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February 05, 2006
The Singularity
"will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. ... The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution." (p. 20, 21)
Ten years ago at Wall Data, we built software that could build software. We constructed a product in which a human could sketch a model of the semantics of his or her data and software would design and construct the relational database, construct all the queries, and build all the forms and reports. It worked, and in fact it still works. Our only problem was that we couldn't convince anyone with a deep pocket (i.e., Microsoft or Oracle) to get involved. And it was too big of an idea for a small software company.
Indeed many projects have constructed software that builds software. In a way, FrontPage, which I'm using right now is constructing software in that it's transforming this WYSIWYIG text into HTML. That's not much. Our data modeling software did much more -- writing pages and pages of ASP code that were inferred from the semantic model.
My experience causes me to believe that software systems can build themselves. They can watch what humans do with them and adjust themselves as necessary. Of course, if they can do that, they can also watch what machines are doing with them and adjust themselves as necessary. And at that point, we have systems that are building new systems, without a "human in the loop."
When that happens, we've reached critical mass. Because at that point, the machines accelerate past us. They work so much faster than we do, they have so much greater capacity, and they are so much cheaper to make, train, and connect. They don't need motivational lectures; they don't require change management consulting; they don't need promotions; they don't get jealous of one another; and they don't die just when they know something useful. They probably will have problems we don't understand ...
And THAT's the point -- once systems can build systems without a human in the loop, they will pass us by and we will be unable to comprehend them. At best, we can hope to be their pets.
Posted by DavidK at February 5, 2006 12:21 PM | Permalink