The Singularity Is Coming

Everybody knows about The Singularity. What? You don’t? The Singularity is a term first coined by Vernor Vinge in 1993. The main principle is that sometime in the next 50 to 100 years, machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence and begin programming itself. Once it does that, the net intelligence will zoom to a level that we cannot comprehend. Humans would no longer be at the top of the food chain.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book entitled The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Mr. Kurzweil’s take is encouraging because he sees room for both humans and machines to co-exist. Others, like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking have a more pessimist take. They claim that artificial intelligence would lead to an existential crisis because the machine or machines would no longer have any need for us and would just find us in the way. It would be the end of mankind and not in a good way.

Elon Musk also believes that machine intelligence is a threat to humanity but he is investing in a company called Neuralink whose corporate charter is to develop an implantable neural lace which would link our minds to the internet and presumably the artificial superintelligence when it comes. That would preempt the machines from becoming our masters because we would be part of the machine.

There is no guarantee that this future will be the end of mankind but it will be the end of life as we know it. You should read Tim Urban’s excellent article Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future. I decided to re-watch an episode of the Netflix series called Black Mirror. The episode is called San Junipero and it won an Emmy award this year. Its basic premise is that machines will become so powerful that when we die, our consciousness will be uploaded “into the cloud” and our spirit will live on forever. Sort of like heaven when you think about it.

Now I’ve seen articles stating that when the Singularity occurs, it will produce a god-like being and it will write its own bible and we will have to worship it. Who knows? Maybe that’s how our universe started in the first place.

I sidestepped the issue in the Rome’s Revolution universe by killing off most of the human population prior to its rise. Of course, in the 35th century, we had to deal with MASAL and OMCOM but they went in a different direction.

Regardless of all this rampant speculation, it seems likely that the Singularity is coming. It may not happen in our lifetime but it certainly seems like it is going to happen in our children’s lifetime.