Up@dawn 2.0

Monday, February 20, 2012

The Technological Singularity

For the finale of my trilogy of posts on my united mind theory, I'd like to talk about how technology plays a role in the idea of us being God. So far I've said that our power of will is what constructs reality. Add to that our freedom of will, and it would seem that we should be able to do pretty much anything we could imagine (i.e. telekinesis, flying, etc). In that case we really would have what we consider the power of God. But obviously we can't do that (trust me, I've tried). This coincides of course with the idea of the collective agreement of rules, but maybe we didn't want to strip ourselves of this power entirely. Maybe we want to gradually gain this power while we also gain the wisdom from experience to responsibly use it.

This is where technology comes into play. We can build tools to manipulate just about every aspect of physics to accomplish nearly everything we can think of. We can build planes to fly, we can build robots to move things without using our own hands, and so on. And if things like Star Trek are any bit close to the truth, we can expect a great deal more power to come. Who's to say we won't someday build something to give us the power of a god?

That day may come sooner than you think. The movie Transcendent Man was mentioned in class, which is about a guy named Ray Kurzweil. He believes that an event he calls the technological singularity will occur within the next 20 years or so. This event is when we will create - either through artificial intelligence or by modifying our own bodies/brains with implants and genetic engineering - a new level of intelligence far beyond our own at this time. It is called a singularity because, much like you can't see beyond the event horizon of a singularity (black hole), we can't predict what this new intelligence will do and thus what the future beyond this moment will be like. Not only because we don't know how much it will be capable of, but because we also don't know what it would even want to do with its power.

I for one lean more to the side of modifying our own intelligence to increase our own power. The prediction of AI is based on the growing rate of processing power our computers have and that at that rate they will soon surpass our brains. However, I think there is more to our power of will than sheer processing power. Perhaps some day we will discover what the bridge between the two is and figure out how to build one, but I think the unification of man and machine will come long before that.

At any rate, I strongly believe that we will someday build Deus ex Machina (God from machine). So in the end, it was not God who created us, but us who created God...or maybe it's a chicken and the egg like situation.

12 comments:

  1. So, Erik, you're with Prof. Walker who wants "to create godlike beings who are as far removed from us in intelligence as we are from apes," and who will develop "hyperlanguages" and provide a Theory of Everything?

    Bill McKibben says: "Not to be impolite, but for this we trade our humanity?"

    Or can we build Deus ex Machina and still retain and value our humanity?

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  2. I think "humanity" in one sense is just a stepping stone in the larger order of things. But it depends on what you mean by humanity. Is it the current biological setup of our bodies? If so then the above statement holds. If it's simply the notion of sentient beings with free will then I think that will continue forever, regardless what physical form it comes in. As for ideals, those change from generation to generation already anyway.

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  3. I certainly fear anything that has superior intellect than humans AND willpower. Rational computers using mathematical logic will certainly deem many of us and our current ways of life as obsolete, and perhaps rightfully so, but, I kinda like my irrationalities.

    I don't think, as Erik said, though, that willpower is equivalent to processing power. But, if we find out it is, I think we're all up shit creek.

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  4. I'm reminded at this moment of Stephen Hawking comparing potential space aliens to the early colonialists and pointing out that at least so far as our empirical evidence has shown, the result every single time an advanced civilization meets with a less advanced (scientifically, economically, etc) civilization does not go very well for the less advanced civilization at all.

    One thing I'm curious about, because I know very little about the theory you've been talking about. If our "collective" will or whatever creates our reality, how does this account for people who discover things completely contrary to the collective conventional wisdom. I mean, everyone in the whole world KNEW with the certainty of fact that the sun revolved around the earth. Until one guy came along and discovered it didn't.

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    1. Maybe when everyone thought the world was flat, it really was. And then we decided it would be more useful for it be round so we could more easily get to the other side. If I remember correctly, that discovery did happen around the time of the early stages of world-wide trade/exploration. A ridiculous thought I know, but interesting.

      What I really think though, is that our higher, individual consciousness, the ones making these discoveries, are not aware of the collective subconscious's thoughts and activities, the one doing the manifesting. It thinks on its own. We as individuals are merely tools sent out to gather information and bring it back. On that note, I believe in reincarnation in that when we take it back (die) we dump all that info off and come back for more.

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  5. I think, Jamie, that the techno-utopian Singularitarians are not to be confused with the New Age Quantum "Flapdoodlers" (I know, we need a more neutral moniker for them). It's the latter who speak of collective consciousness creating reality etc. But, it's a fair question: what becomes of freethought and heresy in a world run by Deus ex Machina? And can we program our cybernetic Overlords with a benign humanity-preserving chip? (Sci-fi geeks will recall Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics...)

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  6. The Three Laws are:
    A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

    A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

    A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

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    1. Wasn't the somewhat ironic point of the three laws (in at least one of his stories) that the most logical way to protect humans would be to enslave us so we stop all this self-destructive business. :)

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    2. I don't think the machines would want to enslave or kill us. What would really be the motive for it? How would it benefit them such that the effort of going to war with us is really worth it. If their intelligence is beyond us, I think so too would be their wisdom. I believe they would value life at least as much as we do, and perhaps would even appreciate us as their predecessors/creators. We didn't exterminate monkeys when we found out we evolved from them.

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  7. For those mystified by this talk of the Singularity, a lot of it comes from Ray Kurzweil, subject of the documentary film "Transcendent Man"-

    "Kurzweil predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and millions of times more powerful. This will be the dawning of a new civilization enabling us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil's post-biological world, boundaries blur between human and machine, real and virtual. Human aging and illness are reversed, world hunger and poverty are solved, and we cure death."
    http://transcendentman.com/about/

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  8. I would just like to say that us Flapdoodlers (And I don't want to speak for all of the 'Flappies' as we like to be called) don't discount the idea that paradigms can shift. First of all, people that are familiar with quantum mechanics will be the first to credit unconventional thought. I think it is meant to go deeper. Collective consciousness is not conjuring. It's the ideas that we share, or, like you (Jamie) said in your presentation today that you/mystic Christians/Buddhists/panentheists/Spinoza/Einstein kind of "believe" if you will of an underlying connection between all things; that the Universe is God and God is us. Some people are just drawing a communicator line between the more mysterious aspects of quantum theory and these seemingly timeless beliefs to, I suppose, get closer to the answer. It is true, though, that we (society in general, not some of the optimists we have with us) all tend to agree on some things a priori, without question that maybe if we all changed our minds about, would be effected positively.

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