The Singularity and the end of Humanity is quickly approaching. Or maybe it is the beginning of Humanity 2.0. Or maybe Humanity won’t be ending or beginning- just marrying itself to the internet to produce cute little cyborg babies free of all the ills and shortcomings of being a normal human.
But will it have a soul?
Of course it will. We will program these future machines to contain our soul inside a packet of data that can securely float around the network of human cyber consciousness free of the restraints of a biological body. Or maybe we will be able to create souls for our machines, an idea that even a Dartmouth Research Summit suggested in the mid 1950's. Or maybe it will just assimilate itself into the collective being of what used to be Mankind so that every individual becomes just a piece of the mass. Then we could all get together and sing “We Are The World” and actually mean it.
But can anyone really know?
In this day and age it seems like everyone has a PhD in the Hypothetical but nobody will ever be able to offer solid answers as to how this whole Singularity-End of the World scenario is going to play out until it will be too late to do anything about it.
I feel like we are just a bunch of prehistoric monkeys talking about the cool things we will be able to do but shouldn’t be allowed to do with our futuristic hyper dexterous opposable thumbs.
The Future, as it has been throughout all human history, is a big question mark punctuating our current existence and that is an incredibly scary thought to wrap our brain around- or plug our brain into if that’s going to be the new lingo. The bottom line is we just do not know what Tomorrow will look like.
In the last couple days I have been trying to wrap my mind around the idea that there could be an event in time where all of Humanity grows at such an exponential rate that total assimilation and surrender to the work of our own hands will become our only option. Frankly, I don’t know how to respond to all these questions except by asking myself more questions.
Rather than the unanswerable semantics of future postulation, I have chosen to respond to this impending doom/ evolution with questions I can actually answer.
Questions like:
What do I currently value that will be completely irrelevant in a hundred years?
Is my identity so intertwined with that of Humanity that I care if future generations at some point cease to exist? Or am I like Hugo de Garis who is building a human like brain with the full knowledge that he could be playing a key role in destroying his own species.
Is the goal of my existence simply to prolong my current state as long as possible or is to actually bring positive change to the existence of someone else. If people are going to live forever then everything I do impacts eternity one way or the other. How do I want to leave it?
Would I want to live forever doing the same things I am doing now and feeling the same way?
These are all some pretty big questions but they are ones I, as well as everyone else, can begin to find an answer to. It is my hope that we figure out how to make the planet worth saving before we figure out how to make it last forever as we wrestle with this nagging thought that maybe we are all created to live forever in the first place.