Singularity
The other night I was watching TV. It happened to be the new terminator show on fox. They mentioned a singularity, it had been a while since I had heard the term and I began to think about it.
A singularity for those who don’t want to google it is the concept that if machines reach a point where they are smart enough and have the will or reason to do so they will improve themselves at a faster and faster rate till that increase seems almost infinite.
The implications that so many fear is that such a fast rate will not be able to be kept up by is meat bags. The machines will become far superior to us in short order and at some point they will find us as a scourge against the earth and wipe us out.
I find this a kind of interesting concept, most of those looking at it fear the machine and fail to realize that it has already begun but not in the way they think. We are approaching a singularity but not with machines but with biology. We are just on the beginning, but we are getting there.
If you think about it we are machines, very complex little biochemical combustion engines. We are smart enough and motivated enough to improve ourselves. With genetics we have for the first time a much faster way to improve ourselves. Each generation can be built better than the last. Each generation will be a little smarter, healthier, longer living. Each generation will improve the tools to make these changes and will increase the rate of change. We will be reaching a critical point where the last generation will not understand what the next has done. Now in theory I suppose there is a biological limit to just how “perfect” we can be. I don’t think we will go just the biological route however, which will bring us to our next topic transhumanism….next time