An Opinionated Singularity

            Well, apparently we get to find a link between two well known and famous dystopian novels, which have been used to show possibilities of where society may eventually go, with an article about the predictions on a technological event horizon for our society from the scientist Raymond Kurzweil.  The article generally attempts to let the reader know that eventually we’re going to make intelligent computers which will make intelligent computers that will make intelligent computers and so on, until eventually the computers and machines will make us look like bumbling incompetents who’d be lucky to try and put the square peg in the round hole.  Apparently hope may be found that any eventual mechanical intelligences won’t want to cause our downfall, seeing as ‘one of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly’ (Grossman) so we may not have to deal with a sociopathic machine which wants to destroy us or machines which want to turn us into batteries. Thank God for small blessings. 

In Brave New World nothing existed that didn’t in some way keep the economy pumping, if that soulless land had a God it would have been efficiency with its son Ford.  For those that believe in an eventual future of machines, according to the article at least, their basis seems to be practicality and ‘realism’, since ‘they have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality’(Grossman).  Apparently in order to be rational to these people you have to have an emergency plan for when your mind might be copied and pasted to a computer and your body’s chucked into a meat grinder.  It’s vaguely sensible to think that at some point our lives may be greatly expanded, perfectly fine to think that we’ll keep producing more and more ‘intelligent’ computers, possibly alright to think we may eventually have robot bodies as an eventual pinnacle of the limb replacements, but to think we will eventually produce androids that will seek our doom or robots which mirror a human so closely as to be well nigh indistinguishable as of yet is still just a midnight tale to inspire worries in programmers.