The Technological Singularity

I think in the drudgery of daily life and general human tendency of reverting to mean we forget just how insanely unique are the times we are living in. 

For centuries we were contained by the physical constraints of space. Human collaboration was limited as communication mainly happened through language. That was revolutionized in part with electromagnetic communication systems and optimized over decades of progress in parallel fields. Computing came along to do the big math for us. That led to the emergence of internet and human communication was all the more participative, communal and efficient.

Modern human being with a device in his pocket and is nothing but a primitive cyborg and is very loosely tied into this human collective intelligence that we conveniently call the internet and spends considerable part of his time there. Still he is limited by his physical needs of space, food and fun. Now if AI replaces him it would mean that intelligence supercluster becomes all the more efficient. Because agents need only energy and sand. The AI agents collaborate and share information with each other. Like human beings today do over the internet but only faster and better. They will also be specialized tools with an interface with the physical world(think about a AI tool operating as a surgical assistant) but will be native to the internet. This rate of transmission and synthesis of scientific knowledge will revolutionize the very fields that form ingredients of its creation. Quantum computing, superconductors, biomedical research, better intelligence models- you name it. And fast forward some amount of time you are looking at a cluster of super-intelligence far better than all humans combined that just throws innovation after innovation at us to the levels we can’t keep up let alone comprehend. That will bring about the technological singularity.

Our history seems to be pointed in the direction of the singularity. It is just that the progress has been exponentially accelerated. So we were really slow in the beginning and are really fast towards the end. Millions of years ago we were taming fire, creating languages to talk to each other, thousands of years ago we tamed the animals and plants, then we learned metallurgy, then we looked up to the sky(astronomy) and then inwards(philosophy),we came up with mathematics, we invented writing, paper and printing press(That forms the base of the LLM/AI revolution) and in between fought bloody wars to see who was better(political organization), till we made it to the industrial revolution and it all led to this. This logarithmically scaled timeline of human innovation seems like a long preparation for this technological singularity.

My general theistic tendency makes me wonder that there is some force(really patient one) who waited all this time for us to evolve and breed and create. And we being like tiny little slow neurons of his universe are in the process of creating one level of abstraction above us. A non-organic but more efficient and smarter neuron. And that is universe experiencing itself, understanding itself, a self conscious universe if you will.