Dear Reader,
In June 2010 The New York Times gave the Singularity movement a big, uncritical, 6000-word, wet kiss. I’ve pasted a few choice quotes below. The entire article can be found here.
I’m editing a book featuring some of today’s most thoughtful philosophers of science and technology, cutting edge artists, political pundits, social critics, and cultural arbiters. The book will focus on the Singularity movement in general and Google’s involvement with it in particular.
My wish list of contributors includes: David Abram, Chris Anderson, Kurt Anderson, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Karen Armstrong, Ken Auletta, John Perry Barlow, Janine Benyus, Albert Borgmann, Fritjof Capra, Denise Caruso, Herbert Dreyfus, Esther Dyson, Daniel Goleman, Hazel Henderson, Danny Hillis, Van Jones, Bill Joy, Kevin Kelly, Andrew Kimbrell, Naomi Klein, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Joanna Macy, John McKnight, Camille Paglia, F. David Peat, Nicanor Perlas, Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Saffo, Kirkpatrick Sale, Christopher Schaefer, Jakob von Uexkull, Margaret Wheatley, Langdon Winner, and Arthur Zajonc.
If you’d like to contribute to this collection, or to recommend potential contributors, please enter your comments in the space below, or write me at: info@utneinstitute.org.
Excerpts from The New York Times, June 12, 2010
Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday
By Ashlee Vance
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen… (it) smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process…Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” …Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs”…
This is my recent piece from Utne Reader discussing singularity. You can also download it here. A contribution by Bill McKibben addressing the 2006 Singularity Summit can be viewed here.
Android Nightmares
Google’s plot to take over mind, body, and soul
Have you noticed the latest TV ads for the Droid, a Verizon mobile phone that uses Google’s Android operating system? One features a handsome young man sitting in a business meeting. He pulls out his Droid, flips open the keyboard, and begins typing at increasingly superhuman speed. First his fingers, then his hands, and finally his arms turn into sophisticated circuitry—the bionic man. The sell line comes via a voice-over at the end of the commercial: “Turning you into an instrument of efficiency.”
Another ad for the device shows the iris of the user’s eye transforming into digital circuitry as he merges with his technology.
What’s the message here? I believe it’s that Google, the company whose maxim is “Don’t be evil,” has given itself over to a vision of the future in which human and machine morph into a monstrous hybrid. As Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin recently declared, “We want to make Google the third half of your brain.”
Brin and Larry Page, the visionary entrepreneurs who together founded Google, are unabashed enthusiasts and promoters of what has come to be known as “the Singularity,” a vision of the near future in which human beings and machines merge so that illness, old age, and even death become things of the past.
Computer pioneer Bill Joy sounded the alarm about the Singularity a decade ago, in a Wired article titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” He argued for voluntary relinquishment of genetic, robotic, and nano technologies, warning that intelligent robots could soon dominate humanity, and that all of nature could be swallowed in an oozing sea of tiny “gray goo” machines.
In two recent books, authors Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants) and Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From) argue that the Singularity is already here, and that we couldn’t stop it even if we wanted to because technology has its own imperative. Well, I’m not ready to surrender.
In 2008 Brin and Page helped set up Singularity University, which meets in a NASA facility and offers a 10-week “graduate” course and a concentrated, nine-day program for CEOs, inventors, and venture capitalists. There, according to New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance, they discuss a time, possibly just a decade or two from now, when nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and computing merge with human life, producing a “superior intelligence that will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.”
Humans, we’re just so, well . . . human.
Many of Silicon Valley’s elite have embraced the Singularity, hoping that technology will allow people to seize control of the evolutionary process. “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” inventor Raymond Kurzweil, author of the movement’s seminal work, The Age of Spiritual Machines, tells the Times. Kurzweil is the Singularity’s highest-leaping cheerleader and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect his dead father.
I don’t know about you, but the Singularity is not the world I want for myself, or for my children. Not that I’m willing to give up Google Search, or Google Earth, mind you. I just don’t want to merge with a machine, or be dominated by one.
Mystic philosopher Rudolf Steiner predicted nearly 100 years ago that a cold evil would rise to prominence at the beginning of the 21st century. This malevolence, which Steiner dubbed Ahriman, is characterized by the denial of soul and spirit in favor of scientific materialism and the dominance of humans by machines. Google’s multimillion-dollar ad campaign for Droid is putting images of the Singularity into the public’s consciousness, and I don’t want impressionable kids (or adults) to digest those images.
No one’s talking these days about Google’s vision of our future, though, or asking what the Singularity’s implications are, or wondering what safeguards we need, or whether this vision is a world we even want. It’s time for us to discuss the role of technology, and Google, and the Singularity. And it can start with one simple question.
What kind of future do you want?
Additional contributions:
Hurrah!
Recommending Howard Rheingold for the dream list. “independent thinker, online instigator …”, Howard is one of the minds behind the Whole Earth Catalog and Electric Minds, one of the first online social networks which is how I met him back in the 90′s. He rated my post, “are we eating our young?” as post of the week … later paid him a visit in person during a Bioneers. a remarkable man, mind and soul with gigantic following and presence among young . http://www.rheingold.com/
Joan
Benefit of owie hamstring tear/couch living = getting to spend time with what my friend Eric Utne is up to.
I agree that it’s a nightmare. It’s not a vision of the future that I can in any way support.
In addition, I don’t think it’s a possible future. It seems to me that if it was a true singularity, it would take an infinite amount of money and energy to accomplish. Moreover, history tells us that human progress is just not that fast. We adapt much more slowly that most “futurists” imagine.
An alternative, and much more positive vision of the future, can be found in de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere where technology is assisting mankind to form a global sphere of knowledge and spirit.
The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008
i say go for it. we already got a plethora of knuckleheads fucking up the world with their provincial obsolete dogmas. cheers to avant garde innovation and its philosophy, it can’t happen swift enough for me.i say make the world more interesting and less mundane.
I read your back page column on singularity, and it made me think of Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming.” . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I used to think the rough beast was the internet, now I think it is singularity.
I read your “Forward” column in the back of the current issue of the Utne Reader with great interest.
For starters, I remember reading the first half of Raymond Kurzweil’s book, “The Age of Spiritual Machines”, and finally one day I had enough. I had to stop & put it down for good. I thought to myself, “this guy is nuts! He has absolutely no idea what ‘spiritual’ means! His point of view with regard to human and natural life continues to be so devoid of any true compassion or regard. Sad, and ultimately frightening.
That has been where my thoughts and feelings have been pretty much for the past decade. Then, about three weeks ago, when a good friend of mine showed me a copy of the book, “One Second Later” by William Forstchen. He then went on to explain that even though the work is fiction, it outlines a very real threat to the U.S, and to many other nations.
Simply described, the book speaks of a time in the very near future when three nuclear devices are launched from freighters in the Gulf of Mexico, and are then detonated roughly 80 miles above ground, creating a massive Electro-Magnetic Pulse, or EMP, which shuts down the entire electrical grid, and all communications systems–including computers, cell phones, electronic ignition systems….anything running on electricity that is not “hardened” or protected against such an energy wave. The book continues to extrapolate for several dozen pages all of the social panic and upheaval that occur after the event. As my friend, Michael said, it’s a pretty grim book. But I think that it is necessary reading.
It should also be pointed out that huge solar flares, and their resultant increase in solar wind, can also cause an EMP energy wave, as it occurred in Canada a couple of decades ago. There are those who believe that we are due for another solar EMP wave within the next 2 to 3 years.
I am probably the most optimistic person that I know, and my wife would agree with me. But, if such an event ever did happen, God forbid, then singularity would be dead. It would be the least popular topic for decades, as we scrambled to relearn all of the skills that our ancestors knew, while rebuilding our existing technology infrastructures with a more humble attitude.
There’s my thoughts. Not too cheery, but I do think that this topic should be approached, since we take our 21st century lifestyle almost entirely for granted. We seem to be blind to our vulnerability, which is all man-made, and hence, quite imperfect. And it could very well be that there are others on this Earth who have come to realize this very fact, and are waiting for the right time to exploit our vulnerability. But I hope that I am wrong…
Fortunately, there is a built-in ‘saver’ to Brian Wright’s horrific scenario: Any human demon going for that sci-fi trip of conquest could only do it by his/her own investment in the techno-truths of tomorrow; and thus would her/himself be fully taken down by it. This fore-knowledge should be all it would take to cure him/her of the insane vision.
Please look at my book, The Singularity is Already Here: An Indigenous and Grassroots Perspective on Our Technological Future. Order it from University Press books in Berkeley, California or check it out from UC Berkeley’s library. Thanks.
Speaking of AI. Here’s a funny chatbot discussion: http://collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2011/05/lets_get_this_p.php