The Search for Posthumanism
Notes from the 2011 Singularity Summit
by Mike Thomsen
The idea that we can run out of time is peculiar. It’s a product of how we organize our memories.
Human consciousness is a kind of romance with the idea that time is finite and consumable. This assumption of finitude means that time can also become digested and metabolized urge, energizing the desire to imagine what is coming next. Being able to organize the past into a semicoherent system, we extrapolate forward and read ourselves into a specific future. We make predictions: Moore’s Law tells us the size and cost of microprocessors diminish every 18 months. Polling reminds us the United States prefer to re-elect their presidents during wartime. The Super Bowl favorite wins three out of four times. It has been written, and so it shall come to pass.
In the opening keynote of the Singularity Summit, Ray Kurzweil, inventor, writer, and immortalist, spoke about the looming end of prognostication. By his best estimate, the Singularity — the moment when our predictive mechanisms are overwhelmed by superintelligent computers that surpass the understanding of any one person — will happen in 2029. This will wipe clean all the fantasies and modeled futures we made for ourselves. Our ability to predict our personal destiny will vanish; in its place we will have the strange sensation of falling through the floor of our own life.
The Singularity tells us that the future is not a truth we can discover, but merely a theater for our private melodramas. Mom and dad are going to die. I’m never going to be an astronaut. Oh my god.
