Improving Our Standard of Living (Wattpad Edition)

Chapter 51: Singularity

The technological singularity is a hypothetical point in the future when the speed of innovation is so great that we cannot comprehend what will happen after it occurs. Specifically, it's a series of technological revolutions—each much greater than the Industrial Revolution—occurring over a short period.

The singularity would require the emergence of superhuman intelligence—AI, posthumans, or both. The pace of innovation could not accelerate so quickly otherwise.

A posthuman is a person who has greatly amplified his or her physical and intellectual capabilities with technological implants. These implants might be so extensive that the individual has abandoned his or her biology, replacing every cell with nanomachinery. This person would also have the ability to merge with computational substrate.

Computational substrate is a collection of nanomachines that process information. These little computers would be scattered all over the world and networked together like the World Wide Web. This network would be home to the virtual worlds in which posthumans reside. They would spend most of their time in cyberspace, allowing them to live lives far more intricate and interesting than what's possible in the physical world. Posthumans would remotely control robots to interact with the environment. They could also create androids to use as avatars.

That's one of the neat things about nanotechnology. Once you can build things one atom at a time, you can create anything. If you want to construct an android that looks and feels identical to a human, you could. And you could give it the full range of sensations of a biological body, plus more. You could, for example, give it night vision, better hearing, and a keener sense of taste and smell.

Nanotechnology could even be used to create biological bodies, though I doubt posthumans would want to. Biology is very limiting and vulnerable. You don't need biological cells to experience the five senses or to look and feel like a human.

Nevertheless, if we wanted to, nanotechnology would allow us to turn "dead" matter into "living matter." For instance, we could transform a handful of dirt into an edible cupcake. Or we could transform a wet dirty rock into a lizard, complete with a brain, neurons, and dendrites organized in the desired manner.

Skeptical? How do you think crops grow from the dirt? What we call "life" is just a bunch of cells composed of even smaller machines that operate at the nanoscale. The "nanomachines" in the seed of a crop—powered by sunlight—take dead matter and transform it into complex life. (While seeds don't need sunlight to germinate, the energy to do so originally comes from sunlight obtained by parent plants.)

Life itself is nanotechnology, proving that nanomachines are possible.

As long as you have energy and a variety of atoms or molecules to work with, you can create anything with sufficiently advanced nanotechnology—atom by atom, molecule by molecule.

The singularity will be the second intelligence explosion. The first happened when humans evolved a large neocortex. Humans are the only animals with the intelligence to make tools, use those tools to make even better tools, use those tools to make even better tools, and so on. This ability has allowed us to continuously surpass the other animals, leaving them further and further behind. Other animals and insects aren't even close to being on the same playing field. They cannot fathom us.

Similarly, unmodified humans would be unable to fathom the posthumans and artificial intelligences of the future. They would be much smarter because their neocortices would be nearly infinite, powered by cloud computing. And they would have hundreds of senses. Within their virtual worlds, they would have enriching experiences and sensations—giving rise to entire industries—that would be impossible for physical humans to experience or comprehend.