Approaching the Singularity
One of my favorite things to do is create fictional worlds and universes. These fictional spaces are, usually, located in some kind of future or future-present. The kind of worlds or universes where I’ve extrapolated various things into an absurdity, beautiful, odd, and worth exploring. The Singularity, a sort of socio-cultural and technological black hole that sucks us into its hungry maw before spitting out forever changed, is something I’ve always wondered about as a human being and a worldbuilder.
Wheels keep spinning around and round… As I sleep, I dream of electric sheep. Their bleating is that of popping toasting, bleeping Facebook messages, and the wailing sirens of police cruisers. Each has a programmed sign etched into its ivory fleece. These signs are made entirely of neon-colored LEDs, which burn bright images of familiar numbers into my brain. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…
They keep moving through my mind’s eye, jumping over an imaginary fence for my counting pleasure. I know that somewhere in the background is a factory pumping these babies out—mass producing them for my benefit, but I don’t hear, smell, or see this factory. Cake jams out in the background, making counting less of a monotonous task: And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians/While overweight Americans wear their patriotic jumpsuits/ Wheels keep on spinning round.
My sleeping mind wonders if sentient machines will dream of such things. Will a machine worry about the next car payment? Will a machine worry about its blood pressure or its subpar sex life, while masturbating and using the last of the hot water in the shower? These are questions I have about the post-Singularity world. Will a machine commute to a nine-to-five cubicle job, wishing, hoping for something disastrous to shake things up? Will the machine have to ask the boss for a raise to feel like it has gotten somewhere in the world? Will a machine doubt climate change because it snows outside?
The Singularity is described in several ways by today’s futurists. However, the Singularity boils down to a few basic ideas. The Singularity is often seen as a point in which technological progress has a snowball effect on human civilization, human culture, and the human body.
This theoretical event suggests that our technological progress will allow us to cheat death, have sentient machines, and live on a planet that can be modified or hacked to work more efficiently and effectively.
The Singularity will be a pivotal moment in our species’ evolutionary history—or so the futurists keep telling us. Some suggest that Singularity could very well destroy human beings altogether, making us obsolete and paving the way for something better, stronger, faster, and more efficient than the older models. Instead of walking around in organic meat sacks, we’ll be cruising around in sleek machine bodies or digital representations of our former selves.
Neal Stephenson, a popular science fiction writer, points out that the Singularity has several quasi-religious undertones, making it harder to take this theoretical event seriously:
I can never get past the structural similarities between the Singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind. (Some Remarks, pp. 25-6)
Might we also suppose that the Singularity, like any technological period, will exclude certain peoples or nations across the globe? Will the Singularity develop unevenly, taking place in more developed nations first, before spreading to other horrified onlookers? If this is the case, does the Singularity change anything? Do we still face the same politico-economic paradigms that dominate our modern world?
So, what do we call these things that come out of the Singularity? Will they be humans? Will they be machines? Or, will they be a mixture of the two?
The likely answer is that those coming out of the Singularity will be a mixture of inorganic and organic components, making the survivors of this event neither human nor machine.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls these individuals Singularitarians.
It’s a label that has yet to catch on. Maybe it needs a t-shirt and T.V. show to gain some traction.
Whatever happens, those coming out of the Singularity alive won’t be recognizable. They’ll be aliens with new cultural norms and bodies out of the coolest sci-fi flick. If flesh and blood humans still exist, they’ll be viewed as living flesh and blood fossils.
I’m sure these humans will find homes in the new museums and living history exhibits built by the Singularitarians, who will admire the majestic beauty of the pre-Singularitarians, much like we do with animals in zoos and other such institutions.
When exactly this technological event will take place appears to be a significant point of contention. In 1993, Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, claimed that the Singularity was thirty years away (i.e., 2023). Ray Kurzweil believes it will happen in the next century. Thus, we’re left scratching our heads about when exactly this event will take place—if it occurs at all. I believe Neal Stephenson offers the best answer concerning the technological singularity described by Kurzweil, Vinge, and those transhumanist or extropian thinkers who frequent science and science fiction conventions across the nation.
My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit […] And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a complicated space heater. (Some Remarks, p. 26)
To best illustrate what Stephenson is talking about, just consider the old HEALTHCARE.GOV Website. The original website contained some five million lines of code, but the website was complete shit. It didn’t work like it was supposed to. Even the best programmers couldn’t fix it. Those programmers working on operating systems and video games see similar occurrences.
Code is full of bugs.
Code is expensive and takes far too long to create. The technical know-how needed for coding also limits what code can do and where it will go. This makes it even harder for me to imagine a not-too-distant future when human bodies have been upgraded with the newest hardware or swapped out for a sleek machine.
How does this hardware work if the software is complete shit? Can you imagine having hardware in your body that has software issues? Can you imagine a world where vital organs start crashing left and right because of a software glitch?
The very idea of the Singularity hinges on software development at the same clip as hardware. Recent experiences concerning software seem to indicate that software still needs to catch up.
Maybe the Singularity will be full of cool hardware but shitty software. Maybe that means we’ll need a Singularity 2.0 that will bring kickass software to the party.
Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that man is a slave to the state. If Nietzsche were alive today, he might say that humans have found a new taskmaster: information-communication technology or ICT.
We are bound to the literal and proverbial whims of this new taskmaster.
Our world has become increasingly dependent on its mediation. ICT technology permeates every crevice of modern society, including manufacturing, warfare, politics, advertising, pornography, shopping, dating, healthcare, and, now, learning in public and private institutions. Calling ICT technology simply the new taskmaster doesn’t seem to fit what is occurring in the world we humans have been building for more than thirty years.
Die Informationstechnologie ist das Opium des Volkes.
It has sunken its roots into everything, leeching off and growing in every place imaginable—from developed nations like the United States to the hermit kingdom of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Who is going to build the Singularity? Apple? Microsoft? Google? Will the Singularity offer only a closed (highly controlled) garden for consumers? Will I be able to move with relative ease and even dabble in hacking my own body or mind? Or, would I have to deal with proprietary hardware and software restrictions?
The Singularity, like the honey-sweet of the gods themselves, is just that: Sweet-tasting garbage that’s probably bad for your health, but fun to think about on occasion.
To Err Is Human is a blog by G. Michael Rapp (and visiting writers and content creators). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. However, if you're using any content to add to an ongoing conversation, for teaching purposes, and/or for furthering the hobbies of gaming, storytelling, and worldbuilding, feel free to pull what you want from this blog, so long as you give credit to the original website (https://toerrishuman.xyz) and the author(s)/content creators in question.