The Singularity

Nowadays, living without some sort of technology seems like a difficult, perhaps even impossible, task. Televisions, smartphones, computers are now intrinsic in our live, as they make them less complicated and more comfortable. Plus, we see new creations almost every day. That’s how fast science and technology are evolving.

Will technology keep evolving forever or will it come a day where it all ceases to exist?

Technological Singularity, or simply Singularity, is the hypothesis that the rate of technological progress will continue to accelerate exponentially to the point of creating artificial superintelligence (ASI) that will, qualitatively, surpass all human intelligence. For the pessimists, the coming of the Singularity might signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and advance technologically at a huge rate.

I have never given any thought to this matter until recently after reading Dan Brown’s “Origin”. In this book, a fictional futurologist discovers the answer to 2 of the most important questions in existence: “Where do we come from?” and “Where are we going?”

If you haven’t read the book yet, and you want to (I highly recommend it), I must warn you that there are some major spoilers ahead! So, in the book, to everyone’s surprise, a new species appears in the studies of the futurologist. It not only appears, but when increasing the timeline further into the future, it consumes the entire human species. That new “species” is Technology. But after a more thorough inspection, we can see that rather than consuming the human race, technology merges with it, forming a symbiotic relationship.

Think about it, we basically can’t live without our phones, we are now implanting chips into brains, we’re creating nanobots that will be injected into the bloodstream to cure things like cholesterol and we also have tools to edit the genetic code. A hybrid species makes a lot of sense! What it means to be human, one day, might change forever. Our lives might change forever.

Do you believe we can improve our world and our lives with technology or do you think that it will be our demise?