 2009). It aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges. This follows an earlier focus by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. An early articulation of such techno-transcendentalism is that of Vernor Vinge on the Singularity (1993) which has evoked a set of useful comments. John Smart of Singularity Watch (aka Acceleration Watch) lists a "[Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]