The Singularity Problem

What about the Singularity?

But wait. If man leaves scarcity behind, and thus the need for money, what about our earlier assertion that “Money…is essential to any society that we would call civil”? If society leaves money behind, won’t it thereby render society uncivil? Of course not. For when society succeeds in evolving beyond money, it will merely be doing what it did when it evolved beyond barter, only vastly more so. That is, society will increase its co-operative powers by orders of magnitude and thereby vastly increase its ability to civilize itself. No more “Getting and spending,” in other words, that “lay waste our powers.” Instead, we will be empowered to not only boldly go where no man has gone before but to become what no man has ever been before.

When will this singular event take place and “cascading technological progress” begin? It will begin when the computing power of a typical laptop today surpasses that of “One Human Brain” – roughly 2030, according to the graph below, which, ironically, is precisely when Keynes (getting virtually everything else wrong) predicted that “the economic problem” will be solved:

If so, then one has to wonder if Stephen Crane didn’t get it backwards and that his poem should therefore read as follows:

The universe said to a man,
“Sir, I exist!”
“And that fact,” replied the man,
“Has created in me
A sense of obligation.”

An obligation to what? To merely do what comes natural to him, based on his intuitive knowledge that insofar as being is, it is good, and that more being is therefore better, his own being standing at the forefront of a process of becoming that he has barely begun to grasp. Yet having dwelled long enough in that convivium – that “living together” – that he can now look back on whence he came with keen eyes, so too can he look forward, with ever keener eyes, to where he is going.

Will he in fact transcend his earthly nature and suffuse the universe with his ever-expanding intelligence? He does not know. What he does know, or at least is finally beginning to know, is that whatever transformation awaits him, it cannot happen as long as he is shackled in body and mind by the forces of nonbeing – i.e., by that which serves no other purpose than to tie him down, hold him back, and otherwise deprive him of his humanity.

And when he is ready, he will put an end to it.*

* Note to himself: mark 2030 on calendar.


Answer to the Matrix Singularity Conflict.