Something Grand or Evil Is

Hadn’t intended to but made my way through the rest of Kurtzweil book “The Singularity is Near” today, in one straight shot.  Hmm.  This is a wonderfully seductive thesis.  Exponential growth in innovation, in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics will accelerate artificial uber-intelligence that will transcend what we now understand to be human, driving cognitive possibilities we can’t begin to imagine.  In so doing, we’ll drive medical breakthroughs in organ replacement and body system management that will make dying optional.

I know enough about the middle ages to know that this impulse has a long history.  Millenarian’s began climbing mountains and orchestrating orgies and otherwise buckling their medieval seat belts up to and after the year one-thousand A.D. in expectation that that the day of reckoning, was just around the corner.  Kurtzweil’s book was written in 2004 and though I felt on the one hand that I was late for the party on this discussion, all his juicy predictions are no longer arriving twenty-five years out, but rather twelve.  I’ll knock on wood as I type it, but that should be doable.  This could be useful, as, per my earlier entry from about ten days earlier when I’d considered the introduction, we may be tapping into immortality around that time.  Clearly, cravenly the single most seductive part of the thesis.

Usually I’d read a few pages of whatever book I’m in the middle of at lunch and get back to work.  Today though, Saturday morning, and this is what Saturday mornings should be all about, I granted myself permission to lie in bed and dig into this breathtaking scenario and not really stop till it was done, four hundred and fifty pages later.  Regardless of whether changes happen at precisely the pace he is suggesting, we will all be in store for some profoundly disruptive technological innovation in the next two decades.  Unlike the disruption of the retail industry that has already occurred or the automotive industry that is now taking place, we will have to consider the disruption of nation states, consciousness, humanity and mortality. 

I looked on line and heard him speak, briefly at a TED talk.  And I read reviews of the work that criticized him as naïve and overly optimistic, but to my reckoning he addressed these lines of critique soberly and sensibly in the later part of the book.  I can’t comment as a neurobiologist but the suggestion that there is simply something ineffable and unknowable about the mind, it’s capacity and processes, forever and always, doesn’t seem especially credible.  As we get closer to understanding it, certainly we get closer to replicating and potentially exceeding what human intellect can do.   Precisely when that happens and whether something grand or evil is now mid-gestation and remains to be seen.  But I think this topic should certainly be one we discuss and plan for now.  I'm reminded that I ought to work some of this into my own default reckoning.  I suspect much of all this will lead us back to the core questions of my last twenty-five years surrounding U.S. China relations:  who then will lead this innovation and what do they intend to use it for

Saturday, 09/02/18