The Singularity is something I've been meaning to bring to this forum for some time. What has kept me, I think, is the scope of its implications, and trying to say anything intelligible about it.
I think it was around 5 years ago when I first came across Vernor Vinge's concise but potent and provocative essay, The Coming Technological Singularity, in which Vinge outlines what he sees as an imminent future of super-human intelligence, at which point, he claims, "the human era will have ended." The time which Vinge expects this to happen by is 2030.
For those who don't know, Vernor Vinge is a sci-fi author, computer scientist and now-retired math professor. He's written a handful of Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas, including Fire Upon The Deep, A Deepness In The Sky, Rainbows End, and Fast Times at Fairmont High. His article on the singularity was published in 1993 in conjunction with a NASA-sponsored event called VISION-21 Symposium.
Basically, this short essay is something that I haven't been able to forget. It's like an impassive, left-justified afteraffect, or a whirling spiral funneling into oblivion that appears whenever I begin to think about 'human progress' and notions of morality.
For example, what prerequisite is there for environmental alarmism if machines are to be the next expression of evolution? 1
And for theists—what significance do popular conceptions of 'God' have in a universe where consciousness can be uploaded and preserved? 2
What will become of human selfhood, that perceived uniqueness which leads to ideas like 'soul'—as all forms of intelligence become omni-accessible—and by entities with a far greater capacity to create cogent understanding than ourselves?
Does this not turn Jesus of Nazareth and his all-too-human brand of prophecy on its nappy head?
I feel confident that a dizzying and accelerating stage of technological advancement is underway, and while there are always Ludites—history tends to preserve them as such.
Vinge concludes his essay thusly:
I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links.
He then goes on to quote the Amercian physicist, Freeman Dyson:
"God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."
Time recently did a feature on The Singularity, check it out: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
1 I think the word 'machine' is provincial here. What we're really talking about is forms of AI that could foreseeably comprise processes which are quite biological.
2 And perhaps re-implanted in our bodies which might be healed or reconstructed through biological engineering
