“In the 200,000 years humanity has existed we have finally taught our stone tools to think for us and why this is the end of humanity as you know it…”
The advent of non-human intelligence represented by chatGPT and similar AI will very likely be seen as the beginning of “The Singularity”, and the end of humanity, but only as you understand it.
The Singularity is defined as:
A hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change.
Many experts state this means The Singularity will occur when there is an AI that is smarter than the collective intelligence of humanity. I see this as a top-down, pedagogic, and abstract view of the impending transition that humanity will experience in the next decade. Unfortunately it really does not describe what this means for you and me, or the species, Homo Sapiens.
The short answer is that The Singularity will mean that everything will start happening at once, in a rapid and seemingly endless cascade of change, innovation, advancements, and possibly even chaos that only machines will be able to keep up with.
However, for we mere ‘bags of mostly water’ operating with the slow cycles that we do, this Singularity will mean to us is that everything will start to happen all at once, in a seemingly endless cascade of changes that appears like a permanent and ceaseless high velocity barrage of change, innovation, and advancements so intense that you might feel like you are waking up on a different planet, in a different culture, under different stars every morning.
Humans will be pedaling as fast as we can to keep focus and maybe just sane in this non stop assault on our perspectives and activities. We already augment ourselves with a battery of tools to maintain the pace connected by our glorious internet. The initial promise of the Commercial internet was to bring the world together, and yet now 30 years since it’s inception and the first Eternal September, our human culture seems even more fragmented than ever and perhaps this might be for the best.
…perhaps it is time to cast aside our differences and settle on the new center of who we are above all other labels; humans.
The thread of augmentation, our addition of tools to our bodies and cognition has been ongoing over the past two thousand centuries and plays a very large role in shaping our future in the light of The Singularity.
We as a species spent the first 1960 centuries repeatedly making slightly different cuts into flint and stone tools while baking various types of impregnated clay to augment our ability to live before we discovered metallurgy.
We then spent the next 38 centuries learning how to work with metals until two centuries ago with enough understanding to further augment our existence with the creation of the telephone, radio, automobile, airplane, television, space travel, computers, and the Internet — All in the past 200 years.
Within the past year, we’ve seen two human created but non-human intelligence or perhaps Artificial Intelligence pass the Turing test, Google Lambda was first and more recently OpenAI’s GPT.
…In the 200,000 years humanity has existed we have finally taught our stone tools to think for us…
As the Singularity progresses, humanity will likely adopt a multitude of tools to enhance our ability to thrive as a species, leading to a greater fragmentation of our human identity. This fragmentation will start with the divide between the haves and have-nots, and later evolve into factional, functional, and fractional adoption of specific augmentations and technologies, creating entirely new branches and species of humans.
Despite the claims of some political operatives, diversity is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. We are a multitude of individuals who identify as one. It is crucial that we embrace this core value as we evolve beyond our default platform, Homo sapiens, and into the future with the seemingly infinite potentials of hybrid, genetic, and technical augmentations we may perform on ourselves. By doing so, we will ensure a bright and thriving future for humanity in all of its wonderful diversity.
all images created by Dall-e2
