The most profound of the singularity support came from St. Edward's University chemist Eamon Healy. Healy had discussed the concept of accelerating change in the film Waking Life in which he divided history into increasingly shorter periods, estimating “two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, a hundred-thousand years for mankind as we know it” and proceeded to human cultural evolution, giving time scales of ten thousand years for agriculture, four hundred years for the scientific revolution, and one hundred and fifty years for the industrial revolution.

He weighted Information as providing the basis for the new evolutionary paradigm, with artificial intelligence its culmination and concluded that man would eventually create “neohumans” which would usurp humanity's present role in scientific and technological progress and allow the exponential trend of accelerating change to continue past the limits of human ability.

Assumptions Behind Singulalrity

The singularity concept does not take into account the energy needs and resources. This concept either takes for granted infinite resources or “forgets" the increase of energy necessary for more advanced technologies. Beside, it does not take into account that the electronic components miniaturization has physical limits.

Others have proposed that other "singularities" can be found through analysis of trends in world population, world GDP, and other indices.

Andrey Korotayev and others argue that historical hyperbolic growth curves can be attributed to feedback loops that ceased to affect global trends in the 1970s, and thus hyperbolic growth should not be expected in the future.

William Nordhaus argued that, prior to 1940, computers followed the much slower growth of a traditional industrial economy, thus rejecting extrapolations of Moore's Law to 19th-century computers. Schmidhuber (2006) suggests differences in memory of recent and distant events create an illusion of accelerating change, and that such phenomena may be responsible for past apocalyptic predictions.

A recent study of patents per thousand persons shows that human creativity does not show accelerating returns, but in fact as suggested by Joseph Tainter in his seminal The Collapse of Complex Societies a law of diminishing returns. The number of patents per thousand peaked in the period from 18501900, and has been declining since. The growth of complexity eventually becomes self-limiting, and leads to a wide spread “general systems collapse”.

Thomas Homer Dixon in The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization shows that the declining energy returns on investment has led to the collapse of the present civilizations.

Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed also shows that cultures self-limit when they exceed the sustainable carrying capacity of their environment, and the consumption of strategic resources (frequently timber, soils or water) creates a deleterious positive feedback loop that leads eventually to social collapse and technological retrogression.

My Position on Singularity

The views in favour and against singularity suggest a balancing mechanism that will eventually pilot the progress of humanity from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Man is the creator of artificial intelligence and knows exactly the extent of discovery and innovation that can destroy him.

The cybernetics paradigm suggests that every machine should have a control mechanism to avoid disaster. Man can build very intelligent machines no doubt but it is still possible to put a control tab to the limits of innovation when it is felt that such innovations could bring a doomsday.

Technological progress will continue to the endless corridors of time but there would be a limit based on the concept of bounded rationality and equifinality. Singularity conundrum will take place mid-way the predictions of its ardent proponents. Let us keep vintage watch on our civilization!