Roboethics (What, Virginia, No Singularity?)

[via Wired] Bruce Sterling reports back edifyingly from the First International Symposium on Roboethics, which took place earlier this year in Sanremo, Italy. He writes: "Ever since Karel Capek introduced the term with his 1924 play R.U.R. or Rossum's Universal Robots, robots have been our theatrical attempt to dress up technology in human form. They embody our very human desire to make technology into a buddy or maybe a doppelgänger - but at least somebody. Somebody like us, with one improvement: We can make a robot behave, even though we've never managed that trick with ourselves."

A survey of abstracts from the symposium provides plenty to chew on, though of course such descriptions tend to be rather genial and general. One word that appears to be conspicuous in its absence there is “Singularity.”

For those of you who have never before stumbled onto this term, it tends to be attributed to Vernor Vinge (a fantastically interesting thinker and the author of a number of sprawling, provocative space-operas that just drip with sensawunda). "Singularity-talk" usually amounts to either (1) a claim that exponentially increasing technological development will eventuate in a sudden and total historical discontinuity or (2) a claim that the creation of "superhuman" post-biological intelligence will eventuate in a comparable discontinuity.

I think that discussions of “singularity” at their best (which can certainly be interesting and unquestionably well-intentioned) tend to overestimate the smooth-function of postulated technologies while underestimating the extent to which technological development is embedded in social and cultural contexts that are not readily represented in exponential graph-curves. Meanwhile, at its worst, singularity-talk can devolve into a kind of manifest-destiny discourse bulldozing forward without much but its own acceleration to recommend it, something like techno-apocalyptic survivalist ranting conjoined to the tropic paraphernalia of transcendental theology.

It remains to be seen whether scholars, scientists, and policy-makers can grapple with the promises and quandaries of the technological mediation and augmentation of human (and nonhuman!) intelligences, as well as the emergence of quasi-intelligent modes of technological agency – but without wandering into what seems to me the usually transcendentalizing, often distracting, sometimes deranging metaphorical entanglements of singularity-talk. But, heck, for all I know, it was all singularity all the time behind the scenes at the symposium itself.