Ushering in the Era of “Beneficial Intelligence”
The notion that there will be a time when technological change will rapidly accelerate, transform, and then merge with human life — in other words, the Singularity — has been with us since at least the fifties. Concepts of non-human entities fashioned in a kind of human image, such as the Golem from Jewish literature, have been with us even longer. By the time the term “robot” entered common parlance, we had already collectively imagined a future full of machines taking on human characteristics and forms. How close are we to the realizations of such concepts, and how much influence do we have in the shaping of the future?
A contemporary smartphone is computationally more powerful than the first Space Shuttle, and today it is unremarkable to own and use one to communicate, calculate our position in space, transmit sounds and images. Over the past hundred years, we have moved from just naming what a robot is or could be, to having ubiquitous, powerful computing technology at our fingertips. The rapid acceleration that Ray Kurzweil spoke of in his popular book The Singularity is Near is palpably a part of our present, and the notion that the Singularity is on the horizon no longer seems an improbable idea, limited to science fiction.
How we’ve chosen to approach the Singularity through the medium of popular culture often reflects a…
