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.
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