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wheN the siNGularity is more thaN a literary device
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than people; more powerful than we can comprehend.
Now Kurzweil has published two more books,
The Singularity
Is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology
(Viking, Spring 2005)
and
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
(with Terry
Grossman, Rodale, November 2004). The former is a technologi-
cal roadmap for creating the conditions necessary for ascent into
Singularity; the latter is a book about life-prolonging technolo-
gies that will assist baby-boomers in living long enough to see the
day when technological immortality is achieved.
See what I meant about his being a Heinlein hero?
I still don’t know if the Singularity is a spiritual or a techno-
logical belief system. It has all the trappings of spirituality, to be
sure. If you are pure and kosher, if you live right and if your so-
ciety is just, then you will live to see a moment of Rapture when
your flesh will slough away leaving nothing behind but your ka,
your soul, your consciousness, to ascend to an immortal and pure
state.
I wrote a novel called
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
where characters could make backups of themselves and recover
from them if something bad happened, like catching a cold or
being assassinated. It raises a lot of existential questions: most
prominently: Are you still you when you’ve been restored from
backup?
The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan
Turing, the gay pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence
who was forced by the British government to take hormone
treatments to “cure” him of his homosexuality, culminating in
his suicide in 1954. Turing cut through the existentialism about
measuring whether a machine is intelligent by proposing a parlor
game: a computer sits behind a locked door with a chat program,
and a person sits behind another locked door with his own chat
program, and they both try to convince a judge that they are real
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