It is inherantly and in totality the point where change in all areas of human endeavor as a whole transform from a growth curve to an event horizon.

The distance in time between bubbles of change events compresses to zero while the number of events in the clusters increase exponentially.
Bang you go from a change curve to a horizontal explosion of constant and constantly accelerating major change events.

Prediction of the change past the initial event horizion is impossible.
And yet you are all hung up on transcending humanity and creating god machines. You are hung up on predicting the unpredicatable.

WRONG!
Your premis is that YOU DON”T KNOW! YOU CANNOT KNOW!

A path this takes could just as easily be that we genetically modify ourselves into dragons that fly through space sucking up solar radiation while trading dragon porn through quantum communications.

The fact is that it is an explosion in all directions. Everything will happen.
You will wake up in the morning and have to adapt to a new world with a new set of rules. Each and every day.
We must, because we can.

“two, that most readers of “hard” science fiction are men.
(”Hard” sci fi defined by me: Futuristic fiction more preoccupied with physics than psychology.)”

i will agree with that. but i don’t know why it matters for the singularity. i’m interested in the singularity because it represents a confluence of sociobiology and technology. i went to the summit at stanford last year and your anecdote about kurzweil doesn’t surprise me. and i think there were relatively few chicks. in reading science fiction, i prefer allegorical fiction that extrapolates social memes and events to the technical fiction that tends to read more like a patent brief. made up technology isn’t as interesting to me as made up wars and superentities. however, i’m still not certain i can distinguish the two as clearly as you do… where does vernor vinge fit in, for example? i consider him “high” sci-fi, but is he a high hard one? neal stephenson?

“When I discovered evolutionary psychology, I learned that was not true. Hang a mobile and a face over a three-day-old babies. The boys look more at the mobile, and the girls look more at the face. Release toddlers in a playground. Boys play more with trucks, girls play more with dolls. Before they can talk, before they can walk, girls and boys show different interests.”

i was pleased to see you folks note that people can feel offended by such generalizations, but you’re not forgiven yet. here you are making them again. as useful as evolutionary psychology may be, it still shortchanges the fact that i am not a unicorn. i am a chick, and i dig the singularity. to distill my being and thirty years of choices down to biology isn’t fair, though it may be scientific. i imagine this is where the eugenics comments come in. i heart science, but it also scares me a little because it works. why shouldn’t someone point this out in legislation as a reason not to fund programs to push women into science?

“Acknowledging innate differences is not the same as imposing them. I use humor in my book, because we really need to develop a sense of humor about gender differences… Most scholars in the social sciences emphasize the diversity of human behavior. I am interested in what is universal about human behavior.”

that all is probably true, but starting there is a mistake. where are the human beings immune to social constructs you’re using for a control? i somehow manage to be a socialist texan too. the only thing universal about human behavior is our capacity to surprise each other like this. what are you relying on those stereotypes for anyway? stop bending over the box and talk to us again. thanks for the cites, but i don’t trust meta-analysis much. why should i be like someone from 30 years ago? this imposition of gender differences comes out of traditions too. if we acknowledge imposed gender differences as if there is no societal component, we may never get a chance to see the truly innate ones.

“The Singularity is the best thing to happen to sex since some final stages of primate-homonid pelvic evolution enabled face-to-face intercourse among hominids (without losing the ability for rear access).” Forget whacked-out body suits, will ecstacy be legal by then, and will they sell it in a special Viagra-MDMA stack?

After publishing the comment I’d posted here, with a few more ideas thrown in on my blog, I received some very angry hate mail. I was feeling like shit, and wondering if I really was wrong. I was told that your statements were completely benign and that I was a man-hater. Your reply has made me so happy. Sometimes men DO know just what to say. :)
PS I thought the joke about sex after the singularity was pretty funny.

http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Female_chimps_teach_us_about_sexbased_learning_differences.html

These female chimps are the ones who excel in tool use. Not the males.

Some of the female responders seem to be taking you out of context, Joe. As a young woman who has loved science fiction since she learned to read, I did cringe at aspects of this interview, however I understand the basis of what you are trying to say.

The problem is that it didn’t come out exactly right. This ties in perfectly with your point that men and women have different predisposed skills. When men are trying to explain something, it often comes out “wrong”. If I had a nickel for every time my boyfriend said something which initially offended or hurt me, and then he said “I didn’t mean it like that, it came out wrong”, I’d be rich. This is a trend I’ve noticed with every man I have ever been close with, in relationships, or even just friends. Usually I am able to decipher his original intent, put it into better words, ask if that is what he meant, and he says with relief “yes, exactly”. Women are better with language and communication than men are. Do men get their boxers in a knot over me saying that? No. In fact, most of them agree with it. These women who are so disturbed over your statements should realize that it goes the other way too. It isn’t AGAINST women. One of the reasons women are so defensive is that we have a very long history of being severely discriminated against. In a time when there is still debate about our right to choose, a backlash is probably healthy. We need to keep the flame of justice alive if we are to keep progressing to being treated as full citizens.

The part about “chicks” not liking science fiction does make me cringe because I think of myself as a smart, analytical “chick”. I see other girls who are all about partying and reality tv and high heels, and they just bore the hell out of me. But I am still a girl! I am still a chick. I am cool, have a sense of humor, and try not to take things too personally. I wear sneakers, and jeans, but like to think that I am still sexy. We shouldn’t have to be one or the other (a nerd, or a “chick”). Something about the way this was spoken made me feel like women who like science fiction are less of women. Once again, I know that was not the intent, but just to make you aware. It often seems to me that men are less interested in women who are intellectual.

JOE PLEASE READ THIS: Before you write an entire book whose very title could be fairly interpreted in a sexist light…

http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Female_chimps_teach_us_about_sexbased_learning_differences.html

These female chimps are the ones who excel in tool use. Not the males.

One more thing… I just discovered Joe Quirk on Youtube today while searching for video of sperm. I immediately bought his book on amazon. Can’t wait for it to arrive.

To answer your second question: The only way to figure out brain influences in adults is to completely eliminate the effect of genes in one group, and completely eliminate the effect of environment in another group. That’s been done.
Identical twins separated at birth share identical genes but not environment. Adopted siblings share similar home environments but no genes.
The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA), run by Thomas Bauchard, David Lykken, and Nancy Segal managed to track down down 115 pairs of identical twins reared apart and 4 sets of reared-apart triplets. [I still need to check my numbers on the 115.] Twins reared apart had been separated for, on average, 30 years. Some of them didn’t even know they had a twin. They compared them against 217 pairs of identical twins reared together and 114 pairs of fraternal twins reared together.
The twins completed Multidimensional Personality Questionnaires, which quantified their habits, basic personality traits, occupations, hobbies, and their opinions on abortion, capital punishment, and gun control. Their siblings, parents, and spouses also completed questionnaires.
Just by comparing questionnaires, the researchers could predict if they were identical or fraternal to 96% accuracy. Yet whether they were raised in the same family or different families didn’t seem to make much difference.
20% of similarity among twins is attributed to sharing same womb environment. [Devilin, Daniels & Roeder, 1997]
Okay, so MISTRA’s twin studies tell us a lot about what is controlled by genes when environment is eliminated. Can we find a study that tells us what is controlled by environment when genes are eliminated?
The Colorado Adoption Project (CAP) studied 245 adopted children against 245 non-adopted to examine genetic and environmental influences on children’s behavior. [Also check The Texas Adoption Project.]
They put these subjects through a battery of standardized tests, measuring everything from their feelings about their relationships to their feelings about their feelings about their relationships. (My wife would love taking these tests. She would also love to take a test about her feelings about her feelings test.)
When we compare the twin data to the adoption data, we come up with earthshattering conclusion: My therapist owes me a lot of money, and so does yours.
The best book of all about the real evidence for where personality comes from is written by Judith Rich Harris, and it’s called THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION: WHY CHILDREN TURN OUT THE WAY THEY DO. It’s a wonderful, revolutionary read.
http://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Turn-They/dp/0684857073
This evidence is ripe for popularization. I want to push forward the proposal that the reason more women are in Oprah’s audience and more men attend Singularity conferences is because of innate differences in their natural interests.
No evidence shows one sex is superior to another, but it does show that when your brain gets masculinized or feminized by hormones in the womb, there are cognitive trade-offs.
It’s very important to me that any evidence I popularize does not arm sexists. My goal is to illuminate relationships. I was a loser in love until I discovered this subject, and it enlightened my love life Any suggestions on how best to present this stuff would be appreciated.

1) Genetic/brain differences as related to gender are either non-existent, negligable or unimportant and anyone who thinks otherwise is sexist and might even be fascist. Except, I think, when it comes to gays… in which case, it IS genetic, because if it’s not, then you lose a good argument against the right wing religious nutballs who think that its “a lifestyle choice” that can be cured.

2) Gender itself isn’t binary, there’s lots of variation… but never EVER call someone who just had their sex changed by the wrong gender.

3) Any real discussion around sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, brain differentiation between sexes — however based on science, anthropology, etc. is to be ignored and anybody who speaks of such things shall be written out of my book of life.

I think I’ve got it now…

And yes, I read Stross’ singularity novels. I don’t attend conferences on the singularity, because unlike some other people, I have a life. You know, school, job, marriage, kids, household, girlfriend? If I get to choose a con a year, no fucking hell I’m going to Accelerated Change. I’m going to the Worldcon.

Yes, this is a random comment. You’ll never see me again, and I won’t come back unless something else from here is linked from Making Light. Thanks for showing your true sexist colours.

*What about the studies that show how different we adults treat our children, based on their gender? You don’t think that pushing cars at a boy from the time he’s born is going to make him interested in them? You don’t think that enforcing a socially acceptable behaviour in girls but not in boys (because, after all, boys will be boys) is going to make them more socially aware?

Whoa!

It’s astonishing that such vigorous responses should result from two innocent statements of fact:

one, that less than 1/5 of the presenters and less than 1/6 of the attendees at the Accelerated Change Conference 2004 were women;

and two, that most readers of “hard” science fiction are men.

(”Hard” sci fi defined by me: Futuristic fiction more preoccupied with physics than psychology.)

My agent sells a lot of science fiction. Book publishers who succeed in the marketplace are those who understand that men and women buy different kinds of books, and that difference extends to subgenres of science fiction.

Does your novel emphasize technical detail and scientific accuracy and sacrifice the inner lives of the characters? Mostly boys read it. Does your novel emphasize the relations and inner lives of your characters and sacrifice technical rigor? Mostly girls read it, and mostly because females read more of all kinds of fiction.

Was the title of our interview provocative? “Chicks” I’ve always thought of as the female version of “dude,” and I used both extensively in my first novel without stirring controversy. That said, people should decide what they want to be called, and if someone doesn’t want to be called a “chick,” then I won’t call them that. Though the objection reminds me of the monk who taught my college “Moral Issues” class, who told us calling a child a “kid” is offensive, because “kid” is what you call a goat, not a child.

The passionate responses demonstrate how deeply women feel personally affronted by gender stereotypes. The passion is productive, because we have to achieve consensus on this issue: the biologically based cognitive differences between men and women. I say “we” because most of the people who responded sound like my political compatriots.

Let me establish my credentials as a feminist man. I want Oprah to be president. I want more estrogen and less testosterone leading companies and countries. My wife runs her own business. I do all the cooking and wash all the dishes. My cat Peter died yesterday, and I cried in front of someone with a penis.

I came of intellectual age in Berkeley. I’d always believed that in a gender-blind society, men and women would behave indistinguishably. When I discovered evolutionary psychology, I learned that was not true. Hang a mobile and a face over a three-day-old babies. The boys look more at the mobile, and the girls look more at the face. Release toddlers in a playground. Boys play more with trucks, girls play more with dolls. Before they can talk, before they can walk, girls and boys show different interests.

And adults? All the cognitive tests show that women and girls are superior at face reading, voice reading, and detecting somebody’s social success in their unconscious body language. Men and boys are superior at rotating shapes in their heads, knowing which way is North, and aiming and blocking projectiles.

Many of these differences are analogous to the difference in height. Some women are tall, some men are short, but the tendency toward taller men and shorter women is statistically overwhelming. But some of these differences are drastic and differ by a whole standard deviation on the bell curve.

Reading up on these studies, I realized there was going to be yet another schism in the feminist movement, between those who accept the evidence that boys and girls, in general, are born with different brains specialized for different tasks, and those who insist that political equality must be based on biological indistinguishability, no matter what the science says.

Those of us interested in increasing women’s power and influence must come to terms with the incontrovertible data (and controvertible conclusions) coming out of neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology.

My next book will be called Tools Are From Men, Talk Is From Women: Why The Other Sex’s Brain is Weird. I will push my hypothesis that the two dynamics spurring the rapid size increase in our neocortexes were tool-use and talking. One sex specialized slightly more in technology, the other slightly more in sociality. I suspect that innate differences in brain structure has something to do with why more men buy technology-obsessed science fiction and are the first to salivate over the Singularity, despite the fact that our community has lots of women who say, “Waitaminute! I wrote that nanotechnology novel and attended that conference!”

Also, I believe I speak for all geeks when I say that male geeks most desperately want women to come “play in their sandbox.” Nothing would made male geeks happier than actual females invading their mechanics shops, D&D games, motherboard tinkerings, and baseball card conventions. I don’t think most women are excluded from these halls of geekdom. I think most women are just not interested. http://www.penwill.com/th1/events.html

Robert X. Cringely put it best in his TV show, “Triumph of the Nerds.”

It’s no coincidence that the only woman in the vicinity looks bored, because this is a boy thing — the obsession of a particular type of boy who would rather struggle with an electronic box than with a world of unpredictable people. We call them engineers, programmers, hackers, and techies, but mainly we call them nerds.”

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part1.html

It’s my contention that even if we manage to create a society of perfect gender equality and respect, more men will be interested in fixing cars and engaging in grand motor coordination, and more women will be interested in empathizing and fine motor coordination, because their brains are genetically predisposed to be compelled by different interests.

Those interested in the biology of homosexuality and transgenderism should read the last third of my book. Or listen to me read two chapters from it here: http://www.kqed.org/arts/people/profile.jsp?id=5284

What we want is more freedom to choose whatever the hell we want, right? Acknowledging innate differences is not the same as imposing them. I use humor in my book, because we really need to develop a sense of humor about gender differences.

No, really. A sense of humor. Please.

Remember my How-will-the Singularity-help-me-get-laid ploy? That was supposed to be knee-slappingly hilarious.

Guess not. Though RU, Jeff, and I shared a Beavis chuckle.

Maybe it’s a guy thing.

And a word on this “nature/nurture” notion that keeps cropping up.

There is no such thing as a nature/nurture debate. It’s something that caught on in the media because it rhymes. A gene can only work in an environment that triggers it to turn on. An environment can only express its influence through an animal by turning genes on and off. You can’t impose culture on a rock. You can only impose culture on an animal designed by genes to learn from culture.

That humans are shaped by culture is obvious. Otherwise we wouldn’t have different cultures. But how does culture shape us? By flipping gene switches in an animal designed to learn from culture. Most scholars in the social sciences emphasize the diversity of human behavior. I am interested in what is universal about human behavior.

The guy being interviewed seems to think that because a woman isn’t thrilled by Kurzweil’s vision of high-tech masturbation, she must not be interested in the singularity, and also sex is not a high priority for her except for connecting to another person’s soul. Huh? What’s wrong with wanting to fuck someone in person? Seriously, sex is great and all, but the singularity has WAY cooler stuff to offer than augmented sex.

He says, “My wife doesn’t care about the Singularity. When I talk about it, it doesn’t resonate for her.” Maybe that’s because his wife is an AESTHETICIAN. Not that there’s anything wrong with helping people look their best. It’s just not a strong background in transhumanism, you know?

He also says of his wife, “if I could convince her that people can live forever and be young as long as they want, she might be into it. But my explanation ends up being sort of technical and attenuated.” That’s right. Your wife doesn’t care about the singularity because YOU MAKE IT SOUND BORING.