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What is Technological Singularity? | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] One of the apprehensions that people have about this technological singularity, which is really a metaphor borrowed from physics, to describe what happens when you go through a black hole. The center of a black hole, the singularity, is where the laws of physics as we know them kind of collapse or implode; they no longer apply.

It's a great metaphor that we borrow to use to describe what can happen with technology. We're going to hit this inflection point, the singularity, where it's going to be like a runaway train that builds on itself. The Terminator scenario is that this artificially intelligent algorithm is going to wake up, it's going to achieve sentience, and it's going to turn on us.

But that's, I think, an erroneous way of looking at it. Some of the more optimistic futurists in Silicon Valley, including people like Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly, for example, who wrote "What Technology Wants," say that what's going to happen instead is that we're going to continue to augment our own thinking by uploading more and more and more of our own cognition, or cognitive apparatus, to non-biological intelligence.

So, it's not so much that that mind is going to rise up against us, but that we're going to continue to become more non-biological. In other words, we already offload cognition onto non-biological props. When you write something down on a piece of paper, part of your thinking is happening on that paper. Part of your thinking is happening by you moving your hand on that pen. Part of your thinking is occurring when you stare at the contents of your own mind on that paper and reflect on what you wrote.

We already incorporate non-biological aspects into our thinking apparatus. There's a great essay written by these cognitive philosophers called David Chalmers and Andy Clark, which talks about the extended mind thesis. This thesis says that things like an iPhone or a smartphone are already manifestations and extensions of the mind, and that the mind is actually not limited to the brain.

The mind exists in the feedback loops between brains, tools, and environments. That's why we say our thoughts shape our spaces, and our spaces return the favor. That's why they say that everything we design is designing in return. Marshall McLuhan used to say, we build the tools, and the tools build us.

So, what really exists are feedback loops—feedback loops of mind. It's not us versus them; it's all one large distributed intelligence that has biological and non-biological parts. That's why I don't think that we have anything to be afraid of; it's just billions of baby steps that increasingly extend and augment our creative capacity. [Music] You [Music]

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