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.
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