Evolving Beyond God: From Floppy Disks to a Technological Singularity
Imagine that the Earth is hardware and humanity is software that updates itself through an evolutionary process. Basically, your kids are literally a better version of you. The same process could be observed with software updates from floppy disks to IoT, personal assistants, and other so-called “smart” software to eventually reach a technological singularity with software self-generation. I want to walk you through the software evolutionary process to see how we are building something potentially bigger, better and smarter than we are, and in that way, answering the eternal omnipotence paradox.
Stage 0: Proterozoic Era — the age of the earliest life forms: Software is written once, installed, and it eventually dies with the device (like a multi-cooker or a calculator). In these ancient and forgotten times, companies delivered updates for software on floppy disks, sent by mail.
Stage 1: Paleozoic Era — life’s emergence from the ocean to land: Manual firmware updates are now possible online and involve specific and often cumbersome procedures. A device should be physically connected to the internet, then new firmware is manually downloaded from a trusted source and uploaded to the device. Old-fashioned routers are a good example of this.
Stages 2 and 3 are a bit fuzzy because it’s hard to draw a firm line between them as they both exist today, and in some cases a user can choose between Stage 2 and Stage 3.
Stage 2: Mesozoic Era — the Age of Reptiles: Dinosaurs dominated the earth, the first birds appeared, and the first mammals were very small. The device is capable of connecting to the internet by itself and checking to see if new updates are available. The user then decides if they want to download the update. A lot of software updates available today work under this scheme (consider iOS device notifications).
Stage 3: Present-day Life — Cenozoic Era — the Age of Mammals: Significant diversification of mammals and their dominance on the Earth. The device automatically downloads and installs all critical updates (invisible to the user) and the device is always up-to-date and safe to use (e.g., smartphones, computers with modern OSes, IoT devices). No user attention is required at all for the maintenance of the device. New functions are often created and installed automatically behind the scenes as long as there is a demand for these functions. The user will always have a productive and safe experience (e.g., Alexa and Tesla cars that provide over-the-air software updates, smart cameras, home sensors).
Stage 4: The Future of Humanity — The Quaternary Age: This is the most recent part of the Cenozoic Era up to the present day — the age of Homo sapiens. Technological singularity: Deep neural networks progressing to a more advanced stage through various reinforced learning techniques. A deep neural network can improve itself and create a better version of itself.
The fourth stage may eventually lead us into an era of technological advancement that will raise old philosophical questions about humanity’s evolutionary trajectory to surpass the omnipotence of God through technological evolution. “Can God write a chess playing AI program that can defeat him?” In other words, can we evolve beyond God?
It looks like this is what humanity is working towards: breaking the bounds of what’s considered evolutionarily possible. Humanity will create something smarter and stronger than they are. In other words, we’re “playing God.” That, in turn, makes me think, will a technological singularity imply that humanity is smarter and stronger than its creator (God)? To go a step further, it can be argued that humanity is God…or, conversely, a fundamentally destructive (de-evolving) “virus” that destroys its home planet with misuse and uncontrolled reproduction. Both statements are equally true. It’s a matter of individual choice: to be a creator or a virus.
Let’s put aside the philosophical questions and look at the harsh truth. Despite the progress humanity has achieved, and the promise of neural networks, interestingly, some banks, stock exchanges, and telecom companies, for whom a stable work process is crucial, have been using HP Integrity NonStop server computers for more than 40 years, which have not required updates and won’t need to for the foreseeable future. And big data is still physically transported by Amazon trucks….
