The Techno-Singularity is Coming

 Recent movies including The Matrix Series, The Hunger Games series, The Net, Spectre, and several others in the recent "James Bond" series, The Terminator Series, and hundreds of others, plus books like George Orwell’s 1984, Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Series, Dan Brown’s Origins all have one thing in common.   Each has a version of the technological singularity, also called the techno-singularity, or simply THE SINGULARITY.

The most popular version of the singularity concept is the intelligence explosion.  This is a self-upgrading artificial intelligence (AI) that will eventually enter runaway self-improvement cycles. Each new and more intelligent generation appears more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence.  This will shortly result in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence. 

At that point, The Singularity, not humankind, will be at the apex of the "evolutionary food chain."  Instead, the communists, socialists, dictators, religious zealots, crony capitalists, environmentalists, and those of other belief creeds fight over the placement of the deck chairs on the deck of the Singularity; while it continues to mature dramatically.

If you don’t want to have your entire life in cinematic color with live audio recorded and used by the Singularity to destroy humanity, I have an alternative.  It could preempt the destruction of humanity and instead create a synthesis that would be complementary and supplementary to both technology and humanity.  It produces a synergistic organizational organism functioning in a way that's the analog of the myriad of components of a cell or the trillions of cells in a human body.

This organizational design is documented in the book entitled Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age.  It's not a book for the casual reader because it's more of a text or manual for building this new political/economic system.  It's a disruptive architecture, but in the end will create a stable economic system based on talent, education, opportunity, and personal responsibility; while being supported by brilliant technology.  But it should be of great interest for those seeing what's really going on while looking to the future with apprehension.

 

 

Right, Left, and the Singularity

Have you noticed that when you look for something on the web, almost immediately, you are inundated with the advertising of like products on YouTube or one of the weather websites?  Sometimes when you are messaging a friend about a pest control service, or some such, or even talking about it in a phone conversation, suddenly those services are advertising on your phone's Facebook app?

Have you driven a new car and found that it has all sorts of "smart" controls to keep you in your lane, to warn you of other vehicles, and so on?  Have you noticed that you get a great deal of unsolicited but targeted e-mail?  Have you seen how you frequently get advertising for local products or services on your web apps, even though you don't need them?  The culprit is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

All of this is the Technology Singularity springing to life.  It is what will become The Singularity within the next 100 years.  A possible example of "The Singularity" is at the movie's core of "The Matrix."  "The Singularity" rules and feeds on humanity.

In Dan Brown's book, "Origin", "The Singularity" is an outgrowth of AI (artificial intelligence), is a new species at the top of the evolutionary chain that will replace humans.

And this is happening even while crony capitalists and liberalist religionists fight to rearrange the deck chairs on the political and economic Titanic.  The crony capitalist right believes in the "opportunity" to buy or steal ideas from innovators and inventors.  It gives the crony capitalists the "opportunity" to become billionaires.   Most of them feel that they should be able to pass this "advantage" (as called by the liberal religious zealots) on to their offspring, much the same way the nobility of the past passed their titles on to their children.

On the left side is the liberalist religion.  The core belief is that all, including retail socialist culture and freeloaders, are "entitled" because they are "equal," even though it's self-evident.  G. Orwell describes it well in his book 1984. 

We now have instruction on "politically correct" "Newspeak" in colleges and universities.  The instructors and professors are the "Thought instructors."  Big technology is the "Thought Police."  Facebook and the others can choose what they consider "obscenities" or “swear words” or “inappropriate” (meaning politically incorrect) and turn them into "Thought Crimes."  Thus, they limit free speech and knowledge that runs against political correctness.  For example, they can choose "the greater good" to mean whatever they feel is appropriate without measuring what "the greater good" is.

And then there is the Singularity hidden in this fog of the political right and left.  It's G. Orwell's "Big Brother."  And more and more, it's always watching and consuming the ability of humans to choose and to be responsible for their actions.

There is at least one way to synergize the right and the left with the Singularity.  It is documented in the book entitled Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age.  It’s not a book for the casual reader because it's more of a text or manual of how this new political/economic system would integrate the three factions.  It's disruptive of all three, but in the end, it will create a stable economic system based on talent, education, opportunity, and personal responsibility.  But for those interested, it should be of great interest.

Economic Left, Right, and Up

Currently, we have a political problem.  The far-left liberals feel that the ideal political/economic situation entitles everyone, including freeloaders and freelance socialists, to a good life, free from monetary worries for food, education, healthcare, and other factors. 

For example, according to a New York Times article:

“President Biden will propose a $6 trillion budget on Friday that would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II as he looks to fund a sweeping economic agenda…The growth is driven by Mr. Biden’s two-part agenda to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure and substantially expand the social safety net (maybe it should be called a social Lazyboy recliner safety net), contained in his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan…”

The far-right feel that working hard for wealth shouldn't mean paying for all the irresponsible people and freeloaders' good life. 

According to an article in The Hill:

The Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative GOP House caucus, called Wednesday for cutting $14 trillion in spending over a decade to balance the budget and produce a surplus.

'We've faced a year of unprecedented spending," the group's leaders wrote in a letter on their proposed budget.  RSC Chairman Jim Banks (R-Ind.) spearheaded the letter.

"As you can imagine, getting our spending under control and eliminating the deficit will prove to be a herculean task," it stated. (maybe it should be called the no strings at all safety net.)

History shows that attempting to provide the good life for everyone ends up with everyone, except a few politicians, in poverty within a relatively short timeframe.  On the other side, not supporting all people, to some degree, ends up with a situation like medieval Europe, with the nobility and the serfs.

The consequence is that the conflicting idealism on both sides increases the tension and stress on the economy.  And it could lead to civil war—currently, the pressures are close to those of the 1850s.

Jefferson and the other founding fathers conceptualized and somewhat implemented a solution to this problem, the Jeffersonian Economic Architecture.  It's time to reconsider this in the Digital Age.

The Jeffersonian Economic Architecture was founded on small farms and small businesses, including small banks.  Today, your smartphone uses a version of this architecture.

Your phone has dozens of "apps" on your phone that provides the phone with various functions.  They can be linked together using standardized interfaces to provide your location, the location of businesses and restaurants, etc., to let you know that your flight is delayed, and to gives a weathercast for your area, among many other things.

In software architecture, these are called services.  Each service has a standardized interface to be connected to other services to provide you with what you want and need.

Currently, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and others have created monopolies on multiple services.  With this monopoly, they have created economies of profit and make themselves multi-, multi-billionaires.  Likewise, banks and "Wall Streeters" have done the same through financial engineering.  In the process, they have redistributed wealth to their pockets.

If you break up these corporations into services with standardized contractual and technological interfaces, it will redistribute the wealth to those with the will and talent to create and operate them.  Further, if technology is introduced into politics, as it has been into weather forecasting helps.  The government will be able to provide more effective and cost-efficient standards and infrastructure to support these services, further enhancing the wealth of all responsible citizens.

The book Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age discusses incorporating both the Jeffersonian economic architecture and technology into the political/economic framework and infrastructure.  This will create a potentially wealthier future for all.

Back to the Future: How We can Synergize the Current Polarized Politics While Integrating Technology

 Currently, the political situation in the United States is similar to the political chaos in the 1850s—moving toward the Civil War.  Like the Civil War, it is a war between economic architectures, “crony” capitalism and Marx’s Communism.   However, there is a better way, returning to the organizational economic architecture of the founding fathers, in particular Thomas Jefferson.

There is a second overriding issue, of which we are all aware, the change from the Age of Print to the Digital Age that is creating more cultural (and even biological) change than most people are aware of.  Right now, the smart phone is becoming the third lobe of our brains.  It remembers the phone numbers of our contacts, it enables us good asynchronous communications with them (in the form of text messages and email), it tells us the weather (current and future), it sings to us the music we want to hear, it even tells us where to drive our vehicles, and so much more.

But it also knows where we are, what we are doing, what we’re interested in, and who we are doing it with.  In the near future it will enable politicians and bureaucrats to control all our activities; that is unless advanced artificial intelligence enables the technology to take over and reduce humanity to slaves of the singularity.

Again, there is a better way.  My book, Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age discusses an alternative.  It starts, in part 1, with a new theory of the definition and source of economic value. In this part economic value and wealth is defined as a direct result of knowledge. An increase in knowledge increases the organization’s ability to survive and thrive.  It goes on to demonstrate that this concept and theory is very likely to be true.

Part 2 describes and discusses organizational architecture.  This architecture applies equally to individuals and nations throughout human history.  It starts with a static enterprise architecture based on the IDEF0 model.  It details the functions and components of that architecture to show how it interlinks these functions of input, process, output, control and mechanisms.  It then adds a process to the architecture using the OODA (observe, orient, decide and act) loop, to produce an organizational architecture.  Further, it shows how by using this model any organization can become more effective in what it’s producing and more cost-efficient in how it produces it.

Part 3 uses this organizational architecture model within the historical context of humanity to support the reality of organizational model.

Part 4 interlinks this organizational model with both the Declaration of Independence—mostly written by Thomas Jefferson—The US Constitution—of which he was involved—with recent technological concepts of Services Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing to produce a political/economic architecture that allows and enables everyone the “pursuit of happiness” wherein “pursuit” means work at what they want to do and have a talent for.  It also means that there will be a great many more millionaires and very few billionaires, that is, it enables sharing the wealth rather than forcing the wealth through governmental redistribution taxes.

While it would be nice to receive royalties from the sale of this book, my purpose for writing it is my hope the people will take a serious look at the political right and left, and technology change, and consider the far-reaching consequences of not starting from the concepts in this book to transform the political/economic system without having a pyric civil war.

I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas you have on this paper or on Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age.