Wikipedia defines The Singularity as "a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseen consequences for human civilization." Discourse on the topic often cites Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a probable cause of The Singularity. In this short-ish post, I aim to demonstrate why The Singularity won't happen anytime soon.
1. Energy Constraints
There is, ultimately, a hard entropic limit to the number of operations a computer can perform per second for a given amount of energy input. And that upper limit assumes conditions which cannot be realized by a normal, everyday computer, such as being stuffed into a black hole or existing in a constant low-Kelvin temperature state.
At this time, computer usage consumes 1 percent, or slightly over 1 percent, of the world's electricity consumption. A single ChatGPT-4 query will use between 1/1000th and 1/100th of a kilowatt hour of electricity, and at this time AI is still in an early phase of consumption, with systems like ChatGPT still being perceived largely as a novelty. But imagine, if you would, a world where such heavy data-crunching applications are used on a day-to-day basis by the average person around the world. Imagine, if you would, a 24/7 arms race between criminals and state hackers who use AI to crack cryptographic digital security layers and their would-be targets who add more and more layers to protect their property. To brute force AES-256 would take enough power to supply 50 million American households for billion of years; even assuming resourceful programmers managed to find shortcuts that trimmed this time down drastically, hacking would still be a quite expensive affair. In real life the most efficient operation to mine one Bitcoin will expend 155,000 kilowatt hours; at its peak Bitcoin mining took up more than 7% of Kazakhstan's electricity usage, despite being a fairly rich country of almost 20,000,000 people.
In short, imagine a world with exponential growth in demand for computing intensity, while electricity supply is growing at a far slower rate. After all, it takes years to commission one gas-fired power plant and even longer to bypass the hurdles to build a nuclear plant. Wind and solar entail buying up large properties in certain locations, and have their own issues, such as scaling up battery capacity. Something will eventually have to give.
The average voter, of course, won't tolerate 60% of local power consumption being siphoned away from their homes and toward such enterprises. So the human factor will further restrict the combined processing power of all computers, which makes the unlimited growth of The Singularity impossible.
2. Water Constraints
Related to the above, computers guzzle water. A lot of water. Cooling is used to raise computing efficiency and keep physical components from frying. Every 5-50 ChatGPT queries will use half a liter of water, and one Bitcoin transaction uses 16,000 liters of water. Water supply is arguably harder to amp up than electricity, as groundwater is finite and a desalination plant would take years to build. And again, the average person wouldn't tolerate half their municipal water supply being diverted from their homes to giant computing plants.
3. Other Constraints
Imagine a future where AI can churn out useful inventions by aggregating patented schematics. Beyond-human-control technological progress is a big part of the whole "Singularity" concept. Assuming that world governments didn't crack down on this in the name of intellectual property rights, there are still problems. An invention that's never built is useless, and to do so entails building physical supply chains and infrastructure. 3D printers are limited to working with certain materials and can only produce a certain range of results. Assuming human owners of these enterprises, it would remain within human control. Assuming that governments recognized the property rights of AI, it still wouldn't be outside human control unless all the work was automated as well.
The rate of advancement here would be slowed by physical constraints. It takes so much time to build a factory and build/install the prerequisite equipment. It takes so much money as a startup, and needs to turn a profit that might not materialize. A factory needs to bring in supplies through vehicles that cannot move faster than roadway speed limits. And so on.
