Technological Singularity

by

Table of Contents

Introduction1

Thesis Statement2

Literature Review2

Methodology4

Discussion4

Conclusion7

WORK CITED8

Technological Singularity

Introduction

The Singularity, a concept whose introduction supposedly occurred through an essay delivered in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, is not an original theory but rather a newly attempted solution for the older problem of the limit. According to Vinge, the Singularity is an inevitable cataclysmic social change ushered in by the coming development of superhuman intelligence through technological innovation, 'a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules” (Vinge 6). Specifically, as Vinge is a computer scientist, he conceives chat this superhuman intelligence will either be wholly computer-based in the form of artificial intelligence, result from a human-computer hybrid, or emerge from a genetically-engineered human. Furthermore, as this superhuman change is greater than human or, more simply, different than human, the precise shape and contours of a post singularity civilization is outside human knowledge.

Some, such as robotics researcher Rodney Brooks, regard any “speculation on the future inherently dangerous and doomed to failure. Yet most technological discourse dabbles in prophecy. The meta-narrative of progress that produces many technologies emphasizes, to use business jargon (for capitalist rhetoric is never far from technology discussions), forward-thinking rather than backward-thinking. This emphasis explains the existence of the Singularity as an epistemological concept and the fact that many of its profits are researchers and inventors first, social scientists and humanists second if at all (Flynn 25).

The future, through the Singularity, provides an epistemological limit that is technological rather than spiritual. Thus, the Singularity proposes a solution to the intractable problem of unthinkability. The ineffable, which was once the habitation of God and ghosts, is now material and technological.

Thesis Statement

Will the technological singularity unlock the greatest hidden secrets of the Universe, does the fate and destiny of Humans end with machines controlling the Universe.

Literature Review

As Walter Benjamin wrote in his influential essay “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, before the rise of film the artwork was pan of ritualistic and elitist behaviors and had already supplanted the religious as a site of ineffability and transcendence. Vinge's work as a science-fiction author of bloated space operas is significant here. His novels are not so much exercises in literature as they are spaces for him to imagine the Singularity as it will exist historically in the future (Modis 95). The Singularity marks another transformation of the ineffable from the artistic to the technological future. Thus, the Singularity is an attempt to objectify the otherness of technology. The Singularity, by its definition, is indefinable; however, its temporality implies certain definability-to-pass. As a product of multiple interacting technologies, predicting the precise shape of post-Singularity civilization is a mistake only allowable to fiction.

But, unlike other unthinkable problems discuss below, the Singularity does not wholly suspend thinkability but defers it to a later time period. The Singularity is a symptom of the postmodern in that it eschews other realities for the Baudrillardean hyperreal “We can no longer imagine any other universe: the grace of transcendence ...