While dallying with my wording of a comment on a post about Google Chrome at Written Inc, I accidentally coined the term “Borgward” (not entirely a new term) which means “approaching Borg-ness,” which means moving towards a Borg-like singularity.
This is all very, very tongue-in-cheek. Borgward is a stupid word that’s amusing on a childish level — a funny-sounding word! — but there’s nothing necessarily ‘wrong’ with that.
If it wasn’t for briefly revelling in that pure, childish amusement, I would never have stumbled on the subsequent, and much more insightful notion of The Paradox of Perfection: forcing things to be perfect forces novel and fruitful accidents to occur.
Whereas when we just let everything go willy-nilly, accidents may occur but we can’t identify or attend to them as effectively. Unless they occur with reference to a well regulated background, they pass us by (and lead to another kind of paradox: randomness eventually develops into a regular pattern — albeit one that happens to us rather than by us).
Scientific discoveries are made within contexts of perfectionism: gravity didn’t just suddenly occur to Newton; his proverbial apple could only have been “fruitful” within the context of an ongoing attempt to work out a perfect theory.
In turn, this notion promises to generate useful insights into creative and evolutionary processes more generally. Conceiving evolution as a sequence of accidents isn’t very compelling in itself; we need the other half of the equation. There may be a lot to learn by metaphorically conceiving Nature/History/God as an anthropomorphic “perfectionist” — who is trying to design the perfect AI, perhaps — who occasionally pinches out fruitful accidents.
And in terms of the ethical and cultural considerations of AI and technological singularity, this line of thought suggests a way to conceive what kind of subjective value (i.e. value for living — the value that ultimately matters the most) that AI could/should generate for us in the future:
Everything comes down to the littlest moments of amusement and discovery. The best that any technology — any society — can do is to perpetuate this process.
We’ll never be Borg because there’ll always be accidents, and paradoxically, moving Borgward may be the most effective way to ensure accidents continue to be fruitful, effective, and fun. (And as Scoble notes, Google has a sense of humour.)
