by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Jan 2013
When starting any discussion on a new topic, such as this one is, it is wise to first lay the groundwork of what the words mean. Let's deal with some definitions first, then move on to axioms.
The Singularity -- this refers to a time in our near future (twenty to seventy years from now) when the computing power on Earth will grow to an unimaginable amount, and, likewise, what it will be doing will be unimaginable to humans. This concept has been talked about by many people, but these days Ray Kurzweil is something of the patron saint of this concept and his book The Singularity is Near (2005) is a good place to start reading about it. He talks about the upcoming GNR Revolution: G=Genetics N=Nanotechnology and R=Robots (Artificial Intelligence).
This means there's a whole lot of change coming and it will cover many aspects of human life... and even more. As this revolution unfolds humans will be creating many other kinds of intelligent life, and interesting hybrids of intelligence that mix human, cyber, bio and nano in many forms.
I agree with this vision, but I will be concentrating on a subset of it in my writing: What happens to the human experience as the world goes into this Singularity environment?
The Snap -- As mentioned earlier, I will call this Post Snap because this is my version of the vision. I use snap because when the changeover comes it will be fast.
Cyber and creations -- "Cyber" is a term I will use for all the various intelligences that will evolve in cyberspace. There will be many, and they will come in constantly changing forms as the computing power of the world continues to grow and become more sophisticated. And, in fact, they will be many places in addition to being in cyberspace. "Creations" is my term for self-aware standalone robots. Once again, there will be many kinds. The big difference between cyber and creations is in how humans perceive them. Humans can see and touch a creation, so they will interact with it differently than they will with a purely cyber entity.
Dilettante -- The dictionary definition of dilettante is: 1. A person who claims an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge. 2. A person with an amateur interest in the arts.
I will change this definition a bit. In this work a dilettante is someone who masters a skill at the personal level, but is interested in using the skill for handcrafting and personal expression, not mass producing. Dilettante is an element of hipsterism.
Urban dwelling -- A few cities, such as NYC and LA in America, will continue to grow. The cities proper and their surrounding areas will grow and get filled with more and more humans. And the resort communities that service these cities will also grow -- places such as Aspen and Hilton Head.
The majority of cities will experience what Cleveland and Detroit are famously experiencing now: They will steadily and dramatically loose human population -- "Why live in Cleveland when you can live in New York City?" will become an even more common mentality. But, these depopulating cities will not turn back into wilderness, they will be repopulated with creations and creation run enterprises and there will be lots of infrastructure in these human-abandoned cities. In the same vein, most farming will become automated, so farms will also become creation populated.
TES -- Stands for Total Entitlement State. This is the condition when some percentage of the community's wealth is channeled through the government and is providing the all basic necessities for all its members.
STEM -- Stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. This is a contemporary acronym for an education well-grounded in analytic thinking and capable of understanding the realities of making material things work in the real world.
What follows are axioms (givens) I will apply when writing these essays. The only explaining of these givens is what you will see here.
Human-centric In these essays I will be limiting my speculations to those things which human consciousness can perceive and experience. I define human consciousness as what we humans experience today -- what happens inside the human brain. What that consciousness experiences can be enhanced -- example: glasses enhancing vision -- but to be "human" by my definition the feeling of experience must be going on inside the human brain. The awareness and decision making must be happening there, not in some other "place" in a hybrid intelligence system that mixes human and various cybers.
This axiom is important because I do feel that hybrid intelligences will proliferate -- there will be plenty of different kinds of intelligences, and the human brain is going to have more and more sophisticated ways of connecting up with cyber-based information and intelligences. So, I'm somewhat arbitrarily drawing this line. But, I draw it here for good reason -- if the thinking is happening in the human brain, then human emotions will still be a large part of that thinking, and human emotion controlling a human body is understandable thinking. It's an anchor. It's thinking we can understand today.
Higher thinking chains in place, but invisible -- I feel that as the Singularity evolves a whole lot will be happening on Earth -- a whole lot! But the entities driving most of that change will be cyber, and most cyber entities will have little to do with humans, and vice versa. Humans and the many kinds of cybers will be sharing Earth's resources, but have little else in common. Think of the relation between mankind and bacteria. Creations, on the other hand, will deal directly and regularly with humans, so they will be designed with human interaction in mind.
So humans will experience only a small and diminishing fraction of what is happening on Earth. But... that's the part I will be exploring. Exploring the other parts is like exploring God. It may be fun to try, but it's basically undoable... too much unknowable... (One difference between exploring God and the cybers of the Singularity is that cybers will be changing quickly as time passes. Think of how computing as we know it has evolved over the decades.)
Cyber will take over commodity manufacturing and service -- Factories and services will get more automated. Think fully automated factories with no people in them and driverless cars. Humans can and will continue to make things and offer services, but they won't be essential things. They will be cherry-on-top luxuries.
The world will be a prosperous place for humans -- Not only will computing power grow exponentially, productivity will grow steadily and rapidly as well. Productivity is how much stuff you can make with a certain amount of resource. The higher the productivity the more you can make. This steady rise in productivity means we will be making many more material goods but using a whole lot less resources to do it.
Plus, the human population is going to peak at about 9 billion in 2050, then decline steadily after that. This will happen because prosperous, urban, middle class people don't have as many children as poor, rural people do. (This is true today and has been true for two hundred years already.) I envision this Singularity world as being 90 percent prosperous urban. Think the demographic changes China and Japan are currently experiencing spread around the world.
The material world will change, but human emotions will not -- human emotional thinking is a constant. It is designed to serve well in the Neolithic Village environment, and is changing slowly to adapt to more civilized environments. But it is warm, fast and comfortable thinking, even when it's not appropriate, so it leads to strange thinking and actions in the civilized environment. The core of what I write about in my Tales of Technofiction stories is how human thinking adapts to the changing "stuff" around it that are the different civilized environments humans live in.
To help round out these axioms here are some common contemporary worries and science fiction themes about the future that are not going to happen.
No Cyber Overlord -- The cyber communities will be thinking about their own issues, not about human issues. If an Overlord appears, it's because he's taken this role up as some kind of entertaining hobby.
No resource exhaustion -- Because of the steady increases in productivity and the peaking of human population, there will be no Malthusian crisis, no "Peak [whatever]". We will be able to make enough basic necessities for all. But making enough luxuries is an entirely different matter! That's controlled by human emotion.
No end of the world -- Climate change, frankenfoods run amok, asteroid strikes, nuclear proliferation, whatever... none of the above or any other similar civilization-threatening catastrophe is going to come to pass. But people will still be chronically worrying about them. That style of worrying is another human emotion.