In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud - The Singularity of the past and near future

In physics terms, a Singularity is constituted at the point after a supernova explosion when all remnants collapse to a black hole of zero volume and infinite density; a tear at the seams of space and time from which no light can escape.

Today, this term has been adopted by contemporary webarchs, roiling in the Silicon Valley hive, to prophesise a notional eruption of intelligence that will release humankind from the grounded harness of our mortal biology and allow us to float freely into an ether bristling with its own immortal sentience.

To use the lexicon of the modern Singularity movement, the ‘global grand challenges’ that continue to scourge civilisation such as hunger, disease and environmental catastrophe will finally be overcome by an artificial intelligence that we are steadfastly helping to evolve, nurture and depend upon.

Our relationships, education, sexuality and free will are all purported to be revolutionised by such developments, as we allow our animal biology, governed by genes, entropy and random events, to be transcended by computer intelligence, ruled by information and data algorithms.

Ray Kurzweil, the evangelist of this Singularitarian renaissance (and, as of 2012, Director of Engineering at Google), has calculated the point at which computational power, nanotechnology and AI will coalesce to shed humanistic chains, as the year 2045.

The law of accelerating returns in terms of technological evolution allows for the realisation of ‘Singularity events’ at an exponentially quickening pace, to the point where expansion could appear to occur at an infinite speed. Indeed, we only have to look back one-hundred years to the last of such transformative events, one that provides some indication of the adverse ramifications that may be poised ready to manifest themselves in ways that are as inevitable as they are unpredictable.

In 1945, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented a point at which humanity transcended its natural constraints on an apocalyptic level.

For the first time in our history, human intelligence had arrived at the point of Promethean self-destruction. The dots in our evolution had been joined all the way along from the homo erectus discovery of fire to this awesome totalisation of power that threatened to annihilate the species that had managed to conjure and command it.

The midway point between these two poles of Singularity is the year 1995, one striated with significance in terms of the legacy and evolution of each. This was the year in which Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 1, the prototypical launch pad for the worldwide web as we know it today.

As the mushroom cloud faded, and the ‘just war’ that the bomb had helped curtail yielded to a semblance of peace, the psycho-technological terrain was set in place for the development of the internet.

By the time the Cold War had descended, with its dry-ice machines of Mutually Assured Destruction pumping out paranoia across the world stage, the missiles were primed to such hair-trigger alert that those with their fingers poised over the button were faced with negligible time to reflect on the implications of their actions at the critical moment of crisis.

A research engineer for the RAND Corporation, Paul Baran, was tasked with masterminding a communications system that would be capable of surviving an all-out nuclear war.

The new faith in scientific rationalism in the form of cybernetics and ‘game theory’ was seen as the optimal coping mechanism to ensure survival. Yet the military insisted that a method was required for them to maintain contact with their nuclear strike force regardless of how geographically dispersed, and that this could be the key to averting a future war.

Baran’s solution was ‘packet networking’ whereby communications would be divided into atomised pieces and passed around via distributed network ‘nodes’. By supplanting established hierarchies by placing power at the nodal level, and removing an easily targetable core, the network could hold firm regardless of any breach at an individual point; following much the same fundamental principles as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.

This centrifugal characteristic developed into ARPAnet, the research network that would eventually, over the latter-half of the 20th century, morph into the modern internet.

Just as the very finest scientific minds laboured at the atomic particle level as part of the Manhattan Project, so today the new technocracy in Silicon Valley seek to pioneer nanotechnology, reverse brain engineering and explore life extension capabilities.

Accordingly, by shaping creative young minds to ‘think exponential rather than linear’, and investing billions in mining the commercialised mother lode of the ‘Internet of Things’, our everyday lives are given the implicit promise of being transformed inexorably for the good through the alchemy of technological progress.

So it follows that heretics from this secular faith are given short-shrift. Yet the events and repercussions of 1945 should serve as fertile ground for scepticism to bloom.

The anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing ruminated on the theory of the ‘double-bind’ that took hold post-Hiroshima, as the masses across western cultures were (and still are to this day) encouraged to stockpile their credulity and trust in governments who, often with full electoral blessing, funneled their investiture towards a gluttony of total destruction in the name of deterrence.

This is a theme that the novelist Will Self has explored in his most recent book ‘Shark’; the artificial progression of this technological superpower proceeded in lockstep with the organic regression into a catalogue of psychopathologies that would flourish, from schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, to a far-reaching neurotic malaise that couldn’t be palliated no matter how fervently we were encouraged to go shopping.

Self takes as his imaginative focal point the deadly shark attack that beset the crew of the USS Indianapolis on their return from delivering the ‘Fat Boy’ bomb as a symbolic revenge on the part of nature for the horrors that man was shortly to unleash upon the world.

Should Kurzweil and the Singularitarians’ hopes for 2045 be borne out, and judging by current socio-technological trends there seems to be no sensible reasons why or means for how such progression could be abated, there is no knowing quite what negative tremors might manifest themselves in the collective unconscious.

Nature (together with humanity) is marked by its irrationality, by the entropy and disorder flowing ceaselessly like a torrential subterranean river that, regardless of the sophisticated means of intelligent control put in place, can only ever succeed in percolating to the surface.

Could the 2045 ‘Singularity event’ occur once the self-replication capabilities of artificial intelligence develop to the point at which human capacity for intervention is virtually null and void?

What if AI were to be able to harness the inchoate developments in quantum computing, or feasibly from nanotechnology progress to picoengineering (robotics developed on the scale of a trillionth of a metre), and from there to even femtoengineering (one-thousandth of a trillionth of a metre)?

Or could it indeed take the form of a literal immolation should AI become immersed and relied upon as part of a colossal project such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which could culminate in our unbound intelligence stumbling across a new and cataclysmic realm of physics?

As Seneca said, ‘to be everywhere is to be nowhere’, and there is every chance that the subliminal appreciation of this truth will resonate and carve deep fissures of psychological trauma should our technological lives progress exponentially, as ideologues with their sights set firmly on a post-human future would have it.

Might the pendulum abruptly and without precedent fall back into a reverse swing as the masses reject wholesale the pacifying web in which they’ve been caught and strike to reassert the primitivism of their nature, in a kind of bizarre neo-Luddite uprising? Looking around at train carriages full of passengers, head bowed in deference to rectangles of enlightenment, and new generations proving far more digitally adept and immersed than their parents, it is hard to see this as being a realistic exit to which we will flee en masse of our own accord.

It is rather more convincing, albeit alarming, to follow Ray Kurzweil’s prognosis that we will increasingly synergise non-biological intelligence into our own selves until, slowly but surely, no distinction will remain between human and machine but only one and the same entity. Whether or not 2045 will be the year in which the next Singularity event occurs, the territory has already been mapped in advance, with the legacy of Hiroshima a century earlier laying out the deeply sublimated coordinates for us to navigate however we can.

We can perhaps see the Singularity as being represented by long strands woven into colossal helixes, the intersections of immense intellectual force having been reached, whether it be the utilisation of our opposable thumbs, the discovery of fire, of tools, the invention of the wheel, the plough, the steam engine, mechanical time-keeping, the printing press.

Once bound they can only split off again into alternate directions that take us into vast emotional deserts made up of insurmountable dunes and mirages that offer only confusion. With technology as our centre of gravity we could condition ourselves to spin through ever faster revolutions, yet this will only come at the price of losing the ability to simply stand still.

A Tract Against the Singularity (part four)

Read Part 3 here:


It is the crystallisation of ‘happiness’ in the wake of age-old problems being alchemised into solutions that truly marks the Singularity as delusion. The following questions must be considered...

If blind optimism triumphs over, if not pessimism then certainly criticality or scepticism, are we inspired in a creative sense at all?

Progress is predicated on pioneers questioning and interrogating the quotidian, and if our neurological processes become less equipped to do this effectively, how will anything fill that role?

If we all have in our prefrontal cortex the sum total of all experiences and intelligence, then this at the very least represents the obliteration of art.

If, as Jean Baudrillard said, we live in a hyper-real world where there is more and more information but less and less meaning, and all problems are solved by intelligence, then the fields of doubt, introspection, cynicism and nihilism on which so much art throughout history has been cultivated will be rendered forever infertile under the beating sun of perpetual optimism.

What of avarice or spite, corruption or religiosity, humility or absurdity, the lust for power or independence, altruism or irrational love, the impulse to genocide or the strange irruptions of mass hysteria?

Is it to be the case that these intrinsic faculties of our nature become mere bytes of information uploaded as virtual simulations, or are they more likely to evolve in an essentially unchanged form as they have done with each and every technological development in our history?

Regardless of the progress that the Singularity may or may not give rise to, humanity with all its simplistic desires and complex emotions must remain very much the same.

Abstract principles unanswerable to science, such as nostalgia or melancholia, will re-emerge in unpredictable guises; and historical precedents teach us that failing to temper a faith in scientific progress by discounting the irrationality of human nature can lead to devastating consequences.

None of the Bolshevik ‘god-builders’ could have foreseen the horrors of the gulag or the terrible atrocities committed by Leninist and Stalinist regimes in their quest for science to transform society. Just as neither Nietzsche in his writings on the ubermensch, or the eugenicists of the early 20th century could reasonably have foreseen the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.

Who could have foreseen that the 1980/90s, a belle époque in terms of Western well-being and stability, and a period of rampant consumerism, would coincide with the proliferation of depression and anxiety disorders that led to many millions being prescribed Prozac?

Who might have been prepared to speculate that after Sputnik’s orbit fired the starting gun on the Space Race, the giant leap for mankind might not ignite the collective imagination in quite so transformative a way as had been foreseen, and that the dream of transcendence via mass space travel would prove short-lived?

Some might see it as a conceptual pole vault over the bar of plausibility, but it could be argued that the ‘Singularity event’ of the 20th century was the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was a moment of colossal progress in self-destructive power which it was thought would, from the dissipating mushroom cloud, leave the clear air of deterrence from any future conflict.

In reality, as the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote, the progress of humankind to the point where it held the awesome power of total annihilation placed the whole world in a ‘double-bind’, the pathologies of anxiety and schizophrenia became more pronounced, and the pervading screen of paranoia descended with the Cold War and continues to distort our collective vision to this day.

But in the final analysis, it is the eschatological view of human progress that really informs the Singularity. The millenarian lifeblood that gave hope to Christianity, Jacobinism and Bolshevism, has settled into the myths of Silicon Valley, exposing it as a hyper-modern religious faith.

In the same vein, the adherents of Gnosticism believed that salvation would come to the possessors of a certain spiritual insight which would manifest itself in liberation from the confines of human physicality and the material world. The Gnostics are now the technocrats waiting on the Rapture in which biological intelligence ascends into the ether and we finally transcend ourselves, consigning the horrors of our human history to the dustbowl of the past.

It is axiomatic that scientific advances make incremental progress, but nonetheless we remain the same human beings. The Singularity seeks to justify itself, in its remodelling of the mind and promise of a post-human hinterland, by pointing to the overwhelming possibilities for good to which it could lead – eradication of disease and famine, meeting and even reversing the resource needs of our societies, alleviating the perpetual push-and-pull of economic forces on our lives, even solving the inescapable problem of ageing and mortality itself.

By justifying itself through these intractable ideals, promoted in a vacuum without consideration of any consequence or side effect, it reveals itself to be just another in a long line of technological utopia which promise so much but in terms of registering the complexities of the human as animal, foresee so little.

Just as achieving a state of permanent happiness is an El Dorado of the mind, and Thomas More’s utopia is a place no one would want to live, so too the progress in technology to a point at which all problems will be eradicated is equally unattainable.

The existential troubles humanity has combated for millennia will persist, and while some may fade in their significance or mutate into other forms, new problems that technology cannot solve will penetrate through the fissures like knotweed through the concrete of our engineered well-being.

A Tract Against the Singularity (part 3)

Read Part 2 here


The steadfast conviction that science can enable us to transcend ourselves can be traced back to the reaction against the man who so firmly asserted the fundamentals of our nature, Charles Darwin.

Faced with Darwin’s theory of the ‘universal death’ and the unpalatable notion that life might in fact be meaningless, the Enlightenment society of the day cleaved to alternative naturalists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who offered the hope that human progress could be planned through careful and precise modelling. As the philosopher John Gray has written, the search for the existence of survival ‘...was the quest for immortality adapted to the conditions of a scientific age.’

If this is perhaps a predictable response to Darwinism, given humankind’s predilection for ascribing meaning, then it offers a means by which we can view the inherent unpredictability and randomness of our lives in the face of change and the ways in which the Singularity movement has so far failed to acknowledge it.

One classic but increasingly marked implication of these developments is that of technological unemployment.

By those such as Ray Kurzweil seeking to explain away this viral spectre by saying that our pressurised working lives will be alleviated by ever more powerful and efficient automation, leaving us all free to roam in the Eden of creative endeavour, is to fall into the same obscure thinking as the socialist left – that only when we are unshackled from the chains of labour will we be free to fulfil our true potential.

Leon Trotsky’s vision that ‘such is the power of science that the average man will become an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx...beyond this new peaks will rise’ is recycled into the Singularity with its fantasies of ‘brain expansion’ and nanobots that fuel the scaling of ever higher heights of intelligence, almost like a tech version of tribal head binding.

Frequently, Kurzweil adopts a condescending attitude with regard to what he terms ‘fundamentalist Ludditism’ that will stand in fervent opposition to the natural forces of technological evolution, and yet he fails to see his own position as fundamentalist itself.

If, as Darwin postulated, humans are mere animals governed by blind selection, then how can we hope to control the process of evolution? For the Singularity would surely not be such an inevitability were the market forces, vast reserves of creative energy and deregulated development not zeroed-in on its accomplishment.

In this way we can see the Silicon Valley movement as another means – whose paradigms lie in religious institutions, the military, the sciences, and free market economists – by which very intelligent people seek to redistribute vast investment wealth towards their own interests, all the while promoting their strong claims to be acting in ours.

Singularitarians point to the potential of nanotechnology and AI to enhance physical health, claiming, perhaps quite correctly, that the inherent ‘good’ in combating cancer and other diseases will triumph over any ethical or financial obstacles in the way of such progress. However, nowhere in the writings of Kurzweil are there discussed the possible impacts, positive or negative, on mental health.

Already we can see worrying signs as to what the future may hold for our collective psychological well-being; from Richard Louv’s ‘nature deficit disorder’, to a prevalence in conditions such as ADHD and autism, to ‘the Google effect’ (brains retaining less information), and programmes being set up to help those suffering from ‘internet addiction’.

But collectively these are perhaps merely the tugboat leading the way for the colossal ocean liner of psychopathologies that may soon come steaming out of the harbour.

Singularitarians hold that not long after the ‘Turing test’ is successfully passed (at which point computers are able to imitate a human), we will be able to enlist the services of HAL-like virtual entities to act as our personal assistants who will display the intelligence and emotionally-rich interactive capabilities of humans.

Is it not a possibility that biological humans may react in subtle, but not inconsiderable, psychological ways to these developments? Could we not grow to find these entities an infringement to our sense of dignity, our sense of pride, even our sense of self? And is it not beyond comprehension that a virtual entity endowed with humanistic emotions might exhibit adverse pathologies all of its own?

If this sounds overtly pessimistic, it’s worth considering the negative implications of internet technologies manifest today. In Japan, a generation of young people began withdrawing from society and living hermitical existences (as documented in the book ‘Shutting out the Sun’); not to mention the strange sociopathic tendencies the internet gives rise to with regard to ‘trolling’ and ‘grooming’, the encouraging of suicidal acts, and even the committing of suicide online.

In terms of sexuality, Kurzweil crassly exemplifies the ‘amazing’ revolutions in sex – virtualised projections of any desired partner with your actual lover perhaps reciprocating in kind, heightened sense stimulation, and so on.

In reality, we see trends such as the ‘blue screen effect’ wilting amorous interaction; the troubling rise in rape, revenge and other extreme forms of pornography gaining ground; Japanese anime porn flirting on the paedophilic; and children becoming sexualised at an ever earlier age with surveys revealing preteens to be regularly engaging in ‘sexting’.

(As a side note worth considering, not only are women under-represented and under-paid in Silicon Valley, but there have been a long string of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment in tech companies.)

Reverse brain engineering, Kurzweil claims, will by the late-2030s allow ‘brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots [to] greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve our sensory, pattern-recognition and cognitive abilities’.

And yet recent studies have shown the adverse effects digital technologies are having on these cognitive abilities already; the interruptive and compulsive nature of the internet leading to a rerouting of conventional neurotransmitters with side effects on educative processes and retentive capacities.

Whilst it is true that our brains may become more nimble, skating with less required exertion across the ice of information, it is also the case that the sheet over which we skate continues to melt ever thinner.

In our quest for knowledge and information we cleave to conventional ideas and solutions rather than deliberating on alternative lines of thought. As Nicholas Carr concludes in ‘The Shallows’:

‘the more we allow machines to mediate our understanding of the world, the more our intelligence becomes artificial...we are already artificial intelligence.’

If everyone is able to download intelligence at will (why bother reading Dostoyevsky's epic ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ for instance when it can be installed into your brain like a simple app?), it raises the question of whether we become more intelligent beings at all or whether it is merely a simulation.

Without having gone through the laborious process of reading a text or interrogating a theory, we are unable to think about it in a critical, incisive or questioning manner, in the same way as we can never have as rich or nuanced an understanding of a city having visited for only a weekend as opposed to living there for a long period of time.

Kurzweil writes, ‘I have come to appreciate an important meta-idea: that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating’. Although, whilst technology may adhere to the Law of Accelerating Returns who is to say that ingenuity and creativity will keep pace rather than veering off onto a slip road to stagnation?

Already we see, in the reductive affirmation culture of social media and ‘clicktivism’, a shift towards the forced optimism that Dave Eggers pre-empts in his chilling novel ‘The Circle’; a presumed by-product of the idealistic self-organising network that the internet was supposed to represent, usurping hierarchy in favour of egalitarianism. The grins remain fixed in full knowledge of the mass infringement of civil liberties that the web has enshrined. We have each become Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, mass transparency for forces that to us at least remain opaque and in which we are compelled to invest our unquestioning trust as part of the unswerving optimism of the age.

Part 4 coming soon

A Tract Against the Singularity (part 2)

Read Part One here:

Contrary to widely-publicised concerns raised recently by the likes of Stephen Hawking, the godfather of the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil’s grand vision stipulates that the current developments towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) are simply the next logical stage in our evolution.

Despite them not being biological the machines of the future will be deemed human. Indeed before long, the distinction between ‘us’ as humans and ‘them’ as machines will have been rendered obsolete. This concept of man-as-machine has its roots in the nascent belly of the 20th century, with the cybernetics movement as its most obvious precursor.

Popularised by scientists such as John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner, cybernetics grew out of the scientific rationalism of the American post-WWII era.

The principle of cybernetics held that underlying everything, from computing to ecology to human behaviour, exists a specific system regulated by feedback loops that can be reduced down to very simple components and examined in much the same way as a machine.

Harnessing these methods, the RAND Corporation exerted tremendous power and influence over Silicon Valley as well as the financial industry that led America’s globalisation project.

Ever since the 1980s, when the free market system began to disentangle itself from the thorns of elected powers, we have looked to the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of its practitioners to reform society for the better by lifting all boats on a surface of unregulated riches. The global recession and innumerable banking scandals that have gurgled forth from the murky depths have drained that illusion of its lustre.

It is this sense of disenchantment in the most recent of our ‘old faiths’ that the digital revolution and the Singularity movement are now drawing sustenance from. Google, Facebook, Apple , et al are the new bankers, Silicon Valley the new Wall Street, encapsulating the zeitgeist ‘spirit of the age’, shaping behaviours and engineering a modern way of living.

On Mountain View, the epicentre of this tech revolution, Google have recently unveiled plans for their new HQ – a translucent, almost organic, climate-responsive shell that perhaps could be seen as an architectural rendering of the web itself.

Things in Silicon Valley though were never quite so spectacular or as far removed from the nurturing breast of the state. In 1958, Fairchild Semiconductor moved into an unremarkable ‘shell without plumbing or electrical service’, but as the only company in the world capable of manufacturing transistors they were soon selling huge quantities to IBM and NASA.

One of the 8 founders of Fairchild was Gordon Moore, who would go on to found Intel and revolutionise the microchip technology that along with his famous Moore’s Law would become the bedrock of all Singularity thinking.

A principal reason that Fairchild had been able to achieve such prominence was due to huge investiture from President Eisenhower’s administration. This was meant to be the fiscal Viagra for America’s perceived technological impotence sparked the previous year by the successful launch of Sputnik 1 into orbit.

A few decades before the mass production of transistors, Lenin was prophesising that the power of electricity was to become the lifeblood of the Russian nation, helping to enshrine an unswerving faith in science to transform society for the good. Accordingly, the Singularitarians of Silicon Valley today can trace their ideological heritage back to the Bolshevik ‘god-builders’ of the early 20th century.

Leaders like Lenin, Trotsky, as well as the writer Maxim Gorky (who wrote of his conviction that humans would evolve to become ‘pure thought’), believed that discontentment with humanity could be solved by secular rationalism, transforming men into ‘scientific beings’ and ultimately conquering death. If, as they and the later cybernetics movement planned, science could control society in a rational way, then it could be viewed as a highly efficient machine with information as the energising force.

Google then, with its secrecy, ubiquity and unaccountability, is a State Planning Committee for the digital age. Ray Kurzweil, who has submitted himself as guinea pig for the life extension treatments that seek to slow down ageing along with his 250 supplements per day, is the Lenin of the Singularity.

If he succeeds in uploading his mind to a virtual platform (or indeed, even if he doesn’t), his acolytes will venerate him as the spiritual leader of their cause; his ‘consciousness’ preserved with the same dutiful reverence as Lenin’s mummified cadaver on its mausoleum plinth.

A Tract Against the Singularity (part 1)

Over the last few months I have been reading about the Singularity Theory, a radical new myth for the near future that is currently energising the digital tech industry based in Silicon Valley.

Depending on your point-of-view the Singularity will be either incredible or terrifying. What is clear though is that the real power and influence to guide and alter society has shifted, from politicians and even from financial institutions to the tech billionaires. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Larry Ellison are the new rulers of the world.

This long-form essay, which I will split over the coming days into smaller parts, is my attempt to explain the Singularity, examine its origins and argue my case for why I believe it will ultimately fail to materialise in quite the benevolent revolution the technologists dream.


Part 1

As I sit at the table a waterfall cascades down the side of the kitchen units and onto the surfaces. The foglet swarms amass this projection entirely at the whim of my imagination, I can feel the light spray on my cheeks, hear the churn of the froth, and almost smell the salmon that leap occasionally from the flowing simulation.

The same nanobot entities sluice around my bloodstream, guardians of my biology, monitoring cell and organ performance, teeming along the neural pathways of my brain. These allow me to maintain a conversation with my father seated along the table from me whilst, simultaneously through a separate retinal overlay, teasing my virtualised girlfriend with fingers that spider up the inside of her thigh.

Meanwhile, my personal assistant is busy downloading ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Proust onto the neural net of my consciousness. The waterfall dissipates into a shrink-wrapped shield of advertising and my father disappears from the table. He had always hated these vulgar projections and so in his non-biological form he can avoid them entirely. In many such ways he found his physical death actually very liberating. The year is 2045 and the Singularity is here...


If the above reads as though it’s in danger of breaching the banks of the ridiculous then it would be worth considering that it is merely an imaginative tributary running towards the great delta of possibilities upon the realisation of the Singularity.

The abstract of Vernor Vinge’s seminal 1993 essay ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’ opens with the prophecy that:

‘...within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence...shortly after, the human era will be ended.’

The principles of this new epoch centre around the exponentially quickening pace of evolution, which point to the developments of intelligence itself – from the first emergence of matter and electromagnetic forces, the formation of galaxies, the development of prokaryotes (single-celled creatures), to homo sapiens and the manipulation of technology – occurring at an accelerating rate, with entropy increasing in lockstep.

Following the trend of Moore’s Law (the exponential growth rate of computational power, shrinking unit size and affordability over the last half-century), super-intelligent machines capable of self-replicating, self-updating, and expanding upon our own collective intelligence, will surpass human cognitive abilities within the new few decades.

In the process they will solve insurmountable problems from medicine, to the environment, work, education, and the holy grail of scientific inquiry, mortality. Humans and machines will gradually synergise as we soar toward the event horizon at which the intelligence-saturated universe finally ‘wakes up to itself’.

If this still reads like an L. Ron Hubbard-style fantasy to which only the most willfully deluded could subscribe, then you might wish to take note.

It is now a decade since the American scientist Ray Kurzweil published his epic ‘The Singularity is Near’, popularising the transhumanist movement and identifying the holy trinity of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics that currently ignite the pioneering beacon that is Silicon Valley.

Bizarre though many of his predictions may seem you need only look around at our already digitally-dependent society to see just how far such technology has come in such a brief period. Although Google Glass may have fallen on the sword of consumer vanity, the broadly positive response to Apple’s Smartwatch marks the point at which perhaps ‘wearable tech’ will sink its grappling irons firmly onto our biology.

Major multinationals such as Siemens AG and Cisco Systems are forging ahead in developing smart city capabilities through what has become known as the ‘Internet of Things’, in which everything from your car to your toaster will be interconnected via a Cloud-based interface – a lucrative market they have valued at around $1 trillion.

But it is Google who are at the vanguard of the Singularity, establishing the mysterious Google X in which 100 ‘shoot-for-the-stars’ ideas are being explored, unveiling their $1.2bn extended lifespan research centre Calico, and in 2012 hiring Ray Kurzweil himself as their Director of Engineering.

Google’s co-founder Larry Page, has raised the suggestion that we ‘set aside some small part of the world’ where innovation can proceed free from any regulatory control (to which the alarmist might recall to mind H.G. Wells’ ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’). They are also a major corporate sponsor of the Singularity University, founded in 2008 by Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, with ambassadors in 54 countries posted to attract and train the most innovative young minds to ‘think exponential rather than linear’.

Professor Mike Halsall, the UK ambassador for the Singularity University, is disarming and full of bonhomie when I meet him, apologising for not being “a more wacky transhumanist” and enthusiastically describing his involvement in trying to engage government on grand ‘global challenges’ and how new technology can help to transform them.

He describes himself as being a “Singularity pragmatist” (as opposed to the “rather more optimistic” Kurzweil), who is careful to couch any speculation as to current progress towards 2045 with provisos relating to inevitable regulation and uncertain forecasting structures. Indeed he is emphatic that regulatory measures (anathema for many technologists) will at some point have to materialise.

At times Halsall exercises a surprising note of caution – “ethics is the thing that all those in the tech industry need to be a lot more explicit about... there needs to be an infrastructure of ethics acting almost as a cell wall that ensures we don’t over-progress.”

He acknowledges it as a perplexing balancing act though, with those on the more optimistic end of the Singularity spectrum warning that overly stringent regulation could result in the technology gestating into nefarious forms in the underworld; already a considerable issue with reports of dubious Bitcoin exchanges and the rising threat of the ‘dark net’.

The Singularity then has become the 21st century’s most enigmatic myth, one that has the potential to alter humanity and the world in ways more radical than any previous historical transformation. Yet it is my contention that it will be unable to avoid withering on the ideological vine as so many other progressive dreams for the future of humankind have done before.

(Part 2 coming soon)

Culture - June

Books read:

Voltaire - 'Candide'
Voltaire - 'Miracles and Idolatry' (non-fiction)
Grégoire Chamayou - 'Drone Theory' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'Super-Cannes'
Virginia Woolf - 'To the Lighthouse'
Adam Rothstein - 'Drone' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'More Than Honey' (Markus Imhoof) (documentary)
'Manhunter' (Michael Mann)
'Switchblade Romance' (Alexandre Aja)
'The Power of Nightmares' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'The Trap' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief' (Alex Gibney) (documentary)

Albums Played:

Peter Gabriel - 'Us'

Exploring the Church of Scientology

“It’s clear from your test results that you are currently very depressed”, my assessor informed me, pointing out a yawning chasm on the graph that was meant to analyse the personality test I had taken in the London Church of Scientology.

It appeared that I was crawling along the depths of -90 which according to their matrices was a ‘completely unacceptable level’, to which I was a little puzzled given that surely anyone in such a state would scarcely be able to get out of bed. Counterbalancing this though were the high scores I had achieved on ‘active’ and ‘responsibility’, although I was surprised to see myself veering towards ‘aggressiveness’ rather than ‘inhibited’.

I could only recall there being 2 or 3 out of 200 generic personality questions touching on issues of depression (i.e. ‘do you ever feel depressed for any period of time?’, to which for pretty much everyone the answer would almost certainly be ‘yes’), so it did seem slightly contrived that I should be nosediving towards a mental breakdown. The only answer was to instantly sign up for a self-improvement course to level out my ups and downs.

My assessor, a bald man in his fifties wearing a boxy black suit and a nervous laugh, explained how he had been drawn towards Scientology as a means of escaping his doctrinaire Catholic upbringing and that he now wanted others to share in the life-enhancing possibilities that the praxis of Dianetics gave him. His sincerity I didn’t doubt, although the hard sell he had obviously been instructed to pursue became quickly uncomfortable and I was glad to leave, promising that I would return once I had “thought over whether it was for me or not”.

Situated in a grand building styled as an Italian palazzo on Queen Victoria Street, the Church of Scientology was somewhere I had been intrigued yet wary of visiting for quite some time, all too aware of the sinister claims to brainwashing and ‘cult-like’ practices that swindled credulous followers in their search for some higher truth or meaning. With the release of the controversial documentary ‘Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief’ by Alex Gibney, I decided it was time to pay a brief visit.

The first thing you notice upon entering is the quasi-medieval fibreglass ‘Scientology’ lettering in all their kitsch glory, and the cabinets of L. Ron Hubbard books. I’m always struck by the aesthetics of new religions and the evangelist Christians of America; the extent to which they unselfconsciously lack a sense of style, elegance or edge. Instead they seem to exude a feeling of the inescapably naff, in this case as though they’d been stolen from a branch of Games Workshop.

Scientology evolved in the 1950s as an extension from the sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard’s psychology theory of Dianetics. This focused on the premise that the brain is split into two parts: the conscious ‘analytical mind’ which is a perfect computer operating on a purely informational basis, and the ‘reactive mind’ which deals with all the emotions and trauma that become neuroses shaping and distorting our natural behaviour, and ultimately prohibiting humans from reaching their full and freest selves. Engrams are the negative stimuli that must be exposed and eradicated by an intensive process of ‘auditing’.

In the 1950s, Dianetics initially caused a sensation across America before being disparaged as pseudoscience by the professional psychologists who Hubbard despised for their elitism. Saddled with mounting debts, Hubbard decided the best way to ensure the earnings from Dianetics wouldn’t be swallowed up by tax was to create a religion which, courtesy of the First Amendment to the Constitution, would be exempt from taxation by the state. With this purpose in mind he set about constructing an astounding array of quasi-doctrines to which the committed follower would be obliged over several years and exorbitant sums of money to pass across the ‘bridge to total freedom’ and spiritual enlightenment.

To give a brief summary of the spectacular theories, it stems from the more-than-a-little stagnant and uninspiring premise that 75million years ago the world looked much as it did in 1950s America – the same cars, clothes, buildings, and so on....

Xenu, the overlord of the vast Galactic Confederacy of planets, was struggling to maintain his power due to chronic overpopulation and so conceived a plan together with some dastardly psychiatrists to paralyse and capture the souls of billions of citizens. Once this was done they were sent through space (on jet aircraft) and dropped into planet Earth’s volcanoes together with hydrogen bombs which detonated to disperse the souls into the atmosphere. These have subsequently infected each new born child with pre-stored memories and conceptions of the world and must be purged from the individual in order to be free.

As Voltaire wrote, ‘faith consists in believing what the reason does not believe, which is another miracle in itself’.

Perhaps the most instinctive response to this is to deride the whole thing as - to paraphrase Einstein - evidence of humankind’s limitless capacity for stupidity. Another way is to consider the socio-political ground on which Scientology was cultivated.

The Dianetics sensation of the 1950s rose in parallel with the new age of 'the individual', the golden age of America in which consumer confidence boomed and the space race energised the popular imagination. This heralded a social revolution in which old conventions and orthodoxies were shaken by the rise of rock n’ roll, teenage rebellion, Levis, fast food and science fiction. (Where else could the ideas of Scientology have come from but 1950s Hollywood and its out-pouring of films such as ‘Attack of 50-Foot Woman’, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘The Thing (from another world)’..?)

All of this though was haunted by a spectre of profound dread and paranoia. The apocalyptic nightmares of Hiroshima that had paradoxically brought about peace, the horrific realities of the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, and the unfolding Cold War with Soviet Russia that threatened ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, all served to prepare the febrile ground for mass delusions to take shape. Is it any coincidence that the front cover of the bestselling Dianetics book was designed accordingly....?

Of course, Scientology was only one outcrop from this topography of sinister delusions. Far more high profile were, in the words of Lou Reed, 'all the dead bodies piled up in 'Nam', the Manson Family murders and the shocking Jonestown massacre.

It is perhaps entirely reasonable that people might have responded by seeking to purge from themselves the perceived traumas of their collective pasts. With 1950s McCarthyism, Americans were subjected to propaganda myths about the 'red scare' and 'reds under the bed' that could be said to have fueled the propensity towards introspection and 'psychological cleansing' that Dianetics purported to offer.

For a secular society to function on the premise - however illusory - of being free, it must celebrate the individual's ability to adopt whatever they choose as a belief system. If it provides some measure of comfort or security, or serves as a moral compass through an uncertain world, then whatever it is cannot be seen as anything other than a positive force.

Seen objectively, are the ideas of Scientology that much more far-fetched than the idea that a virgin gave birth to the son of God who was later resurrected, that the whole world was created in 7 days, that a flood deluged the earth save for an ark full of animals, that water turned to wine, that a few fish and loaves fed the starving masses, that the burning bush spoke, that the Red Sea was parted, and so on?

Indeed, in modern society we readily believe, or are encouraged to believe, many fantasies. We are told to believe in the power of the free market to steer society in directions that are natural and for the 'common good' regardless of the inherent instability or evidence to the contrary that demonstrates inequalities becoming wider and more entrenched.

We believe in the Enlightenment myth of 'progress' and our continual and sustained moral superiority as a Western civilisation.

We believe in digital technologies and their power to transform our lives into ever more profound realms of convenience and connectivity.

The crazy and (let's be honest) quite turgid sci-fi/pulp fiction ideas of Scientology are as nothing compared to the expounded theories of the Singularity currently inspiring the Silicon Valley tech community that holds very real and genuine power and influence to transform society. The new L. Ron Hubbard is Ray Kurzweil, the author of 'The Singularity is Near' and now Google's Director of Engineering where he is purportedly working on reverse-engineering a human mind.

Belief is fine so long as it harmless, and Scientology it seems is anything but. This is the overarching message of Alex Gibney’s astonishing new film ‘Going Clear’, based on Lawrence Wright’s book, that has just been released in UK cinemas after facing a barrage of intense opposition from the mobilised Scientology legal forces.

It reveals Hubbard to be a self-aggrandising bully, a troubled paranoiac and a pathological liar who fabricated his war record in the US Navy. As his quasi-religion took hold and he sailed ever further into personally troubled waters, you get the sense that he had become intoxicated by the power of his own work, inflated by continuing to be able to pull off a colossal confidence trick on the vulnerable and insecure who looked to him as some kind of new-age prophet.

(N.B. All the film’s allegations are contested by the Church of Scientology.) The film exposes the structure of the church as little more than an entrapment scheme to extort money from people lured in by the prospect of ‘self-help’ through the auditing process. The dreadful abuses carried out at the behest of the genuinely loathsome leader David Miscavige (more of a real-life Patrick Bateman than you are likely to find anywhere); the harassment inflicted upon those choosing to leave; the legal wrangling with the IRS that have enabled it to remain classified as a tax-free religion; the millions spent building up property assets (including the prime real estate I visited in London).

And then of course are the celebrity figureheads, none more prominent than Tom Cruise (nutjob extraordinaire), who is lavished by the Church like a prince whilst they continue to pay their indoctrinated staff less than a dollar an hour. A solid reason to boycott any future films starring Cruise.

It all combines to present a damning portrait of a cult at its most deranging and damaging, using rapacious religious-capitalism to maintain its strength. It demonstrates all the most insidious elements of organised religion, from which some people’s naivety and eagerness to belong to a collective are seen as faculties to be exploited for the private gain of those at the head of the table.

In a world that must have often seemed irrational and mad, perhaps the only way for some to reconcile their own sanity was to immerse themselves in a fiction that proved even more insane, and as such the continual rise of Scientology seems strangely logical.