Thesis: how can we now write about the future when the Singularity cometh and will change everything by leaps and bounds?
Is it becoming impossible to write about a relatively near-future that will likely be so different, none or very few current authors (in his or her right mind...hmmm) can even fantasize? By most expectations, this historical threshold of a new human spurt in techno-socio evolution (the Singularity) will happen in a few decades. But apart from literature, what about the real changes themselves? Will our physical bodies become passe’, self-regenerating, unnecessary? So far any changes can only be surmised in terms of magnitude and generality, not specifics. Current writers and thinkers can’t imagine or dream what our lives will be after the Singularity, although some new vocabulary has come to be, e.g. “post-human” and “trans-human”, which suggest ...…what these words try to grapple with, I suppose.
The Singularity? “Wha” you might say? Well, lets educate ourselves broadly. First, to set current context, there are two meanings of “Singularity” floating around the Culture these days and both carry lots of weight, so "Singularity" is a double Meme. For the nerdy-nerds who visit my “other” blog, The Singularity refers to the fearful “Naked Black Hole”, a cosmic-physics predicted artifact in the form of an infinitely small point in space-time with such immense gravity it chug-a-lugs planets, stars and galaxies at a phenomenal rate…and supposedly spits them back out but into a different space-time universe. The NBH has less likelihood of existing in our sector of the universe than a Jack Russell terrier beating all the Vegas and Monte Carlo black jack tables every play, every day for several years…but since the whole universe is so large, such odds are not so bad. Let’s say most scientists are hoping this is one prediction that is not detected in our corner of the universe. Get the point?
But the Singularity about which we speak here is a tamer (maybe)event that is human-significant, tho involving and driven by human technology. This Singularity will affect our culture and how we will live. This Singularity defines and is defined by a sort of threshold in human affairs (cultural history). Human cleverness will finally whole hog get away from us,hopefully just for a while, and we will need all the species intelligence and cooperation we can muster to come out the other side with sanity, though we will be morphed in many ways. But, again maybe we will finally do the Job and just evolve away.
Our Singularity, 20-30 years from now, will be a confluence of several or more major technical advances, already conceptualized and under research, which will pop into being and “presto-whamo” there you are: newness abounding, sentient artificial intelligent machines (AI), DNA tinkering leading to centuries-long life spans, energy surpluses from harnessing fusion, no limits to pretty much everything of consequence even those we can’t now imagine such as a myriad of delightful quantum devices and toys among other things like teleportation (we’ve already demo’d it in the lab over a meter’s distance tho with just molecules).. Our human-made Singularity will challenge us in many exciting and difficult ways.
Our evolved monkey curiosity will have finally confronted us with an unavoidable door opening and consequences of our own making. We will have to step through that door and develop new paradigms for our lives, our social interactions and our vision of the “future”. Our “bodies” will have new meanings in themselves and to us personally. At base level, there will be artificial intelligence (AI): AI will very likely be poly-modal - it will take the forms of being external to us (near- thinking cyber-robots, cyborgs), internal within us (souped up brains, super hearing and vision, etc), and hybrid - e.g., a true organic internet with brain implants, enhanced human bio-traits via more genetic tinkering and further paradigm shifting advances. In short, we might be presented with the choice, for real this time, of keeping, artificially enhancing or just leaving behind our physical bodies. The meaning of being human will change, hence the terms trans-human and post-human.
Perhaps most importantly, what will we do with ourselves? The Hunter-gatherer mode will be gone as a survival need, but it might hang around as a nagging itch. Maybe it will mean we can choose what “life form” suits our fancy. Personalities perhaps can be uploaded into vastly large memory quantum-multibit arrays on a microchip (VLQMA), or confined in a gaseous bubble (possessing infinitely large quantum degeneracies). Anyone for Self-Aware-Plasmoidal-Sentient-Entity? SAPS!!
Although it's argued that since we can't imagine life after The Singularity, it's almost impossible to write about it. On the other hand, some posit, with good reason, that you could bring Socrates forward in time and show him the Singularity World and he would understand!?!?! But then again, imho so would Phillip K. Dick (1968, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was made into the movie “Blade Runner”, 1982). Is it truly becoming impossible to write about the future? The recent sci-fi/cultural-commentary movie, “District 9”, presents an alternative view that ultra-advanced technology might co-exist with unsolved human-life trivialities such as slums, unsolved garbage disposal, prejudice, etc. Message? The road to Nirvana is long and winding. [more recent authors on this topic: C.Stross, The Glasshouse (2006)and Singularity Sky (2003); J.McDevitt is another post singularity thinker.
Post script. For further interest and reading, Forbes presents coverage of the October 3-4,2009, 4th Annual Transhumanist Summit in NYC ("Calling All Transhumanists", Courtney Boyd Meyers). Here is a brief taste of the thinking of the Summit president, Michael Vassar:
Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same. "Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today's world," he says. His odds don't take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.We can expect a flurry of Singularity discussions and conferences as time moves along.
Vassar's six staffers at the Singularity Institute, including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, "Uncertain Future Project," "Global Catastrophic Risk Project" and "Economics and Machine Intelligence," and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology's trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.
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