In 1903, the Wright brothers showed the world the first sustained flight. In 1953, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix of DNA. Twenty years later, we are using CRISPR to edit DNA. And we are only a historical moment away from “The Singularity.”

This weak and mortal body

The Singularity is defined as a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

  • According to Ray Kurzweil, we are only a few decades from the point when things really take off – when we enter a breathtakingly abrupt, and completely transformed, new world.

A sci-fi lover’s dream

How you view Kurzweil will depend largely on your existing biases

  • The world of the 2020s is unrecognizable compared to that of the 1920s
  • There are many obstacles in the way of unlimited technological progress
  • Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford

The next epoch

The next great leap for the universe will be when humans and technology merge

  • Our very biology will become enmeshed with the technology we create
  • It is the age of bionics – machines we make will allow us to overcome “age-old human problems and vastly amplify creativity”

Cold water on a circuit board

The biggest bottleneck on the path to AI is software, not hardware

  • Past technological advances do not guarantee similar future advances
  • There is no necessary reason that there will be exponential growth of the kind futurologists depend on
  • A world of “enhanced intelligence” – in which we might see a 20 percent increase in intelligence – is surely outside the remit of “diminishing returns”
  • Even among humans, relatively small differences in design capacities seem to lead to large differences in the systems that are designed

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