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Transcending the flesh: The coming Singularity


In the future, there will be robots. And that future will happen less than 40 years from now. If you believe that humans and machines will eventually become one, then the Singularity movement is for you.


In the future, there will be robots. And that future will happen less than 40 years from now.

What is The Singularity? It is that point in time when humanity’s technological capacity so outstrips itself that a moment of near apotheosis for the race takes place. This means many things, but chief among them are: a) technology will become so small and cheap that body augmentation (through nanobots) will become as routine as an injection’ and b) we will give birth to machine artificial intelligence (AI) so smart it surpasses all the smart human brains of the world put together. Ray Kuzweil’s book The Singularity is Near (When Humans Transcend Biology) defines it thus: “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality." If you experience a profound feeling of terror and shock at having grasped the full meaning of that statement, please don’t be alarmed. It’s a sane and valid reaction. It’s pretty easy to dismiss the concepts and predictions of those who believe in the coming Singularity (they call themselves Singularitarians or Transhumanists —or even Post-Humanists) as wish fulfillment of futurists and tech-fetishists. Mad ravings, even.

The Singularity is that point in time when humanity’s technological capacity so outstrips itself that a moment of near apotheosis for the race takes place.

Time Magazine contributor Lev Grossman, writing about the Singularity movement, says that hanging out with Singularitarians is like being with a “small but intense. . .hive of like-minded thinkers. . .When you enter their mind-space you pass through a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity." But there are two things you need to know about the Singularity and its community. First, it’s extremely popular on an international scale not only because it promises the science fictional equivalent of The Rapture but because there is actual hard science going on here. Carljoe Javier is the author of And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth and a couple of other non-fiction books. He’s also a Filipino Singularitarian. He discovered the movement through one of Kurzweil's lectures. “I've started hoping for the Singularity to come," he explains. “It has inspired me to focus on the development of my intellect. Along with breakthroughs in genetics, the singularity promises a stronger physical form. What I'm concerned with is what are we putting into these enhanced forms? I want beings of integrity, intelligence, and justice to beinhabiting such enhanced bodies. I push myself to develop those things." Second, the people who belong to this community are often the same ones who are in a position (with access to resources) to enact the changes that could hurry along the Singularity. Consider some of the major players in the Transhumanism movement of Silicon Valley, California. They include, among others: Peter Thiel (co-founder and former CEO of PayPal and a multi-million dollar donor to transhumanist causes), Robert Ettinger (“The Father of Cryonics" and founder of the Cryonics Institute), Aubrey De Grey (Founder of Methuselah Foundation and SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence) and Ralph Merkle (researcher and speaker on nanotechnology and cryonics).

We will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence with supercomputers by the end of this decade... (and) effective software models of human intelligence by the mid-2020s.
—Ray Kurzweil
And that’s just some of the organizations that involves Singularitarianism and Transhumanism. There’s also the World Transhumanist Association, Alcor Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, Extropy Institute, Methuselah Foundation and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. That last organization is a bastion of Kurzweilian thought. Though the community of Signularitarians are not ALL Kurzweilians, for better or for worse, Ray Kurzweil is the tip of the spear. Though there are of course many interpretations to this monumental event Kurzweil’s thoughts are by far the most hopeful and the clearest. It was he who did the math and postulated the basic timeline of the coming event horizon. This is what he calls The Law of Accelerating Returns. In a nutshell this law states that the basic measures of information technology progress predictably and exponentially. They double right now about every year. The key word there is “exponentially." Which basically translates -as Grossman of Time points out — as: “things are getting faster, FASTER." It’s true of biological technology, like genetic sequencing. Costs come down about half every year and progress doubles every year. Kurzweil’s book further clarifies: “. . .because we're doubling the rate of progress every decade, we'll see the equivalent of a century of progress—at today's rate—in only twenty-five calendar years. . . .We will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence with supercomputers by the end of this decade and with personal-computer-size devices by the end of the following decade. We will have effective software models of human intelligence by the mid-2020s." Because of this premise Kurzweil calculates that the birth of AI, with a margin for a conservative estimate, will happen in the year 2045. The Singularity event now has a date. Those who believe in Kurzweil’s writings do so on a level that comes close to religious zeal. Not bad for a 60-plus year old inventor who built his first computing machine at 17. While Kurzweil and the other futurists disagree on many things (one critic even bashed Kurzweil’s ideas as conflicting to the point of absurdity) what they do agree on is the inevitability of the man-machine nirvana whether it be androids, cyborgs robots or some other fusion of biology and technology. When one’s tools surpass your own intelligence, when the ghosts awake in the machine, it’s best to let them do the heavy computational lifting. This, they believe, is the next stage of human evolution. Nature doesn’t change us anymore, you see, we simply change nature. Not since homo sapiens shuffled free from the homo erectus gene soup has there been a major change in our bodies. All that’s going to be old hat in a mere 30 something years.

Robots are already being tested for use by Filipino educators to teach English and other subjects to South Korean students.

“I see it as a chance to improve humanity," says Javier. “Take our hearts and minds, the soft stuff, and protect and prolong it in hard stuff, download our consciousness, preserve intellect. Can you imagine how it would be if we could interact with the consciousness of great thinkers today?" Singularitarians also point to the patterns of accelerated progress all around us today. The release of the next version of gadgets in less than a year (the iPAD2, included), a computer (called Watson) beating two trivia champs at Jeopardy, neural implants gaining wider medical use (those chips inserted in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains to fight memory loss) and of course robots gaining more brain at a scary velocity. Very soon we might view the Roomba intelli-vacuum as the trilobyte of future robots. As Grossman writes: “while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation. It’s all too easy to say that these changes will only happen in the West and the First World countries. But a developing, politically-stable Third World Asian country like ours with a more than fair share of the tech market (we ARE a cellphone-heavy populace after all), a growing acuity for telecommute work (e.g. call centers) and openness to digital life on Web 2.0 (Pinoy Friendster and Facebook stats are through the roof) can already feel the momentum of these accelerating returns. Robots are already being tested for use by Filipino educators to teach English and other subjects to South Korean students. The robots are called EngKey and are still in the experimental beta-test stage, but the models and their interface have already been manufactured. With the EngKey bots, made the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), the Filipino teachers communicate using embedded microphones and speakers. A small screen at the head of the robot displays the face of the human teacher. A gesture and emotion recognition software enables the robot to match the teacher’s movement and expressions. EngKey looks like a huge egg with short arms. It’s about one meter tall. And South Korea is dead serious about its mass production and use. They hope to have a robot in every kindergarten classroom by 2013. Javier is of the opinion that feeling the full Philippine impact of the Singularity movement will be a slow, long process. “Now we're still struggling with the RH bill. [But] I think the Singularity will inevitable force a chance in values and beliefs, and traditionalists will take a long time to accept this. The more forward thinking, and those who can most afford such technologies, will embrace it immediately." We’ve only skimmed the surface of this vast and controversial subject. And we do need to point out that a major concern among all Singularitarians is that the salvation offered by the Singularity may ultimately prove a Faustian bargain. These are the Terminator and The Matrix scenarios, the dark side of this foretelling. Will machines, becoming self-aware, simply decide that the main problem is humanity itself and proceed to eliminate and/or enslave us for use as batteries? Kurzweil and other commentators all agree this is quite possible. After all, nobody really knows what will happen once robots develop consciousness. “I do worry about abuse," says Kurzweil in a media interview. Despite the misgivings, this powerful subculture is gaining mainstream influence. See you in 2045. — TJD, GMA News
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