The singulatarian spectrum

Mundane SF, like atheism, is so completely mainstream in science and futurology that it's rare that anyone bothers to mention it. The IEEE Spectrum magazine has published a Special Issue on the Singularity aka Rapture of the nerds, pointing out often forgotten issues like:

IT'S A LITTLE EARLY TO TALK ABOUT SIMULATING CONSCIOUSNESS ON MACHINES WHEN WE BARELY KNOW ABOUT THE NEUROLOGY OF A SEA SLUG

but that doesn't ever seem to dampen speculation by those who would also be counting on a painless replacement for fossil fuels in the next ten years, or anti-gravity cars.

The editors gave a good interview in this week's Scientific American Podcast.

Take home message:

• God doesn't exist


• There's no evidence that our pitiful technology is going to somehow invent God in the next ten or a hundred years


• You will die like all other humans before you.

In actuality in the future we'll be wondering whether our great technology is able to perform basic requirements, like feeding us. The best scientists in the world using the fastest and most high-tech computers have made the predictions to within a practical margin of error.

Now pay attention to it.

John Horgan pwnts the Singularitans

Via Andrew Sullivan, a great quote:

"Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity."

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