Do you ever sit back and look at the rate technology has been advancing at in the past century? How about since the beginning of time? At first, advances were slow, but as we look more recently, we see the rate of these advancements continually increasing. What does this mean for the future? Imagine what our ancestors would think to look at us today. Think of how dramatic that shock may be for us to look into the future that our descendants will be living in. Vernor Vinge proposes a concept he calls “technological Singularity;” all our technological advances are moving towards one single goal. Another reason it is called the Singularity is for the same reason things such as a black hole are called Singularities – they are mysteries beyond our reach. Technology will advance, it is proposed, to infinities, where mathematics cannot even approach it. Or we can also refer to this “technological Singularity” as Damien Broderick does and simply call it “the Spike.” If you look at a graphical representation of advancement versus time, it literally is an exponential curve climaxing in a Spike.
We, the readers, first are told about how technology really is advancing at such a rapid pace that it seems its advancement actually represent a Spike. The key to future change, Broderick proposes, is machines and programs that modify their own design, therefore optimizing their functioning. They will end up improving themselves in ways that we humans cannot even begin to understand.
Broderick starts his book by discussing several components of the Spike, including:
These are coming of age topics we have to learn to deal with, and are doing so. For example, with genetic engineering, Broderick discusses Dolly, the successful sheep clone. He also discusses control of senescence (controlling the aging process by slowing it down) in scientific discoveries such as those about the presence or lack of certain proteins and genes influencing our life expectancy.
Much of the excitement about the Spike is due to anticipation of defeating death. Along with the advancement of technology, several advances will take place in the medical field. Many are even going as far as taking place in cryopreservation in hopes that, some day, when they are thawed out, society will be advanced enough that they will be given the “key to life,” the “fountain of youth.”
After establishing what is meant by the Spike, he writes about what it would be like to live in the age of the Spike. People will no longer be human. Instead, we, or our descendants, will be “transhuman,” or even “posthuman.” In the chapter “Uncoupling the Flesh,” he discusses what it may be like to have a virtual copy of yourself in a virtual world, where such questions come up as “would the copy really be real?” or “is the copy still you?” and how to tell the real and the copy apart.
“Every philosophy to date has been based on one of two postulates: either we all must die and vanish forever, or we all must die and pass onto some finer supernatural realm. The Spike, by contrast, will offer a genuine alternative – unlimited time on Earth, and eventually, perhaps, among the starts, as physically youthful and fully mature transhumans.” Technology will completely transform our meaning of life.
What is our purpose of life? Broderick quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky, saying that we should let the transhumans worry about problems with transhumans and that “our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.” This is a more pessimistic view of our role, but a very real view among many who mingle in the topics of these advancements.
Broderick proposes very futuristic ideas, and very controversial to say the least. “In the longest term of the history of intelligent life in the universe, it will surely prove to be the case … that the routing and inevitable death of conscious beings was a temporary error, quickly c orrected.” Again, we see here that he addresses the control of senescence which many scientists anticipate in our future.
Damien Broderick is a senior
research Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia and holds a
multi-disciplinary PhD from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of
science and literature. He has been the
recipient of many literary awards, including several Ditmar awards. He writes science fiction, futuristic
nonfiction, and has many critical essays, covering a large range of topics,
including popular science books, science fiction, and cultural issues and
theories, that have been published.
This book addresses many coming of age questions that we are coming across more and more frequently today, especially among those in the scientific fields. It is very current and applies to today’s reading audience. For some, it dares the reader to go beyond his natural realm of thinking and to address the future and form his own opinions and stances on the technological Singularity.
While it is a long read for someone who is just starting to familiarize himself with the Singularity, I would recommend this book to readers who truly have a passion for futuristic ideas and realities such as the Spike. However, for someone who does not have a natural interest in futurism, it can be a slow read, which could easily have been cut down to half the pages. It is more philosophical and obviously does not come from any religious background.