The Technological Singularity

by Murray Shanahan

So one approach to keeping up with machine superintelligence might be simply to employ sophisticated AI technology as a tool, amplifying human intelligence noninvasively, so to speak. In essence, this is what humans have done since the invention of writing. But transhumanists aim for more than this. The transhumanist approach to keeping up with superintelligence is not merely to use technology but to merge with it. No one who uses a calculator says that it feels like a part of their mind in the way that someone who has mastered a tool such as a paintbrush might say it feels like a part of their body. The machinations of the calculator are hidden from the user, who simply takes its results as given. We have far more intimate, albeit imperfect, access to the reasoning processes that go on in our own heads, and this intimacy facilitates reflection and cognitive integration. A properly transhumanist perspective on cognitive enhancement demands the same level of intimacy. The enhanced human would be neither a user of AI technology nor a member of a hybrid human–computer team. Rather, interfaced directly to their brain, sophisticated AI technology would be become a part of their mind, conferring unmediated access to its computational processes. The result would be a new sort of human being, a bio-machine hybrid species with potentially far greater intellectual capabilities than an ordinary person. The rest of society would then have to decide how to treat such people, while they...