Please distribute to others who may be interested...
And apologies if you receive this more than once...
You are hereby invited to a new lecture in our "Clea
Foundations" series, which addresses fundamental issues that are
likely to interest people with different disciplinary
backgrounds.
(The CLEA Foundations lectures are a more large-scale
complement to our long standing ECCO seminars series)
Time: Monday, April 8, 2019, 14:00 - 16:00
Place: Promotiezaal - D2.01, building D,
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels
If you cannot attend, the lecture will be streamed live at: https://vub.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=135326dc-cca5-4428-91be-aa24008e5424
21st Century
Singularity
A Big History
Perspective
by
Andrey
Korotayev
Abstract: The idea that in the near future we should
expect "the Singularity" has become quite popular recently,
primarily thanks to the activities of Google technical director in the
field of machine training Raymond Kurzweil and his book The
Singularity Is Near (2005).
It is shown that the mathematical analysis of the series of
events (described by Kurzweil in his famous book), which starts with
the emergence of our Galaxy and ends with the decoding of the DNA
code, is indeed ideally described by an extremely simple mathematical
function (not known to Kurzweil himself) with a singularity in the
region of 2029. It is also shown that, a similar time series
(beginning with the onset of life on Earth and ending with the
information revolution - composed by the Russian physicist Alexander
Panov completely independently of Kurzweil) is also practically
perfectly described by a mathematical function (very similar to the
above and not used by Panov) with a singularity in the region of 2027.
It is shown that this function is also extremely similar to the
equation discovered in 1960 by Heinz von Foerster and published in his
famous article in the journal "Science" - this function
almost perfectly describes the dynamics of the world population and is
characterized by a mathematical singularity in the region of
2027.
All this indicates the existence of sufficiently rigorous global
macroevolutionary regularities (describing the evolution of complexity
on our planet for a few billion of years), which can be surprisingly
accurately described by extremely simple mathematical functions. At
the same time it is demonstrated that in the region of the singularity
point there is no reason, after Kurzweil, to expect an unprecedented
(many orders of magnitude) acceleration of the rates of technological
development. There are more grounds for interpreting this point as an
indication of an inflection point, after which the pace of global
evolution will begin to slow down systematically in the long
term.
About the speaker:
Prof. Korotayev is Head of the Laboratory for Monitoring of the
Risks of Sociopolitical Destabilization at the National Research
University Higher School of Economics and a Senior Research Professor
at the Center for Big History and System Forecasting of the Institute
of Oriental Studies as well as in the Institute for African Studies of
the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is full professor at the Faculty
of Global Studies of the Moscow State University.
This lecture is organized by the Center Leo Apostel for
Transdisciplinary Studies:
in collaboration with the ECCO seminar series:
http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108
--
Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Center Leo Apostel
Free University of Brussels (VUB)
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
Free University of Brussels (VUB)
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
