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.