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Is History
Converging?
Again?
Jürgen
Schmidhuber
June 2006
(updated 2012)
Associate an error bar of not much
more than 10 percent with each date below
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This page is based on the concluding section of
J. Schmidhuber: New Millennium AI and the Convergence of History. In W. Duch and J. Mandziuk, eds.,
Challenges to Computational Intelligence, Springer, 2006. Preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/cs.AI/0606081,
June 2006.
Update of 2012: In
Singularity Hypotheses,
Springer, 2013.
PDF of preprint.
Summary.
Essential historic developments (that is,
the subjects of major chapters in many history textbooks) match
a binary scale marking exponentially declining temporal intervals,
each half the size of the previous one and equal to a power of 2
times a human lifetime (roughly 80 years - throughout recorded history many individuals
have reached this age).
It seems that history itself is about to converge around 2040
in an Omega Point (Teilhard de Chardin, 1916)
or Historic Singularity
(Stanislaw Ulam, 1958) -
compare Schmidhuber's computer history speedup law.
Or is this impression just a by-product of the way humans allocate
memory space to past events? Scroll down for more!
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~29 lifetimes or
~40,000 years ago
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Modern humans start colonizing the world from Africa
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~28 lifetimes ago or
~20,000 years ago
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Bow and arrow invented; hunting revolution
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~27 lifetimes ago or
~10,000 years ago
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Invention of agriculture; first
permanent settlements; beginnings of civilization;
colonization of the Americas
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~26 lifetimes ago or
~5,000 years ago
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First high civilizations (Sumeria, Egypt),
and the most important invention of recorded history,
namely, the one that made recorded history possible: writing
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~25 lifetimes ago or
~2,500 years ago
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Axial Age: The ancient Greeks invent democracy and found Western science/art/philosophy, from algorithmic procedures and formal proofs to
anatomically perfect sculptures, harmonic music, and organized sports.
Old Testament written;
major Asian religions founded. Persian empire is only
empire ever to encompass close to 50% of humankind. High civilizations in China, origin of the first
calculation tools, and India, origin of the zero
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~24 lifetimes ago
8th century AD
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Bookprint (often called the most important invention of
the past 2000 years) invented in
China.
Islamic science and culture start spreading across
large parts of the known world (this has frequently been
called the most important event between Antiquity and
the age of discoveries)
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Omega - 23 lifetimes
15th century AD
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The largest empire ever
stretches from Korea all the way to Germany.
Chinese fleets and later also European vessels start
exploring the world. Gun powder and guns invented in China.
Rennaissance and printing press (often called the most influential
invention of the past 1000 years) followed by the Reformation
in Europe. Begin of the
Scientific Revolution
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Omega - 22 lifetimes
18th century
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Age of enlightenment and rational thought in Europe.
Massive progress in mathematics, astronomy, optics, and physics in general;
first flying machines;
first steam engines to power the Industrial Revolution
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Omega - 2 lifetimes
around 1880
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Combustion engines, cheap electricity, and modern chemistry power the
Second Industrial Revolution. Birth of modern medicine through the germ theory of disease.
Genetic theory, evolution theory, globalization, Marxism,
European colonialism at its short-lived peak
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Omega - 1 lifetime
around 1960
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Modern post-World War II society and pop culture emerges.
The world-wide super-exponential
population explosion is at its peak.
Threat of humanity's extinction through hydrogen bombs;
first spacecraft and commercial computers;
DNA structure unveiled
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Omega - 1/2 lifetime around 2000
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Cheap personal computers and the
World Wide Web
power the Third Industrial Revolution - at the moment of
this writing (2006) we are still living through this.
A mathematical theory of
optimal universal artificial intelligence emerges -
will this be considered a milestone in the future?
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Omega - 1/4 lifetime
around 2020
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Omega - 1/8 lifetime
around 2030
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Previous publications on this topic:
According to Schmidhuber's
speedup law (2003),
since 1623 the delays between successive radical breakthroughs
in computer science have decreased exponentially: each new one
came roughly twice as fast as the previous one; they
seem to converge around Omega = 2040.
Compare the original article
arxiv:cs.AI/0302012
or the local copy.
Also compare
the concept of an approaching historic singularity
(Stanislaw Ulam, 1958), which apparently inspired Vernor Vinge's
writings on the
technological singularity.
See also more recent books on this topic by Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil and others.
Fibonacci Web Design by
Juergen Schmidhuber
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Wishful thinking?
The following disclosure should help the
reader to take this list with a grain of salt.
The author, who admits being very interested in witnessing the
Omega point, was born in 1963, and therefore perhaps should not
expect to live long past 2040. This may motivate him
to uncover certain historic patterns that fit his desires, while
ignoring other patterns that do not.
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Again?
Others may feel attracted by the same trap.
For example, Kurzweil (2005) plots
exponential speedups in sequences of historic paradigm shifts identified
by various historians, to back up the hypothesis that "the singularity
is near." His historians are all contemporary though,
presumably being subject to a similar bias. People of past
ages might have held quite different views. For example, possibly some
historians of the year 1525 felt inclined to predict a convergence
of history around 1540, deriving this date from an exponential
speedup of recent breakthroughs such as
Western bookprint (around 1444), the re-discovery of America
(48 years later), the Reformation (again 24 years later - see the pattern?),
and other events they deemed important although today they are mostly forgotten.
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The nature of human memory.
Could it be that such lists just
reflect the human way of allocating memory space to
past events? Maybe there is a general rule for
both the individual memory of single humans and the collective
memory of entire societies and their history books:
constant amounts of
memory space get allocated to exponentially larger, adjacent
time intervals further and further into the past. For example, events
that happened between 2 and 4 lifetimes ago get roughly as much
memory space as events in the previous interval of twice the size.
Presumably only a few "important" memories will survive
the necessary compression. Maybe that's why there has never been a
shortage of prophets predicting that the end is near - the important
events according to one's own view of the past always seem to
accelerate exponentially.
A similar plausible type of memory decay allocates O(1/n)
memory units to all events older than O(n) unit time intervals.
This is reminiscent of a bias governed by a time-reversed
Speed Prior.
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