8/4/24
The Singularity is Near
This is number seventy-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I STILL DON’T KNOW if my current line of thinking for a new story is viable and will outlast my trip to Alaska completed this week. This idea has been cooking in the back of my mind for seven years, since reading Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near. The 672-page book is nearly a third footnotes, and I read them all!
If you are not familiar with the book, the blurb is as follows:
At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
My summary is that this book presents a futurist vision in which AI will progress to such an extent that it will be possible to upload one’s brain to a computer and essentially live forever. Or until the next system upgrade—whichever comes first. It forecasts a union of man and machine.
It can’t be much of a stretch from there to the universe of Richard Morgan’s novel Altered Carbon, which was released three years before Kurzweil’s “non-fiction” book. In Altered Carbon, most people have cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their consciousness. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely. Their stacks can be downloaded into new bodies, or “sleeves,” after death. People could be re-sleeved indefinitely, giving the very wealthy virtual immortality.
I am intrigued by the whole concept and now, I suppose I’ll have to buy and read Kurzweil’s updated book, The Singularity is Nearer, published in June of this year. At least it’s only 432 pages.
I seldom write futurist books. Aside from the pseudo-science fiction books in the SWARM Cycle, the only books I’ve written that take place in the future were also in a parallel universe in The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins.
In this series, 80-year-old Jacob is granted his wish to return to the age of fourteen. But the Jacob Hopkins he is sent into is fourteen the same year version 1 died. Not only is Jacob version 2 giving up on life, but he lives in a different reality in which many of the things v1 knew were irrelevant. The new Jacob version 3 is the old man in a young man’s body, but completely out of step with the time, the culture, and even his own family.
Yet, a different version of many of the people he knew in his first life also appear and cluster around him.
I began writing the series in September of 2018. By the time I finished the series in September 2019, I was horrified to see how many of the things I prognosticated had already become reality in this dimension. And more continued as I finished the books with Jacob having made it in this alternate reality up through 2023.
So, I’m cautious about writing anything that has a near future bent to it. The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins is available as a collection or individual eBooks on Bookapy.
What has puzzled me about Kurzweil’s view of the Singularity—and uniformly that of the sources he quotes—is that the advances talked about are all technological. It is AI and super computing power that enables everything.
Why have none of these writers investigated the state of human evolution?
Homo sapiens have been on earth for 600-800,000 years. We can quickly identify the progress from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, and the progress of Homo sapiens’ initial ability to communicate and create complex social structures to today’s intellectual and physical achievements.
There are, of course, those who believe in the mythology of the creation of man as being some 6,000 years ago. In their perspective, humans were created perfect, ‘in the image of God.’ They have been degenerating ever since. I find it disturbing that people who are on the de-evolutionary slope seem to be increasing in number and proportion.
But let us look at the positive side—the side I’ll try to exploit if I write this book. Humans have been constantly evolving. But even the paleoanthropologic data focuses on the size, shape, and looks of the species. We need only to look at the number of world records being broken daily to see that the physical specimen of humanity has changed and is changing as we speak.
In 1891, Luther Cary of the United States set the world record in the 100-meter sprint in 10.8 seconds. That record stood for seventeen years. In 2009, Usain Bolt of Jamaica broke his own world record with a time of 9.58 seconds. A record that has stood for fourteen years since.
In every Olympic event we see a progression of world records: running faster, jumping higher or farther, throwing longer distances, lifting heavier weights. Yes, these are all the best of the best, but the best of the rest of us are continuing to get better and faster physically, smarter mentally, and more cosmopolitan socially.
The sheer quantity of information that we are inundated with daily requires an expansion of thought processes. Those who ignore information or cannot evaluate its worth stand out in any crowd. But the capability is there. Listen to that same person recite the stats of a basketball or baseball player and argue the merits of that player’s ability compared to all others. The ability is there, even if applied unevenly.
The human brain is continuing to evolve. That is my thesis for the book.
And we are affecting that evolution. I carry in my heart a device about the size of a vitamin capsule that regulates my heartrate. I have hearing aids that enhance my hearing. (I had no idea how noisy you all are!) I have a watch on my wrist that tells me my heartrate, blood pressure, blood oxygen level, exercise level, and calories burned.
Implanted technology is increasing. Titanium joints. Mechanical hearts. Cranial hearing aids. And soon, many of the functions of our cell phones will be accessible through implanted chips. (Remember the scare we had about microchips being injected with vaccinations?) The technology is not yet small enough to fit through a needle, but the possibility of an implant is very real.
Certainly, all this technology implanted in our bodies is affecting our direction and speed of evolution. I predict a day (as I said in opening: a hundred years? A thousand?) when humans will evolve a gene that will enable us to communicate with computers and other people without a technological implant. I postulate a silicon gene (or chromosome or DNA pair) that will speed up the pathways in the human brain to match that of the technology surrounding us.
And at that point, a new species will have evolved. Homo iunctus. Connected people. That is when the Singularity is truly near.
Oh, this is too much fun. By the time this appears, I will be preparing a leisurely trip down the Pacific Coast as I make my way back to Las Vegas. I’ll either be writing this story, or I will have been overtaken by another. I’ll let you know next week.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
