The Spike

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Overview

The future is going to be radically different, and very soon now. How different? Let Damien Broderick tell you. Human life and the human condition are changing rapidly as we enter the new century, and is about to change even faster and more radically. Dazzling scientific breakthroughs are changing how long we may live, where we live, how we dress, how we communicate, how we work and what work we do, and even how we think and imagine. Scientist Vernor Vinge proposed that humanity is approaching what he called the Singularity and what Broderick renames the Spike: that moment in human history that is rapidly approaching when heretofore unimaginable changes—the advent of artificial intelligene, of human immortality, of nanotechnology, are just a few of the changes—occur with such rapidity and number that the human race will be transformed—or destroyed. And that moment, many experts predict, is almost upon us. This is the book of wonders and dangers, that brings is all together to stretch our minds.

About the Author:
Damien Broderick, a noted Austrailian critic and scholar with an interdisiplinary PhD in literature and science, lives in Melbourne, Austrailia.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Is technological change advancing so rapidly that we can no longer chart its progress? Are we careening ever closer to the point that scientists have dubbed "the singularity," the moment when the pace of innovation will lead to changes so profound that attempting to envision the future becomes an impossible dream? According to Broderick (The Last Mortal Generation; Theory and Its Discontents), the answer is a resounding and enthusiastic yes. As he points out, the rate of scientific change has increased ("spiked") with exponential rapidity over the past 500 years; everyday machines such as personal computers already have microprocessing capacities that far surpass anything originally predicted when they were first invented. Virtual reality applications are routinely used in the operating room, while cloning has entered our world with astonishing speed. So why not, in the extremely near future, "smart paint" that changes color on command and converts light to electricity when no one is in the room? Some of the changes anticipated by Broderick include science-fiction staples such as uploading and copying one's consciousness; freezing terminally ill bodies for revival in the more medically sophisticated future; and so-called "Santa Claus machines," which can build almost anything "washing machines or teacups or automobiles or starships" out of highly abundant, naturally occurring materials. Broderick's freewheeling analysis of the "spike" a phenomenon already dubiously questioned, he admits, in otherwise sympathetic scientific circles may help bring this debate to a more mainstream audience, although his writing, despite its conversational tone, may still have too specialized a scientific and technological vocabulary for the average general reader. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312877828
  • Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
  • Publication date: 2/1/2002
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 384
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.85 (d)

Meet the Author

Damien Broderick is a noted Australian critic and scholar with an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in literature and science. He has published several SF novels and another important speculative science work, The Last Mortal Generation. He lives in Australia.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

—Vernor Vinge, NASA VISION-21 Symposium, 1993


It rushes at you, the future.

Usually we don't notice that. We are unaware of its gallop. Time might not be a rushing black wall coming at us from the future, but that's surely how it looks when you stare unflinchingly at the year 2050 and beyond, at the strange creatures on the near horizon of time (our own grandchildren, or even ourselves, technologically preserved and enhanced). Call them transhumans or even posthumans.

The initial transition into posthumanity, for people intimately linked to specially-designed computerised neural nets, might not wait until 2050. It could happen even earlier. 2040. 2030. Maybe sooner, as Vinge predicted. This is no longer the deep, the inconceivably distant future. These are the dates when quite a few young adults today expect to be packing up their private possessions and leaving the office for the last time, headed for retirement. These are dates when today's babes in arms will be strong adults in the prime of life.

Around 2050, or maybe even 2030, is when a technological Singularity, as it's been termed, is expected to erupt. That, at any rate, is the considered opinion of a number of informed if unusually adventurous scientists. Professor Vinge called this projected event "the technological Singularity," something of a mouthful. I call it "the Spike," an upward jab on the chart of change, a time of upheaval unprecedented in human history.

And, of course,it's a profoundly suspect suggestion. We've heard this sort of thing prophesied quite recently, in literally Apocalyptic religious revelations of millennial End Time and Rapture.

That's not the kind of upheaval I'm describing.

A number of perfectly rational, well-informed and extremely smart scientists are anticipating a Singularity, a barrier to confident anticipation of future technologies. I prefer the term "Spike," because when you chart it on a graph it looks like a Spike! Its exponential curve resembles a spike on a graph of change over time.

The more the curve grows, the larger is each subsequent bound upward. It takes a long time to double the original figure, but the same period again gets you four times farther up the curve, then eight times... so that after just ten doublings, you've risen a thousand times as far, then two thousand, and on it goes. Note this: the time it takes to go from one to two, and then from two to four, is just the same period needed to take that mighty leap from 1000 to 2000. A short time later we're talking a million-fold increase in a single step, and the very next step after that is two million-fold . . .

History's slowly rising trajectory of progress over tens of thousands of years, having taken a swift turn upward in recent centuries and decades, quickly roars straight up some time after 2030 and before 2100. That's the Spike. Change in technology and medicine moves off the scale of standard measurements: it goes asymptotic, as a mathematician would say. An asymptote is a curve that bends more and more sharply until it is heading almost straight along one of the axes—in this case, up the page into the future.

So the curve of technological change is getting closer and closer to the utterly vertical in a shorter and shorter time. At the limit, which is reached quite quickly (disproving Zeno's ancient paradox about the tortoise beating Achilles if it has a head-start), the curve tends toward infinity. It rips through the top of the graph and is never seen again.

At the Spike, we can confidently expect that some form of intelligence (human, silicon, or a blend of the two) will emerge at a posthuman level. At that point, all the standard rules and cultural projections go into the waste-paper basket.

A quick preliminary stroll through the future.

Everything you think you know about the future is wrong.

Excerpted from The Spike by Damien Broderick. Copyright © 2000 by Damien Broderick. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.


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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 17, 2002

    Clear Exposition of a Complex and Controversial Subject

    Damien Broderick has done a wonderful job of outlining many of the technologies and technological trends that are driving exponential change in our world and then analyzing the impacts of those changes on humanity. Better than Moravec's Robot, and Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines (wonderful books in their own right), Broderick has covered the subject of technological progress in the coming decades in a much more broad and practical manner. Easily understandable by the non-scientist and technology neophites, The Spike is nontheless very entertaining and captivating reading for anyone interested in the dynamic social landscape that is rapidly evolving as a result of the interactions between highly complex technologies and human reactions to them. A positive look at our collective future that embraces the possiblities and potentialities of what we might become. Highly recommended.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 25, 2001

    A Vertical Future

    We are already in the early stages of a transition that will radically alter civilization and even the human species itself. THE SPIKE, by Australia's respected cultural theorist and science writer Damien Broderick, offers an insightful survey of cutting-edge science of today and the not-so-distant future. First published in Australia in 1997, THE SPIKE has been thoroughly updated for it's release in the USA. Advances in several fields of applied science are following a course whose graphs have remained relatively flat throughout human history but are suddenly becoming steeper. If current trends continue, the graphs will become almost vertical within the next thirty to fifty years. Dr. Broderick refers to this interval of rapid change as The Spike, because that's what the graphs resemble. Probably the most commonly known of these trends Is Moore's Law, which holds that computing power (expressed as the number of components on an integrated circuit) per dollar will double every eighteen months to two years. The arithmetic is easy to do. Start with 2 x 1 = 2; 2 x 2 = 4; 2 x 4 = 8; by the time you've repeated the multiplication process twenty times you've increased computing power by a factor of a million, and the twenty-first multiplication increases it by a million more. Although trends do not always continue to the runaway Spike stage, there are no obvious reasons to anticipate that current growth will slow significantly within the next thirty years. Because The Spike represents such a dramatic shift in the rate of technological advance, it is impossible to accurately predict what the post-Spike world will be like, but by projecting existing trends into the future experts can make educated guesses. The three fields which are likely to have the greatest impact on the future are biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Broderick provides an intriguing tour of some of the technological wonders that may be part of our reality later this century. Genetic engineering, more fully covered in Broderick's book The Last Mortal Generation, could abolish disease, aging, and even death. Molecular Nanotechnology, or minting (from the initials MNT), may allow the assembly of goods at the molecular level. Using minting, you could produce 'whatever you want to build, if you have the plan and the laws of physics don't forbid it.' With self-replicating assemblers, finished products could be had for little more than the cost of the raw materials. Take diamonds. They're made of carbon, and carbon is cheap. The minting process could use diamond, with a strength-to-weight ratio fifty times greater than steel, to fashion the frames of high-rise buildings or space stations. A serving of perfectly aged and roasted prime rib could be constructed atom by atom. Walkways could be paved with photovoltaic cells. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might take the form of a PC with the reasoning power of the human mind; or a self-aware Internet; or a Super Intelligent machine beside which a human would seem incredibly slow and stupid. Humans could enhance their brains by linking them to other brains or to machines. Or human personalities could be uploaded to machines. The last two possibilities add new dimensions to the question of self-identity. Such things as diamond sky scrapers and linked human brains may seem more like fantasy than science, but they are based on foreseeable development of existing technology. And shockingly, such advanced development could take place within the next fifty years. Mathematician Vernor Vinge predicts a spike some time between 2030 and 2100 for AI, and graphs of trends in several other fields of applied science converge around the year 2050. While Broderick's sweeping account of the current and possible future states of technology is wonderfully exciting, the most valuable aspect of The Spike may be the questions it raises about technology's impact on human society. The

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 2, 2012

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