Dr. Strange and the Psychedelic Origins of the FuturePage: 2/4 (5172 total words in this text) (1857 Reads)  Dr. Strange and the Psychedelic Origins of the Future
by Vincent Bridges
Two In the early 1960s, before heading up into the mountains to La Honda, Ken Kesey lived near a quiet valley south of Stanford University. Back then it was known for its fruit orchards and was called the Valley of Heart’s Delight. It wouldn’t become Silicon Valley until 1971, and by then the radical evolution of the future was under way. But it all started, the future was truly groked and teased into manifestation, right there, amid the peaches and the apricots of Heart’s Delight. That somehow is comforting to contemplate…
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were depression era graduates of Stanford University when they pooled their resources in 1938 to build audio oscillators out of their garage in the valley. Their first customer was Walt Disney, who bought eight oscillators for his new movie Fantasia. Twenty years later, the area was full of new tech companies. In 1959, just as Kesey was discovering LSD up at Stanford, Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductors, discovered a way to mass produce thousands of transistors on a single piece of silicon, inventing, along with Jack Kilby, the computer chip as we know it.
Six years later, Noyce’s boss, director of Fairchild’s Research and Development Laboratories Gordon E. Moore, made an even more fascinating discovery. Since the first prototype microchip, complexity, the amount of transistor power on a single slice of quartz, had been doubling roughly every year. And, Moore predicted in the April 1965 35th anniversary edition of Electronics magazine, this doubling would continue at the same rate for at least the next ten years.
At the end of that decade, Moore revised his prediction to a doubling every two years. Even this however was conservative. Moore’s prediction, and by 1975 it was “Moore’s Law,” became the core faith of the entire global computer industry and the complexity doubling had settled at around 18 months. This growth curve has continued right to the present day, 2005, with the 28th doubling, an increase of over 1,000 billion times the processing power of that prototype chip in just 45 years.
Such radical change is unprecedented in human history. Exponential change, the series of doublings, creates a curve that quite quickly goes straight up. The industrial revolution of the 19th century presented a few examples of such exponential growth; the railroads between 1830 and 1840 doubled their track mileage at almost the same rate as the microchip. This curve drove the radical changes of the 1880s in America, when a farm boy from Ohio, such as Gordon Moore’s grandfather, could catch a train to a new life out in the vastness of the west. Millions rode this wave of technology and America was transformed as record numbers of immigrants signed on to settle the frontier. The trip to California went from four months, on the fastest Clipper ship, to six days and San Francisco went from a gold rush boomtown to a sophisticated city with pretensions of culture.
It was the greatest such Curve in human history to that point, but it leveled out after roughly 14 doublings in 85 years. That curve was limited by material constraints, land, steel, coal and so on, but the electronic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t recognize such constraints. Basically, the only limits are imagination and quantum mechanics. This lack of material limits means that the cost of this technological miracle shrinks as well. The cost of shipping a ton of wheat on the transcontinental railroad was halved at most three times during the era of the railroads’ greatest expansion. By contrast, the price of computing power, transistors on a chip, has halved 30 times. I just bought a memory chip for my PSP that has eight times the computing power of NASA’s Apollo program for under a hundred dollars, and for $5 wholesale you can buy a “smart card” that has the computing power of a 386 PC, circa 1990. Soon, very soon, computers will be so common, and cost so little, that microchips with power that seemed miraculous in 1965 will in fact be as disposable as pocket lint.
Everyone older than 45 or so has lived through the entire shockwave of the curve. Unlike our parents and grandparents, who had as much as a generation to absorb the shock of the 19th and early 20th century’s technological curves, this microchip driven curve shows no sign of slowing down long enough to allow anyone to adjust and become comfortable. Fortunately, the early incremental changes were small enough at each jump that only recently have the shockwaves been sharp enough to shake the nature of our culture, and perhaps very soon, to shape the nature of what it means to be human.
As with the changes, which were global in scale, produced by the rapid technological growth stimulated by the railroads, the exponential and unstopping curve of information technology is also driving changes in everything from biology to robotics to human interactions. And these curves of accelerating change are now proliferating exponentially. Innovation is happening so fast, literally, that people are incapable of defining what they are inventing. All of these curves are now a wave, and they add up to a world that is profoundly different from the past, even the recent past.
With each doubling of Moore’s Law, every 18 months or so, we are coming closer to a shock wave event horizon where, perhaps very suddenly, our everyday reality stops making sense. The idea that the exponential growth of the curve would result in huge and unpredictable social changes was first floated in 1993 at a NASA colloquium by science fiction author Vernor Vinge. He borrowed from astrophysics the idea of a singularity to describe the event and in many ways it is a very apt description. Vinge argued “…that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” Meaning of course the possibility of greater-than-human intelligence, a Dr. Strange level transcendence event.
According to Vinge it could happen on several levels at once. The Curve could create a supercomputer, intentionally or not, that has super-human intelligence. Or the Internet could interconnect so thoroughly as to wake up as a kind of global brain. Or, cyborg technology could wire a human into these expanding cyber-awarenesses and thereby create the greater-than-human consciousness. Or, perhaps, genetic research will produce humans with truly enhanced intelligence and abilities. Any of these are not only possible but also likely in the next few decades. Vinge believes that if the singularity is possible, and everything suggests it is, then its advent is truly unstoppable.
At the present, all serious discussions on the impact of the curve start with Vinge’s ideas on the singularity. The major point of discussion has become what affect the critical uncertainties - such as: Is the curve smooth; is it driven by natural or mathematical forces; will software keep up with hardware; if the curve is predetermined will it result in infinite change? – will have on the immediate future. The game now is looking for “early warning” signs of the approaching cultural singularity.
Because, if the singularity can happen, it will happen, then early nodal points of human electronic interaction and expanded awareness demonstrate that it is happening. These are points where the future seems to be bootstrapping itself. Joel Garreau, in his book Radical Evolution, points to the 2003 Shadow Bowl operation by a group of geeks from San Diego State as a sign post. The group, called The River, wired the entire Super Bowl for human cognition. This is indeed a marker, an early warning sign that, at least on a technological level, the singularity is rapidly approaching.
However, the first such nodal point of the curve’s singularity occurred just a few months after the first appearance of Moore’s Law, back in 1965. And it happened at the crucial intersection of LSD, electronics, music, and the mass consciousness of transcendence symbolized by Dr. Strange’s voyage in search of Eternity. Once that first node happened, the arrival of the singularity, the concrescence of the wave, was just a matter of time.
©2005 by Vincent Bridges - All Rights Reserved
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2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com
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