by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright May 2013
This vision of the future was inspired in me by reading Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity is Near. Reading this gave me a much clearer view of what the near future was likely to be like. The heart of this vision is that Earth's computing power, what I will call cyber, is growing both rapidly and exponentially now, and this growth is unlikely to stop any time soon. Because of the exponential nature of this growth, big surprises are coming. As those surprises come, we will be experiencing The Singularity, as Kurzweil and others call it.
One of the Earth-shaking changes will be that self-aware intelligences will evolve in this exponentially growing cyberspace -- these cyber entities will share Earth with humans and other carbon-based life forms. In my vision, that is just a first step, following steps will be the creation of self-aware intelligences from many different kinds of base materials and information processing structures -- silicon, photonic, quantum, and engineered carbon-based life to name a few. Intelligent, self-aware life will experience a species radiation comparable to that of the Cambrian Explosion that occurred billions of years ago as carbon-based life forms first figured out how to become multicellular and have specialized cells.
Diversity is one element of The Singularity. Another is fast change. The Singularity is not an ending point, it's a transition into a new climate, and a key feature of that new climate is... change keeps happening even faster and faster! There is a Singularity only when viewed from the perspective of mortal humans, for the cyber inhabitants its just more of the same, only faster and faster. This means that in time, a few decades after the Singularity "starts", the cyber world can change its environment and species mix from day-to-day, and even second-to-second.
From the point of view of mortals watching cybers, these beings are going to look more and more schizophrenic as time passes -- the humans of a decade or more into the Singularity won't expect them to respond in a consistent way from one meeting to the next. And there will be lots of new kinds of beings as the Singularity advances, each kind being more advanced and inscrutable than the precessors.
Along with diversity and speed there is another important change: What is the instinctive thinking for these new beings? A definition: Human instinctive thinking is thinking that which comes fast and easy and is high performance -- think of it as our vision system, and the warm, fuzzy thinking that comes with falling in love. The converse is learned thinking, think arithmetic. Human instinctive thinking has developed over trillions of generations as humans and their predecessors continually adapted to living on Earth. The human vision is an example of the high performance that instinctive thinking can produce. The cybers are going to start their thinking evolution from completely new ground: one of the many kinds of cyberspace. They aren't carbon-based and they haven't been living on Earth (in the human sense). Their "harsh reality" is completely different, so the instinctive thinking they develop will be completely different as well. Example: If a cyber being evolved out of Microsoft Excel, its instinctive thinking would be spreadsheeting.
This coming cyber future is neat! It is also complex, which makes story telling about it hard. Something else that makes the story telling even more difficult is that what these cyber beings think about, and how they think about it, is going to be alien to human thinkers. Their thinking is going to be as compatible with human thinking as, say, cow thinking is to human thinking -- we humans just won't get it.
This is a challenge!
And this is how I will meet this challenge: In these stories I will talk only about what mortal humans experience. I'm not going to get into things such as what it feels like to move a conciousness between mortal and cyber existence. This is likely to happen, it's certainly a wish and dream for many humans alive today -- Ray Kurzweil being an icon for this hope. But, as I cover in my Birds and Boeings essay, the reality this dream inspires is not likely to have much in common with the dream. And, even more important for my story telling, the cyber side of the experience will be mostly incomprehensible to the mortal side. The people side is going to say, "Eh? You say what happened? You say what is important? I don't understand."
So for these stories I will be talking about what mortal humans experience. The cybers will be there, but they will be to humans as ancient gods were to ancient humans: thinking their own thoughts, capricious and undecipherable. But when their attention turns to influencing mortal activities they will be powerful in subtle ways.
--The End--