Surviving the Singularity, Revisited

Back in pre-millennial year of 1997, I wrote an article for a very beautiful glossy magazine called 21C—Scanning the Future, long since defunct. The article was titled by the editor Mind Children: Extropians. My title, which I like better, was Surviving the Singularity. It has been posted on the web now for years and has accumulated links from transhumanist groups and Singularity pages.

For the article, I did indeed interview some Extropians as well as like-minded transhumanists. A transhumanists is someone who considers himself to be in transition to a post-human state—molting the fragile human form to become an entity that is hopefully smarter, more durable and longer lasting. An Extropian (see Extropy.org) is a member of Extropy Institute, a transhumanist organization (some would say cult) based in Los Angeles. Extropians, in general, share a libertarian philosophy and an aspiration to live forever through the application of rapidly developing technology. A staple of belief for transhumanists is a rapidly approaching Singularity, a moment in time when technology is advancing so rapidly that it becomes beyond human capability to predict all the ramifications and unintended consequences. Despite this uncertainty, as my article demonstrates, transhumanists tend to see the Singularity as a kind of “techno-rapture” after which we will all be in a better place.

Credit for the original concept of the Singularity goes to John Von Neumann, the brilliant originator of game theory and author of the ‘mutually assured destruction (MAD)” concept that guided our Cold War military policy. The one who really popularized the idea, however, was Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and author of some classic science fiction novels, like True Names and Marooned in Real Time. The catalyst for the Singularity, according to Vinge, was the increase in computing power, until we can build a greater than human intelligence. From my article:

"We humans," says Vinge," have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what ifs" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than (Darwinian) natural selection. Now by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals... From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control."

The newest Singularity proponent is Ray Kurzweil, whose book The Singularity is Near has recently been published (I haven’t read it yet). He bases his view, in part, on his Law of Accelerating Returns; basically that technology feeds back on itself to further speed technological development. In the 21st century, he says, we will experience 20,000 years of progress as measured in 20th century units (progress units, hereinafter to be called the kurzweil). If you think back to where the world was in 1900, you can see that he has a point. Advances in not only information science, but biotechnology and particularly nanotechnology are hastening the arrival of the Singularity in Kurzweil’s view.

When I wrote Surviving the Singularity, I did so from the standpoint of a journalist, reporting more or less uncritically on the views of my transhumanist subjects. Now I like to think of myself as an analyst, and as such, I am not a big believer in the Singularity. In my book, Nanotech Pioneers, I use the drug industry to demonstrate that technology doesn’t always work out the way you would expect:

There are perhaps exceptions to be found to the overall march of technology. One problematic area, for instance, has been the field of drug development. The 1990’s should have been the golden era for drug discovery. New methods of “combinatorial chemistry” had made it possible to create almost any organic compound that could be imagined. The sequencing of the human genome was revealing new drug targets on a regular basis. Robotic technologies were automating the process of preclinical testing to the tune of 100,000 individual assays per day. Everything was in place for incredibly rapid progress. But somehow it didn’t happen. At a drug discovery conference, held in June 2000, I heard the keynote speaker Doug Livingstone of Novartis Research Foundation moan, “We bought you the robots, now where are the drugs?”

The buzzword of the conference was “de-bottlenecking,” an egregious neologism that implies a negation of the verb “to bottleneck (as in: I bottleneck, he bottlenecks, they are bottlenecking, we should all be de-bottlenecking). When I was a kid, at parties I would spin a bottle between members of the opposite sex, who were circled around it. Whomever de bottle pointed to, her I would get to neck with. With all this de-bottlenecking going on, it is not surprising that little in the realm of actual drug discovery was getting done.

After the robots were deployed, the slow point in drug development, by common consensus, was assay development. According to a number of companies, this problem could be fixed if you buy their _____ (fill in the blank) a). fluorescent protein, b) electrochemiluminescent reagent, c) ion channel technology, d) microfluidic chips, e) cell line, f) software. All of which might have seemed true to a participant of the conference in June 2000. But the real bottleneck, it seems in retrospect, was a shortage of expertise. It takes a clever person (or two or three or four) to devise an assay that will give a meaningful result.

Another problem for the drug industry was the implementation of an innovative management concept called “drug champions.” Researchers, you may be surprised to learn, reside toward the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to drug companies. They are hired and fired on a project basis while management is, relatively speaking, forever. The idea was that researchers who had discovered a new drug candidate would work their way up the management ladder by following their drug and serving as an advocate for that drug within the company through animal and human trials. The problem was, that by the time that a drug made it to human trials, a “drug champion” might have eight years of his career wrapped around this one particular chemical. Not surprisingly, these researchers became eloquent and forceful proponents of “their” compound. So much so that it became difficult to drop drug compounds in early trials. Drugs that never should have made it past animal testing survived until human Phase III clinical trials. By this time hundreds of millions of dollars of the company’s money had been invested and it took a particularly brave and forceful manager to point out obvious disappointments. A state of corporate cognitive dissonance ensues, group denial. The drug gets pushed until the FDA says no. Most of the oft-quoted $800 million dollar figure for new drugs consists of the amortization of costs for drugs that don’t make it through to approval.

Technology can’t overcome every obstacle. Even if all the new compounds that chemists could invent were effective drugs, they would still have to be tested on humans, a process that can take at least five years and usually much longer. However much the science might say “this drug will work” based on theoretical grounds and animal testing, the government, rightly, will not approve it until it has been shown to be effective and safe in human trials.

Another great part of the problem with the drug discovery process has been the focus of the major drug companies. Faced with the loss of large moneymakers due to patent expiration, the major drug companies were hungry in the nineties and still today for large, blockbuster drugs. Drugs that might have helped tens of thousands of people were ignored because of the economic need to find drugs that they could sell to millions of people--usually drugs that were only marginally better than those already sold in well-established markets. When Vioxx was removed from the shelves, many patients simply resorted to ibuprofen, a generic, over-the-counter drug with a good safety profile and a long history.

The approval rate for new drugs by the Food and Drug Administration was stagnant throughout the nineties and beyond. More depressing still, some of the blockbuster drugs that had been approved, like the Cox-2 inhibitor Vioxx, had to be pulled from the shelves due to safety concerns.

For those believers in the apotheosis of technology, I say beware the human factor. People are the ultimate consumers of technology and they have a lot of problems and eccentricities. Machines don’t spend money and it is money, after all, that makes the world go ‘round.