What Does a Beer Taste Like After the Singularity?

When a kooky-sounding technology theory gains enough intellectual momentum to have its own conference, with smart people discussing it and venture capitalists talking about investing in it—it's worth stopping by to listen.

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This past weekend, I dropped in on the Singularity Summit at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to see what kind of discourse goes on at the intersection of computer science and science fiction. The idea of the technological singularity defies easy explanation, but I'll give it a shot: Imagine a techno-futurist rapture (according to some theorists, in the near future) when computer processing and storage has improved to the point where artificial intelligence becomes smarter than human intelligence, and computers are able to improve and refine themselves at an accelerated pace.

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That pace would be dramatic, possibly exponential, but the character and exact speed of the acceleration is almost beside the point, since the intellectual capabilities of such machines would be, by definition, beyond the comprehension of mere humans. In other words, one day, our machines will get smarter than us, and then they will be able to make machines that are even smarter than them, then those machines will make other machines that are smarter than the previous machines, and so on, making the conventional human mind more and more of an anachronism.

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The most important thing to realize about the singularity is that those who evangelize about it tend to be enthusiastic about the idea. This may seem strange to those of us who have grown up on a steady diet of movies such as 2001, War Games, Terminator and The Matrix. Most pop-culture visions of this sort of future come to the humbling conclusion that any machine that achieved superior intelligence would naturally conclude that humans and humanity in general were no longer necessary--except, perhaps, as biofuel. Some in the singularity movement are willing to admit the potential of such a scenario, but to many, viewing the singularity as a good thing or a bad thing does little to change its inevitability. And that's why many singularians support the idea of "uploading" one's consciousness to the machines once the flesh and blood support system of intelligence becomes essentially irrelevant. With your mind freed into the digital realm, the theory goes, you will, for all intents and purposes, be immortal, and will benefit from the same sort of superintelligence that the machines themselves possess.

The whole idea is so weird and fantastic-sounding that it's surprising to hear how rationally and intelligently its adherents talk about it. Gary Marcus, director of NYU's Center for Child Language gave a talk where he described the human mind as an evolutionary kluge, producing a wonderfully-refined sense of vision, but a terribly deficient cue-based memory recall system. Altering the mind with a more logical computer system could reduce errors and improve our basic capacity to reason, he claims. And he's probably right--dropping a couple gigs of DDR3 RAM into my noggin probably would help with my awful tendency to forget people's names as soon as I hear them.

You can see how believable and even plausible a technological singularity seems once you take a few things for granted. If it were possible to improve your memory with a digital device, for example, then everybody would want one, because not having such a device would put you at a disadvantage to those who had such technology. Then an escalation of biodigital enhancement would naturally occur until some people were walking around with more microchips than neurons. At some point the hand off between human intelligence and machine intelligence would have occurred. And that's just one possible singularity scenario.

Now, I'm not really a romantic about the human mind. I don't believe that biological humans have some intangible ether pulsing about in their skulls that is impossible to replicate in the machine world. But I will say that I think this stuff is a lot harder than these folks make it out to be. Before we can decide what we want from artificial intelligence, we need to figure out just what we mean when we describe human intelligence. Human smarts have an incredible degree of variance from person to person, culture to culture and time to time. (The geniuses who thought the earth was the center of the universe in Galileo's time don't seem so smart now.) Intelligence isn't just storing data, it implies the ability to learn, something the average 2-year old is far better at than the smartest computer. And intelligence is also a subjective assessment. (I may believe that Ray Kurzweil, AI pioneer and author of The Singularity is Near, is a genius; you may think he's an idiot and a fanatacist.)

Even if we accepted that it was possible to digitize the broad, ever-evolving spectrum that is human intelligence, add your own consciousness to it and then accelerate the heck out of it and spin the whole concoction indefinitely into the future, what would the point be, exactly? Once divorced from a corporeal self, any mind that a person might upload would probably quickly lose anything resembling a human psychology. Just think, a "mind" living in a computer would hardly have need for food, and so eating a deliciously greasy bacon cheeseburger along with a cold beer would be unnecessary. Sure, you could run a bacon cheeseburger and beer simulation program to entertain yourself, but devoid of the true feeling of hunger and thirst, it would soon lose context. Likewise, social interaction would be somewhat pointless. In a totally networked world of computerized minds, the idea of compartmentalized thoughts unique to individuals would be, at best, an artificial construct--as would the conventional ideas of privacy and individual will that are the hallmarks of humanity.

In this techno-utopian future, our digital selves may insist on keeping a sense of individuality; we may even insist on physical separation in robotic versions of our former selves, but that would work against the very idea of a rapidly evolving collective intelligence. So if we truly designed our computers to think like us, any singularity would likely collapse into the same jealousies and secrets that define the fascinating, hard-to-pin-down state of human intelligence.

So to sum up: The singularity is a brilliant mental exercise with which to ponder our technological future, but if any computer becomes self-aware enough to start refining its own intelligence at an accelerated rate, I'm going to unplug that thing and take a baseball bat to it.

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