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The next stage in evolution—a machine consciousness able to manipulate time and space—is just around the corner. The catch: humans will no longer be in charge.

by Abou Farman for Maisonneuve

ASSUME, FOR A MOMENT, the point of view of Intelligence. Not an intelligent point of view, but the perspective of Intelligence itself, gazing out on the cold and gaseous 13.5-billion-year-old universe.

It would seem, would it not, that you ought to give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve done a damn good job of progressing from a few dumb rocks, flung out of the Big Bang, into monocellular creatures that learned how to make copies of themselves. Next, you grew into a complex, hyperaware species called Homo sapiens that extended its brain power through machines. Finally you took up residence inside buzzing electronic circuits whose intellectual abilities increased so quickly they unified everything in one gigantic supersmart info-sphere.

And you’re not done yet! In fact, you would be forgiven for thinking the universe was arranged to accommodate your flourishing. Especially now that, thanks to silicon-based computation, you’ve transcended the narrow conditions of your previous biological platform: the human body. Restless for even greater complexity you will soon spread across the void, saturating atoms, energy, space, and waking all of creation from its long slumber.

THIS SCENARIO frames the worldview of a loose movement assembled under a tent called the Singularity. If the term is familiar, you’ve likely heard it in tandem with the name Ray Kurzweil. A short, dapper techie with a thinning tuft of silver hair, Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor who, among other things, created the first text-to-speech device and built the first acoustic synthesizer, the Kurzweil 250, which came out in 1983 and revolutionized music. Currently, Kurzweil has links to NASA and Google, and acts as an advisor to DARPA, the US Department of Defense’s advanced research arm, which, since its launch in 1958, has been responsible for everything from the internet to biodefense to unmanned bombing aircraft such as the Predator.

Kurzweil is also the unofficial leader of the Singularity—its Chief Executive Oracle. He assumed this mantle with the publication of The Singularity is Near (2005), a book that analyzes the curve of technological development from humble flint-knapping to the zippy microchip. The curve he draws rises exponentially, and we are sitting right on the elbow, which means very suddenly this trend toward smaller and smarter technologies will yield greater-than-human machine intelligence. That sort of superintelligence will proliferate not by self-replication, but by building other agents with even greater intelligence than itself, which will in turn build more superior agents. The result will be an “intelligence explosion” so fast and so vast that the laws and certainties with which we are familiar will no longer apply. That event-horizon is called the Singularity.

Since our brains are wet, messy, relatively inefficient products of evolution and, as one Singularitarian put it, were “not designed to be end-user modifiable,” we humans may simply be uploaded into this intelligence expansion. But if we don’t survive at all, well, at least the universe itself will be flooded with something of independent value, all its “dumb matter”—to quote Kurzweil’s book—transformed into “exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence.”

The prospect of such a destiny makes some people ecstatic. It terrifies others. Singularitarians tend to harbour both reactions simultaneously, which is just how Edmund Burke first defined the effect of “the sublime.” While Kurzweil may not intend it in its original sense, the word seems apt: insofar as it elicits terror and awe at once, the Singularity is sublime.

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Read the rest on the Maisonneuve webpage.