The Singularity

As far as I can tell, when someone refers to himself as a "futurist," his job mostly involves serving as a prophet for the coming singularity. If you haven't heard already, "singularity," in this context, refers to the moment when machine intelligence becomes greater than that of the human brain. After this event, when computers begin to program and improve themselves, it's impossible to predict what will come next since it will be an increasingly greater intelligence that propels technology forward. The newest Big Think episode gives a good example of this thesis by one of it's most famous proponents:



Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 computers will be smarter than people. I can only guess how he arrived at this number, but he seems pretty confident about it. It's fun to think about, but this is obviously a controversial idea. His analysis is partly an extrapolation of Moore's law, but that will eventually hit its physical limits when circuits can no longer become smaller. Kurzweil finds ways around this problem with the possibility of quantum computing, but the fact that he needs someone to invent a non-existing technology makes you wonder how he can be so confident about a year as precise as 2029. And I'm sure there are better arguments against it, but most scientists don't take this sort of thing seriously enough to put the time into critiquing it.

But that aside, this idea is about as close to the "promised land" a secular person can get (unless Arnold Schwarzenegger has something to do with it, but I don't see why super intelligent machines would become evil, necessarily). Almost all difficult questions would become easy; we could just ask the machine. Economies could be coordinated, conflicts resolved, diseases and maybe even old age itself could be cured.

But in the end, life would be so fundamentally altered that the thought of it is a little revolting. It's impossible to know if we should be rooting for it or not.