Doomsday Forever
The world is ending again... and again...
Some kid named Leo got ousted from OpenAI for his doomy "situational awareness." Now, he warns that the Super Computer Gods will arrive in only a few years. His futurist vision is like a system update on an old HP desktop. This dusty modem has been screeching a long time.
Ray Kurzweil predicted the Singularity decades ago. In celeb innovator style, he picked up Vernor Vinge's seminal idea and ran with it. According to Ray's repackaged "Law of Accelerating Returns," the hockeystick on the official chart means humanity will soon be consumed by AI-powered nanobot swarms — and that's a good thing!
Originally, Kurzweil predicted full brain emulation by 2029. We're talking about a person's every neuron and synapse uploaded into a virtual connectome. As tech progressed in the real world, though, this brain emulation model quietly shifted to artificial general intelligence (AGI) via abstract neural networks — yet somehow Kurzweil still gets credit for predicting our current place on the AGI timeline.
Despite his decrepit state, ol’ Ray is still looking forward to biodigital immorality by 2045 — the real Singularity. But as a friend of mine said this morning, "He looks like a clown version of Joe Biden. Look at those suspenders. And that wig!"
Imagine his sandpaper tongue licking a nano longevity ice cream cone. Imagine olfactory implants for enhanced hair-sniffing. As our current "AI Czar" likes to say, imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.
Kurzweil will be dead by 2045. At that point, computers will be smart enough to know why he died (hint: because everyone dies). Perhaps the machines will wonder why the 2020s became the decade of public senility, where social media swarms mocked old people's shriveling brains, day after day, speculating on who did or didn't shit their pants.
Perhaps the machines will kill us all for being so cruel.
As the young devour the old, we see new kids on the block waving their shiny SINGULARITY IS NEAR signs like neohippies reenacting 'Nam protests. It's hard to believe Ray was once as fresh and sharp as our newest shooting star, Leopold Aschenbrenner. After young Leo was fired by OpenAI, he published a manifesto entitled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead."
The kid likes to draw straight lines on logarithmic graphs, just like ol’ Ray. Over time, these ascending lines lead directly to AGI, then onward and upward to digital superintelligence.
"The AGI race has begun," young Leo writes. "We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed. ... If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war."
The end is nigh. The kingdom of compute is near. People have been saying it for years, and the old heads have been saying "I've been saying it for years" for years.
Many transhumanists believe in the coming Singularity as a matter of faith. Others see it as another dumb, superstitious religion. Plenty just flip-flop according to the latest press release.
Ironically, many anti-tech critics also have faith in the coming Singularity — except they anticipate a brutal Tribulation. They don't want to believe, but they do BELIEVE.
As I've said many, many, many times — I am agnostic about prophecies of immanent techno-utopia or impending electro-doom, at least on the specifics. I've heard dire prophecies all my life: political Antichrists, global warming, nuclear annihilation, terrorist sleeper cells, communist FEMA camp-fillers, exponential plagues, solar flares, a Planet X collision, baby black holes gathering beneath the Alps. On and on and on.
Every time a new panic starts, you'd think no one was there for the last big freak out. They shout, "Look!! A wolf!!!" But all I see is another squirrel. (To be honest, though, that lil rodent does seem like it wants to eat me.)
The reality is that artificial intelligence — or "machine learning" or "advanced algorithms" or "digital demons" or whatever you want to call Big Algo — has come a long way in a short time. So have robots. So has genetic engineering. So have brain implants.
AI will likely advance far beyond what we see today, whether it is a hockeystick graph or a series of ascending S-curves. Tech advances always lag behind the hype (and doomsaying). But these advances will also outpace the naysayers repeating "gerbij in, gerbij out; gerbij in, gerbij out."
AI is poised to saturate everything that beeps and blinks. It will suck up souls like a fat kid slurping a blended brain smoothie and barf it all over our screens. If you don't like it, call customer service to tell the bots about your troubles.
The Future™ is on its way. Machines are becoming human-like. Humans are becoming machine-like. It's like we were made for each other.
You need to take this control system seriously. You need to remember how ridiculous it all is.
🤖🤖🤖
If you wanna head for the hills now, by all means, pack up and get out of town. Even if the Singularity never comes, at least you won't be surrounded by the clamor of Spanglish or Arabic or up-talking, silver spoon twatfaces using neologisms like "they/them/theirs" or "front hole." The wilderness awaits, with all its beauty and threatening vicissitudes.
Or maybe you'd rather stay online and gripe about the Machine. I've done it for three years now. Chances are you'll find me here again, using my iTrode to mock cyborgs and feed bits of my soul into this algorithmic mill.
There is a third option, though, albeit short-term. The way is out the door and into the sunshine. Most of you could go out there right now. You could pluck the iTrode from your eyeballs and leave it behind. You could go talk to people. You could tell your new friends about the looming Singularity! They'll love you for it.
Nothing is stopping you.
There is no Antichrist blocking your door and no nuclear holocaust outside. There are no killer contagions, no meteor strikes, no supervolcanos, no scorpion-tailed locusts, no black clouds of murderous drones, no nanobot swarms, and no superintelligent AI googledy gods. At least, not today. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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I grew up on doom and gloom. It's in my DNA. My family was Plymouth Brethren and I spent Sundays (and a lot of other days) listening to sermons on the Book of Revelation, the elders dispkaying complex charts and timelines. I had nightmares about being left behind in the Rapture.
My dad, Dave Hunt, was a prominent Christian author who wrote books about the Last Days, among other things. The thing is, a lot of those prophesies seem to be coming true today. If my dad were alive today, he'd be having the time of his life, he'd be in his element. I don't agree with everything I was taught as a child, but I like to think my dad would be proud of me carrying on his legacy to some extent.
The fact is, humankind's greatest achievement is that we can now obliterate ourselves and we keep getting over to doing it. No wonder we are feeling gloomy.
It's been too long, Joe. I've missed your writing here.
That was inspiring! ♥