In 1903, the Wright brothers showed the world the first sustained flight. In 1953, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix of DNA. Twenty years later, we are using CRISPR to edit DNA. And we are only a historical moment away from “The Singularity.”
This weak and mortal body
The Singularity is defined as a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.
- According to Ray Kurzweil, we are only a few decades from the point when things really take off – when we enter a breathtakingly abrupt, and completely transformed, new world.
A sci-fi lover’s dream
How you view Kurzweil will depend largely on your existing biases
- The world of the 2020s is unrecognizable compared to that of the 1920s
- There are many obstacles in the way of unlimited technological progress
- Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford
The next epoch
The next great leap for the universe will be when humans and technology merge
- Our very biology will become enmeshed with the technology we create
- It is the age of bionics – machines we make will allow us to overcome “age-old human problems and vastly amplify creativity”
Cold water on a circuit board
The biggest bottleneck on the path to AI is software, not hardware
- Past technological advances do not guarantee similar future advances
- There is no necessary reason that there will be exponential growth of the kind futurologists depend on
- A world of “enhanced intelligence” – in which we might see a 20 percent increase in intelligence – is surely outside the remit of “diminishing returns”
- Even among humans, relatively small differences in design capacities seem to lead to large differences in the systems that are designed
