Tevun-Krus #19 - Singularity

The Animals of Farthing Wood on Steroids - An Article by @AngusEcrivain

When we talk about the Singularity we're generally talking about the Technological Singularity, the (some say) inevitable point in time when Artificial Intelligence is so far beyond the scope of anything that we can currently comprehend, when machines build bigger and better machines without any human input and their cognitive abilities are such that we, the human race, are nought but single-celled organisms in comparison.

Think about The Matrix, where human beings are grown and used as nothing more than batteries to fuel the machines' 'lives.' I wager that if the events of that rather awesome trilogy - well it is, c'mon... In fact it's my second favourite trilogy, right there behind Back to the Future but anyway, that's besides the point - were ever to come to pass, we as a species would be able to do nothing about it at all. There would be no 'One,' no Neo to come to our rescue. There would be no 'matrix,' built for us to 'live,' our lives in merry ignorance.

It would be the end of us, and that's scary.

But I don't think it's only the technological side of things we have to worry about. Zoo, a novel by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge - recently commissioned as a TV series of which I've watched the first few episodes (though I must admit, I've not read the novel) - puts forth the possibility that animals all over the world have had enough of the human race and band together to reclaim Earth for themselves.

Now I know, I know... It sounds like The Animals of Farthing Wood on steroids and to be fair, it may well be. The thing is, I see no reason why something like this, potentially, couldn't come to pass.

I'm not here to review the novel or the show, though to be fair I do suggest you watch the latter as the acting is decent and the premise well presented.

But think about it for a second. We've been around for what, 50,000-100,000 years in some form or other and what have we done? I mean really, what have we done? A lot of killing, in fact we're rather good at that, be it our fellow man or the animals that walk the Earth we, as a species, have developed a knack for taking life. True enough we've invented tomato soup and oven cleaner, lemonade and Comic Sans MS but when you really get down to it, if there happened to be a benevolent race of aliens who'd been watching us over the last few thousand years I imagine that many of their conversations, assuming they have the capability, about us would go something along the lines of, "well, they're getting there on the whole 'intelligence and independent thought,' thing, and let's be honest the microwave oven is pretty sweet, but they've really nailed killing shit! Pretty much made it their own."

As a Science Fictional-type writer I love to ask, as we all do, 'what if..?'

What if, as in the first episode of Zoo, a group of male lions took it upon themselves to band together and kill humans?

What if a herd of elephants stampeded through downtown Yaoundé with the sole intention of causing an inordinate amount of destruction and killing the entire population of the city?

What if the entire human population of Alaska and Canada were killed by a combination of Moose and Polar Bears?

So I'll accept that if any of the above situations, or any other conceivable situation, were to arise we wouldn't be dealing with a Singularity in the strictest sense, and it certainly wouldn't be quite the same as the Technological Singularity, but I believe it would be a Singularity none the less.

If this was to come to pass it would most definitely be the end of life as we know it. The Human Race would be on the menu for every single animal across the globe. Even going to the shops to buy a Cornetto would mean risking your life.

I suspect there would be no going back, either. Kill or be killed would probably be the order of the day and if that ain't a Singularity, I don't know what is.