The singularity is nigh!

What do we think of this, then?

The basic idea is that the pace of technological development is accelerating so fast there is a kind of technological event horizon (in about 40 years time) beyond which human life will be so different that we can't even imagine it or make any predictions.

Now that makes sense to me. But then people start talking about posthumans and human/AI hybrids and super-intelligent AI, who utterly surpass humans, and uploading our minds into giant computer networks, and I start thinking it's all getting a bit far-fetched. And kind of worrying.

But all the 'transhumanists' who are into it seem to be over-weaning techno-optimists who think this is all fine and dandy. A quote I found,

"One might imagine that machines will at some point come to significantly surpass biological human beings in general intelligence, and that these machines will be able to apply their intelligence to rapidly improve themselves so that within short order they become superintelligent. Superintelligent machines would then be able to rapidly advance all other fields of science and technology."

I can't help thinking that

a) Superintelligent machines might want to instead, e.g., wipe out their puny slavemasters (i.e. us). So not necessarily such a good thing.

b) This underestimates the complexity of the human brain and how easy it would be to design something which surpasses it. Bearing in mind that people have consistently made over-optimistic predictions of how long it would take us to build an AI which could pass the Turing test.

c) It makes the kind of error Mary Midgley skewers in Science as Salvation, of assuming that logical cognition is the only important component of human existence and that we could unproblematically do away with everything but information. And of ascribing teleological purpose to evolution, which is the same sort of woolly thinking that some new agers engage in. Someone describes the singularity as 'The Rapture for nerds.' And it does seem to me to be an age-old apocalyptic/transcendent metanarrative, simply with a high-tech mechanism.