Global Technological Singularity
Discussion
Cadell Last:
"The notion of technological singularity driven by scientific networks actualizing artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and quantum computing (for example) challenges theorists to think a fundamental impossibility of thought. This impossibility for thought is ultimately a qualitative phase transition representing a level of existence beyond our mental or ideational capability to meaningfully abstract. Thus, from the perspective of the human mind the technological singularity represents a type of infinity since it could involve the emergence of a phenomenal realm of higher level perception, thought, and communication, potentially in higher dimensional geometries than the three dimensional geometries (plus time) that fundamentally characterize and constrain human experience and aims. In terms of analytic mechanisms the most frequently deployed conjectures for the actual realization of such an event include artificial general intelligence (AGI) or human intelligence amplification (IA) [15–17]. In terms of scientific theory predictions for the emergence of a technological singularity are based on extrapolation models of exponential computational evolution. These models were originally founded on Moore’s Law [18,19], and are currently often based on the ‘Law of Accelerating Returns’ (LOAR) [20,21]. Moore’s law and LOAR suggest that in terms of pure computational capacity the total cognitive capacities of the human species will be surpassed before mid-century. This is why extrapolations of this process are represented with attractive metaphors from mathematics and physics of an approaching ‘event horizon’ towards an ‘other side’ of being [22]. Currently there is no coherent scientific model that helps us to describe the actualization of embodied superintelligence (in whatever form it takes) and the ontological effects of its higher order cognitive force. In other words, what will a civilization with such high levels of computing power be actualizing and how can we theoretically approach such phenomena? [23]. Thus the futures horizon of technological singularity signifies an immanent actuality of a post-human world where our own modernist social systems structured by reason and science give rise to a suite of technological possibilities that undermine both human existence and transcendence [24]. From the proper historical context the technological singularity may well represent yet another scientific de-centering where humanity’s fundamental social and historical mode of being itself appears with an uncontrollable inhuman aim immanent to our nature [25,26]. In this frame social systems as symbolic networks of communication, here in the form of reason and science, overdetermine the highest experiential and emotional interests of humans themselves (self-consciousness) in favor of their own unbounded and unconscious propagation [27]. In popular discourse these issues of our uncontrollable social and historical modes of being are generally framed as part of the Anthropocene [28]. The Anthropocene signifies the fact that scientific epistemology and general human presence is both increasingly powerful and increasingly unpredictable in its ontological consequences [29]. However, in this context technologically mediated issues of global warming and economic inequality appear insignificant in comparison to the possibility of post-human systems of machinic superintelligence [30]. Are these processes evolutionarily determined to eliminate possibilities of human experience and transcendence [31,32], or is it possible to gain control of these social and historical modes of being and direct them towards actualizing desires of concern for human experience and emotion? [33,34] In either context, how can we make sense of totality in relation to the truth of nature and humanity as an integrated whole?"