So you hear a lot of people are really freaked out
about this idea, this meme of singularity.
Some call it the "rapture of the nerds."
They feel like technologists have
hijacked the Christian story of God
and heaven and the afterlife and just
translated it into the language of electronic technology
and synthetic intelligence and mastering the information
processes of biology so that we can engender and engineer
But I don't really think that that's a problem.
Those religious myths that we have been caught up
in for centuries reflect our yearnings
As Ernest Becker says, "We are gods with anuses.
With our minds, we can ponder the infinite.
Yet we're housed in these heart-pumping, breath-gasping,
So to be godly, yet creaturely imbues the human condition
with a sort of bittersweet, exquisite pain quality to it
that, in a way, drives our creativity.
Our desire to transcend all previous limits,
to transform the world in our own image,
comes from our desire to escape the death sentence that
makes us ultimately food for worms.
So I think that the singularity as a meme that
reflects the acceleration of the human design process
to the point of achieving a kind of infinite velocity
where everything becomes linked with everything else,
and matter becomes mind where we impregnate the universe
with intelligence, as Erik Davis has written.
Today, technologists are these ecstatic technicians
They're figuring out how awareness
Can we create non-biological intelligence?
Can we create sentience in a different substrate
that is not bound by the limits of biology?
We are the frontal lobes of the universe.
If we are the eyes and ears of the universe,
if we are a way for the cosmos to know itself,
as Carl Sagan says, then our desire
to transcend all previous limits is the universe's desires
So I don't think there's anything unnatural about that.