Judgement Day? Religious Movement? or New Period of Rapid Evolution? What is Singularity…?

Fully immersive virtual reality, mind uploading, extended life, cyborgs, Utopian society and pathogen killing nanobots…

First off, while you read through this article make sure you have your Terminator theme song playing on loop for the most transcendent experience possible.
Terminator Soundtrack - Classic

Singularity… the theory coined by renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil paraphrased in its simplest form is as follows:

“The functionality of the human brain is quantifiable in terms of technology that we can build in the near future.” When artificial or non-biological intelligence has the capacity to think like we humans do it will be able to access its own’ design’ or source code and rapidly redesign itself, essentially the evolutionary process would be sped up at an exponential rate and artificial intelligence would soar past human brain processing capability. AI would take over all further development at such an alarming rate humans would not even be able to comprehend what was going on…

Currently average computer processors can run billions of bits per second, thanks to the internet computers are also able to share information instantaneously… Now, imagine this; The inner workings of the Human Brain have been quantified. With a synergy between human intelligence and AI processing speed a ‘human’ could now have billions of thoughts per second and be connected on a conscious level with other connected ‘humans’ processing billions of thoughts at the same time and all this information can be stored and retrieved instantly… This unfathomable event is a lot closer to feasibility than you might think. With processing speed, bandwidth, capacity and many other types of measures increasing at an exponential rate, see Moor’s Law, Artificial Intelligence will completely take over the cutting edge of all scientific research and development, and will generate new advancements (including improvements to their own programming) so quickly that normal humans will not be able to follow what is going on. By this point, the Singularity will definitely have been reached.”

Courtesy of Wikipedia we have a timeline to walk us through this natural technological progression that ultimately leads to Singularity. When you break this timeline down, and put all the converging technologies in place it really does seem like Singularity is imminent:

Future technology predictions

Implications:

1. From Xbox graphics to fully Immersive Virtual Reality: Yes, 3D rendering will become so realistic it will be indistinguishable from the real thing. Add nanobots into the mix and you will be able to experience all of the human senses in a virtual world. Hello Smellivision.

If the word ‘nanobots’ is too Sci-Fi for you, guess what? the technology already exists and has largely been fueled by its potential uses for medical applications.

2. With nanobots and nanotechnology in general, we should be able to “explore and analyze living systems in greater detail than ever before considered possible”. Imagine nanobots injected into the brain allowing us to map the inner workings of the brain using a bottom up approach where on a molecular level we can paint a big picture of exactly how the brain works… Or, imagine nanobots programmed to identify and destroy deadly pathogens like HIV in a sort of inner body star wars.

“Autonomous molecular machines, operating in the human body, could monitor levels of different compounds and store that information in internal memory. They could determine both their location and the time. Thus, information could be gathered about changing conditions inside the body, and that information could be tied to both the location and the time of collection. Physical samples of small volumes (nano tissue samples) could likewise be taken.

These molecular machines could then be filtered out of the blood supply and the stored information (and samples) could be analyzed. This would provide a picture of activities within healthy or injured tissue. This new knowledge would give us new insights and new approaches to curing the sick and healing the injured.”

3. Once the brain has been mapped this makes room for other cool applications like “mind uploading” (Mind Uploading which would essentially be the ability to upload our thoughts to a computer for later retrieval. This is where the religious and cult-like concepts surrounding Singularity come in to play because if this happens the consciousness of an individual human mind could be literally ‘Saved’ and therefore you would exist forever, at least on a conscious level. Nanotechnology would also be so advanced at this point that molecular machines could find and replace deteriorating cells and rebuild our DNA so that we would appear to be ‘Forever Young’.

4. From a Terminator Judgement day perspective, we wouldn’t be overrun by giant human looking machines but rather by swarms of self replicating nanobots that can convert matter at an atomic level into intelligent computational substrate. See “Waking up the Universe” at the end of the wikipedia article on Future Predictions below.

5. Potential for world war? Absolutely, as technology begins to rapidly change accepted paradigms naturally a lot of people will be enraged by the emergence of new tech. therefore threatening the mentality of “the way things were” in regards to the nature of human life as radical life extension, genetic engineering, and cybernetics begin to reign supreme.

Even if this timeline is somewhat off, our generation is in for some incredible changes and amazing experiences within the next 40 years.

Feel free to post other implications you can think of in the comments below!
Make sure to check out the Q & A with Futurist Ray Kurzweil: Q & A

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