Solid Blog of Ise I think my toes are jealous of my fingers because they get to point at things

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

That’s a quote by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most well-respected scifi-authors in the history of the human existence. And you know what, he’s right. Humans today rarely understand much about the magical items we use every day. Computers, cellphones, LCD-televisions and so forth.

Occasionally I end up in discussions with other people about alien technology. You know, the scifi-type of technology. Flying saucers, mindrays, etc. That’s when I whip out the quote above and remind them that if we would travel back in time just a hundred years, and start explaining cellphones, the internet, satellites, the GPS-system to someone back in 1911 they would probably be convinced we were talking about magical items. The same thing goes for alien technology. If aliens showed up here one day, their technology would be amazing, but it would simply be more advanced than ours.

With this in mind, there’s a hypothetical future event that now and again catches my imagination. It’s been labeled as a “technological singularity” and most people believe it will take place sometime in the early to mid twenty-first century. Which is essentially right around the corner.

The singularity will actually be a number of different things taking place at roughly the same time. The primary event will be the development of machine intelligence that match or exceed our own intelligence. Personally I don’t like the term “artificial intelligence” and prefer to label it as machine intelligence instead, but it’s the same thing. One day we will develop machines that can think for real – not just the crude simulations of thought that we can produce today. Machines that can reason, that can wonder, machines that like us will have the capacity for genuine thought. Other parts of the singularity will be advanced technologies such as nanotechnology, workable quantum physics and biotech so advanced that the line between human and machine start to blur.

The mind has trouble even thinking about these things, and the singularity will so profoundly change our society and ourselves that it will be impossible for us to predict the future beyond that point. We simply don’t have the comprehension for it.

For me personally, the big question is whether we will benefit from the singularity, or if humans will self-destruct through it. Often I worry about our society claiming to be so evolved and civilized, yet we still fight meaningless wars over imagined resources rather than share them equally, and we still insist on being hindered by obsolete institutions such as religion and bureaucracy. I mean, we still insist on using money, and our countries and societies still use the same models of politics and economy that were created hundreds of years ago, only much more refined and detailed – but still as primitive.

For the singularity to work to our benefit, we need to lay aside much of the childish squabbles that humans still cling to. We need to stop worrying about money, remove the concept of money and profit, and instead share resources equally and for the benefit of all. The concept of money limits us, because large corporations who have invested resources in certain things (car-companies depending on oil, for example) will resist any change to that, and for the singularity to benefit we would have to leave all that behind.

Otherwise, it might be our undoing.

I hope that the singularity instead becomes our salvation. A way out from all this noise, all this violence and hate. I hope that we can lay off the yoke of religion, politics and borders to become something better. To use technology to free us and take us into a better future, to make ourselves better. I hope I live to see that day, when machine intelligence rises up as our equal, that day when we can cure any disease and any damage instantly and when we can travel anywhere faster than the speed of thought.

About fifteen years ago –when actual connections to the Internet started appearing in peoples homes– some theories were put forth as to the “dangers” of this. One of these theories were the concept of information overload. Back then we used dial-up modems running at quite low speeds compared to broadband now, and the web/internet was a bit more primitive and less hard-edged. Things like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia were at best some distant vague fantasies.

Today all this is a reality, and information overload is becoming a reality. I’m fascinated at the amount of useless and redundant information that is created, both by automatic systems and humans themselves.

For example, all of these goddamn notifications that gets emailed to me whenever something happens somewhere. Someone likes something I put on Facebook, bam – notification through email. More fluff to fill my inbox. Why is this necessary, and why does it have to happen instantly? I always liked email because you DIDN’T have to reply immediately, but this has been perverted now – since email takes virtually no time at all to arrive, people expect you to answer it instantaneously as well. Emails fly back and forth, and everything is bogged down in these useless and redundant emails informing me of how someone did this, something happened, someone did that, someone said this and so on.

GODDAMMIT. I will find this out the next time I visit Facebook or Youtube or whatever. Okay? Until then, could we please stop cluttering up the “information superhighway” (oh god what a hilarious phrase that is now) with this useless information? It does nothing except stress me up.