Singularity Summit predicts new type of human

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 10 Sep 2007 at 15:25

Technology is about to rewrite what it means to be human, according to a convention of futurists.

Meeting at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco, hundreds of scientists, engineers and technology experts discussed a future in which robots wrote their own code, and implants allowed the human brain to process data at incredible speeds.

"We and our world won't be us anymore," Rodney Brooks, a robotics professor at the MIT told PC Pro. "Who is us and who is them is going to become a different sort of question. We will get more silicon and steel inside us but we'll also be using more and more biological materials in robots, and ultimately we'll start to share components.

"The process is starting but this will take decades or centuries to fully play out."

At the apex of this convergence the group postulates a "Technological Singularity", a moment where humanity is transformed into something beyond our current understanding.

"It seems plausible that with technology we can create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond this event are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm," says science fiction writer, Vernor Vinge.

The "singularists" back up their claims by looking back at the radical advances in computing in the past 50 years, and citing Moore's law which predicts the number of transistors on a chip should double every two years. By contrast, the singularists say, the evolution of modern humans from primates involved just a threefold increase in brain capacity.

"To any thoughtful person, the singularity idea, even if it seems wild, raises a gigantic, swirling cloud of profound and vital questions about humanity and the powerful technologies it is producing," says author Douglas Hofstadter.

"Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity's collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible."