The much-hyped singularity, as Ray Kurzweil sums up in his book on the matter, is “an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.“
I’d argue that copy/paste laziness at the push of a button impedes creativity, in keeping with the reaction/repetition cycle of pop culture where actual creativity no longer exists in any measurable form, but that takes the fun out of the cult. Many believe the singularity is strictly a technological thing, with mankind creating a new form of independent life, namely a self-aware Artificial Intelligence cue Carmina Burana soundtrack. Others believe the singularity isn’t necessarily to do with technologies at all, although they would be affected. These voices believe it will be an evolutionary, even spiritual, surge in the capabilities of our species, where whichever spark of divinity we tell ourselves we possess will take the reins and reformulate society from the ground up with racists forgetting their racism and billionaires suddenly willing to return their pilfered resources to feed and house the millions who desperately need feeding and housing. A mother of a short-cut, saving all from the trouble of rolling up their sleeves to sacrifice some blood, sweat and tears to dig our own ways back out of this premature burial of heads confined firmly up nether regions.
Being a non-theist, I don’t believe in any lick of it. It arrogantly presumes that we are more learned, more righteous, than all those who came before. It overlooks that the savior-persons expected to lead the way are Peeping Toms, flakey life-hacking imbeciles who spend more time gaming than expanding their personal repertoire of actual life experiences, micro-dosing their fauxhawk’d gourds amidst their toy collections and sharing the selfie on the digital social hot that month to prove to strangers how cool they really are. Sustained on pure ego and fanciful governmental contracts where militaristic applications are always pursued first and foremost, underpaying their own workers so they can have extra disposable income added to their tax breaks, corporate grants and subsidies to go off and buy the rights to Silverhawks. But only if they find the time between VR circle jerks, Berlin raves and boning Burning Man gold-diggers. These people give credence to stereotypes, they are a joke preprogrammed with pampered hypocrisy out the wazoo. The zero hour saving grace of a singularity is a pipe-dream of plastic and alloys, as ill-considered as any other theology. Aside from the rampant thievery of the immoral and unethical, good things require hard work or impossible to replicate luck. Darwin wasn’t big on the natural world providing quick fixes. Resolute faith in the ridiculous is a great argument against traditionally organized religions, yet infallible faith in the producers whose tech can randomly explode in your pocket is somehow magically kosher.
Case in point, Bloomberg is fear-mongering that Beijing, with assistance provided by Google, is set on using tech to judge behaviors of all of its citizenry to know for certain who’s naughty or nice. Basically taking the middlemen of the digital socials out of the equation. “Those gook bastards!” responds concerned SJW westerners by way of hashtag while doing jack and shit about it AFK. Meanwhile, Google itself is pridefully announcing their own neat plan to expand their native mining to further encompass monitoring our moods, movements and behavior inside our respective private spaces. “We are living the science fictional dream! #excitingtimes” gushes PG-rated, PC comments on Google’s PR fan-page on Facebook.
Sabine Hossenfelder writes that the echelons of physics have actually been stagnant the past several decades, with naught but lingering (wait for it) reaction to and repetition of works which had been produced some time before. Despite this link being found at Hacker News, none of the smarty-pants techie commentators there made the correlation of what this forebodes of that promised singularity. Elsewhere, Peter Woit writes about fake physics actually being more prevalent now than fake news, with so many talking heads wanting a spotlight bad enough to forge in every connotation a path to it. Again, no self-awareness to contrast such occurrences with a fabled singularity, yet these people are unironically expected to craft a thing with the capacity for self-awareness.
The only valid argument against Climate Change, one which I think Carlin agreed with, is that Mother Nature has thrown extremes encompassing all sides of the spectrum at herself. She has done this long before we crawled up from the slime and she will probably continue long, long after we selfie ourselves out of existence. Even were we to somehow poison her for good, the mudball corpse shall transform into fertilizer and life will begin anew, of its own accord. Of course interesting happenings are afoot. Interesting happenings have always been all around us, but when we are culturally forbidden from honestly engaging in hindsight or foresight or accepting that one-day our kind too shall be ingloriously buried by the sands of time, then we would never know better. And if you yourself are saving no one, then why would the most self-centered of the world save you, even by accident?