The Coming Technological Singularity | Page 6

be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of
great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to
menu-driven interfaces.
o Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1
Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale
architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of
electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high bandwidth
connection to be in addition to what paths are already present in the
brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid
of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won't do it. But
suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain
structure was actually setting up, as the embryo develops. That
suggests:
o Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success in the
first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to
complex simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the
people who study how the embryonic brain develops. In the long run,
such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths
and interesting intellectual abilities. Originally, I had hoped that this

discussion of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the
Singularity. (After all, IA allows our participation in a kind of
transcendance.) Alas, looking back over these IA proposals, about all I
am sure of is that they should be considered, that they may give us
more options. But as for safety ... well, some of the suggestions are a
little scarey on their face. One of my informal reviewers pointed out
that IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans
have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard
competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be
necessary in today's world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks
and are coopted into the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built
de novo might possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a
kernel based on fang and talon. And even the egalitarian view of an
Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a
nightmare [26].
The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of
humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply
held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong
superhumanity can show why that is.
Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for
Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our
most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for: That humans
themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice
occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. For those
who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps
even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of
godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress
(overleaping Stent's barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long
as we can make the universe survive [10] [4]) would be achievable.
But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems
themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same
capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look
more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling
picture I have seen of this is in [18].) To live indefinitely long, the mind

itself must grow ... and when it becomes great enough, and looks
back ... what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was
originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the original
was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the
Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing
incrementally out of the old must still be valid.
This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct ways.
The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the
hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of
self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people
("self-awareness and other delusions"). Intelligence Amplification
undercuts our concept of ego from another direction. The
post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth
networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will
likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including
ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when
pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a
selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under
consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and
the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how
essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be -- no
matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be.