The opposite of creationism: an antimetabole

Singularitarianism is the opposite of creationism.

Creationists say God created humans in the shockingly recent past. Singularitarians say humans will create God in the shockingly near future.

When creationists look at evolution, they see the engineering of the universe. When Singularitarians look at engineering, we see the evolution of the universe.

Creationists say you should thank God for giving you computers. Singularitarians say you'll thank computers for giving you God.

Mind uploading: the write answer

A 1st generation Apple iPad showing iBooks, with the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A book, one might say, is a document consisting of text, printed in ink on sheets of paper. A human mind, one might likewise say, is an entity consisting of ideas, thought processes and emotions, configured into neurons, synapses and glial cells in a brain.

But if I ask whether or not the book you're reading is Alice in Wonderland, I don't care what kind of ink or paper it's printed on, or whether or not it's printed at all. As far as the reader is concerned, a book is text, not the configuration of matter used to store that text. Nobody questions whether or not an e-book can be Alice, just because Alice was originally a printed book.

The Singularity movie is near

IMDB says The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil's film adaptation of his 2005 book, is opening in the US this Friday. I don't know where they got this date from (all the other sources I can find just say "Summer"), but let's spread the word anyway. After all, the more people are expecting it to open on Friday, the more incentive there'll be for it to actually open on Friday. (And if the movie's release can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, then maybe its subject matter can as well, but that's another story.)

TSIN is part documentary and part science fiction, and you probably don't have to agree with many of Kurzweil's predictions to appreciate both parts. In the documentary scenes, Kurzweil interviews dozens of experts, gathers opposing viewpoints about the history and future of technology like any good documentarian, and presents his own conclusions.

Mind uploading: from mad science to peer-reviewed literature

It's finally happened.

This month, for the first time ever, a peer-reviewed scientific journal dedicated a "Special Issue" to the subject of mind uploading. A theoretical process whereby human beings could become software, mind uploading promises all kinds of benefits imaginable, from immortality to cheap space travel.

Workaholism isn't obsolete after all

A week ago I confessed to being a workaholic, and wrote about how working too hard tends to lead to second-rate output. I quoted FM-2030 as saying that workaholics -- even those of us who love our jobs -- were too uncreative and all-around boring to be ready for the singularity and its precursor period (which he called the Telespheral Age).

On Saturday, however, Sean Henderson from the Abolitionist Society wrote, in reply to an e-mail inquiry of mine, "Present day work implies involuntary suffering - we'll need workaholics to develop the means to transform human design so that activity is blissful. Maybe the motto should be 'towards the abolition of suffering through suffering'."

#Occupy the #Singularity

[A]s death to the mortal man so failure to the immortal[...]. (Imperial Thought of the Day, Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 4th ed., p. 226)

Some Singularitarians have publicly jumped to the conclusion that younger Occupy Wall Street protesters have nothing to worry about in the long run. The argument runs like this:

Premise: Mind uploading will eliminate the need for food, water, shelter and medicine. The only necessities of posthuman existence will be data storage, processor hardware, and electricity.
Premise: Moore's Law, combined with a new abundant energy source (fusion? space-solar?), will make all three of these resources abundant and the cost of existence negligible.
Conclusion: Therefore, at the time of the Singularity, planet Earth will have transitioned to a post-scarcity economy without poverty.

I consider the first premise all but proven and the second highly probable, but I don't agree that the conclusion logically follows from them.

Kurzweil: no prophet, but a name worth dropping

For most of my undergraduate career, I wouldn't have been able to write a blog like this one. Without being thoroughly familiar with such keywords as "technological acceleration", "transhumanism" and "singularitarian", it was hard to articulate my visions and sense of purpose in life, and hard for Google to find me any of the relevant writing on the subject by futurists.

What finally got me going in the right direction was when one of my profs name-dropped Ray Kurzweil this summer, and I started reading his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.