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February 19th 2023
“I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.” - Ray Kurzweil
Recently, I have become completely engrossed in Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is near'. His predictions and analysis of exponential growth in computing and our knowledge of the brain paints a frightening picture of the future. After bearing witness to just the plateau of explosion that was the digital era, the technology which I can't imagine living without, I have come to the unsettling revelation that everything is about to change again, and even faster than before. With AI reaching new heights and achieving global prevalence through recent ground-breaking innovations such as ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, what used to seem like science fiction is now becoming a reality. It is no longer unreasonable to say that we may fully understand the core underlying mechanisms behind the learning mechanisms of the brain and the nature of our own consciousness. This has implications that would give anyone goosebumps!
These technologies, which have been developing over the last 30 years and which has saturated everything we do behind the scenes from computer simulation to managing our finances, are now beginning to spill forth into our day to day lives and people are starting to take notice. It seems that my generation will be one marked by unprecedented advances in AI just as the one before was for the digital computing. While it may seem like not much has happened in the last 10 years as the 10 years before them, the pace of progress moves briskly towards the elbow of the next paradigm of human development.
Looking back at history the exponential nature of human progress quickly becomes clear. Knowledge enables more knowledge, and growth leads to more growth. What's remarkable is the consistency and predictability of future paradigms. Just as we were once in the stone age, and then the industrial age, we are now in the digital age. This can only prompt us to imagine future ages. What's remarkable is the consistency with which this evident ascendance occurs. Kurzweil compellingly presents us with the historically exponential growth of human progress throughout the millennium, a pattern which remains unbroken to this day.
The idea of uploading our brains to a digital format represents the next logical step in this process of exponential growth, and its potential implications are both exciting and daunting in equal measure. It is a strange experience debating the "hard" problem of consciousness. Who are we really? What constitutes "us"? Are we the brain, or the signals? Do we truly have free will, or are we just an abstract mechanism of computation for evolution? It's one of those experiences where you become unsure if the "thinking" you is equivalent to the sum of the cells that constitute your body. After a certain level of recursion, one inevitably stack overflows, and goes back to the blissful comfort of ignorance. It's at times like these where I am simultaneously mortified and enthusiastic for what the future will hold in this respect. Consciousness confounds the conscious, and perhaps we are not meant to understand the secrets of our own existence.
Philosophically, the concept of uploading our brains to a digital format raises fascinating questions about the nature of consciousness, identity, and what it truly means to be human. Would a digital version of ourselves truly be "us"? Or would it be a mere copy, lacking the essence of what makes us who we are? Some argue that the very idea of uploading our brains to a digital format is a form of transhumanism, seeking to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies and move towards a new form of existence.
Others argue that our consciousness is intricately tied to our physical bodies and the experiences that shape them, and that a digital version of ourselves could never truly capture the full scope of our consciousness. Ultimately, these are deep and complex philosophical questions that may never have a definitive answer.
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