The Singularity Is Near is subtly self-contradictory

There is a subtle inconsistency in Ray Kurzweil’s futurist manifesto The Singularity Is Near. He kicks of the book by defending his Theory of Accelerating Returns, plotting major historical events from various “lists” onto a logarithmic time axis.

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These events are drawn from various lists published by Carl Sagan (the “cosmic calendar”), the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the American Museum of Natural History, and many experts in astrophysics, geology, anthropology, and history. There are various blog posts that criticize this approach and others that agree with it’s premise, if not the sketchy axes.

Later in the book, Kurzweil argues that any field that falls under the definition of an “information technology” can benefit from the exponential trend in computational power, whereas those fields that remain un-augmented will have to settle for old-school linear growth.

These two premises are incompatible. On the one hand, there is a universal and unstoppable acceleration of progress stretching across cosmological, evolutionary, archaeological, and modern timescales. On the other, all the industries that aren’t in some way digitized or digitizable with modern computing technology is exempt from the aforementioned Universal Law. But clearly the processes at work in the 13.8 billion years prior to the invention of the computer can’t possibly qualify as “information technologies” according to this latter definition.

The counterargument to this is that the workings of the universe and evolution themselves represent an ongoing computation that has accelerated without conscious thought from any being. In fact, human intelligence and the new silicon substrate for computation is just a tool in the toolbox of the self-propagating meme that is the Law of Accelerating Returns. Which I guess works too.