A Singular Techno-Savior

Singularitarians Await the Advent of Their Blessed Hope, the Conscious Computer

In Part 1 of this series, “Brainiacs: The Mythical Pipedreams of Transhumanist Tech Execs” (Salvo 62), I explained how materialists—those who believe that nature is all there is and that nothing exists but material stuff—are hoping that science will one day grant immortality to humans. But putting aside the insurmountable problem that consciousness is not material stuff, we also saw that those who place their hope in transhuman immortality through brain uploading recognize that they aren’t even close to having the computer power necessary to save them. However, in their techno hope-springs-eternal world, they trust in a coming superintelligence they call the Singularity! Cue the angel choir!

Wait; they don’t believe in angels.

Salvation by Technology

But seriously, I’m not exaggerating. For many, the Singularity is their savior (or maybe their destroyer or enslaver—we’ll talk more about this shortly). Ray Kurzweil, in his popular book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, explains the Singularity: “What, then, is the Singularity? It’s 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.”¹ Kurzweil and others believe that computers will soon be smarter than people and when that happens, these computers will exponentially start improving themselves.² And when that happens—yee-haw!—computers will help us humans transcend biology.

The movie Transcendence (2014) depicts what the Singularity might be like. Scientist Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is trying to make a self-aware computer when an audience member asks him, “So you want to create a god? Your own god?” Will replied, “Isn’t that what man has always done?” Indeed, it is!

Many think that when the Singularity happens, computers will become conscious. Kurzweil is bullish:

Clearly, nonbiological entities will claim to have emotional and spiritual experiences, just as we do today. They—we—will claim to be human and to have the full range of emotional and spiritual experiences that humans claim to have. And these will not be idle claims; they will evidence the sort of rich, complex, and subtle behavior associated with such feelings.³ (emphasis mine)

Notice the blurring of man and machine: “They—we—will claim to be human.”

This may seem impossible, but Singularitarians—those who have pondered and “get” the significance of the Singularity—like to point out that in 1992, world chess champion Gary Kasparov “scorned the pathetic state” of computer chess, but just five years later, he lost to an IBM computer named Deep Blue.⁴ Therefore, we should give computers a chance, and as they get faster and faster, pretty soon they’ll become self-aware and start thinking on their own. When that happens, we’ll be able to upload our brains. Kurzweil explains the glories of how this computer salvation will result in our own immortality:

Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed. The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want.⁵

In other words, the Singularity will enable us to be transhuman and thus immortal. Our savior comes! Forget the angels. Cue the theme music for 2001: A Space Odyssey!

Destroyer or Enslaver?

One problem with the envisioned Singularity is that when a self-aware computer develops a mind of its own, then who knows what that mind might do? In 1965, mathematician Irving John Good warned that since “an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines  . . . the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”⁶ Similarly, in 1993, mathematics professor Vernor Vinge, who first used the word “singularity” about strong AI computers, warned that if the Singularity could not be prevented, then it “would not be humankind’s ‘tool’—any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.”⁷

  Singularity advocates express concern that the Singularity might become our destroyer or enslaver. After all, if computers really, truly begin to think on their own and if they really are, as Kurzweil put it, “trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence,” then that’s where all the dystopian sci-fi scenarios come in. Thus, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak asked, “Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on?”⁸

Destroyer

What if, after the Singularity, theMachine decides you’re in the way, or using up or polluting valuable resources, or dangerous because at any moment you might destroy the world with nuclear war—or even worse, thinks you might switch it off? This Singularity savior might just be your murderer. This is illustrated in Star Trek—The Motion Picture (1979), where the “carbon units’ infestation” must be removed (you’re a carbon unit). This is also illustrated in the many films in The Terminator franchise (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009, 2015, 2019), where the computer Skynet becomes self-aware and considers humans hostile to its existence and decides to destroy them.

Serious scientists share these concerns. Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”⁹ Similarly, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk says that, when it comes to making AI safe, “maybe there’s a five to 10 percent chance of success.”¹⁰ Philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, writes that “when the AI has gained sufficient strength to obviate the need for secrecy,” then the “overt implementation phase might start with a ‘strike’ in which the AI eliminates the human species.” This could result in a “society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children.”¹¹ Bostrom seems to have overlooked the possibility that conscious computers would benefit themselves and have the time of their lives!

Enslaver

So the Singularity might kill us, but if it doesn’t kill us, there’s another problem. What if it enslaves us? We’ve seen this in The Matrix films (1999, 2003 [two films], 2021), where humans are farmed to produce bio-electrical energy, with their minds trapped in a virtual reality world to keep them pacified. Elon Musk thinks our computer overlords might decide to keep us around as pets. In a dialog with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, he said, “we won’t be like a pet Labrador if we’re lucky.” Tyson responded, “So we’ll be lab pets to them.” “Yes,” Musk agreed. Tyson quipped, “They’ll keep the docile humans and get rid of the violent ones. . . . And then breed the docile humans.”¹²

  But it gets worse. Musk and Tyson both think it’s probable that we are presently living in a virtual reality. An audience member asked Musk if he’d ever thought about whether we are, right now, living in a computer simulation. Musk replied that he has thought about that “a lot” and that “the odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions.”¹³

By saying it’s one chance in billions that we are in “base reality,” Musk meant that the overwhelming odds are that we are presently in a simulation. Talk-show host Larry King asked Neil deGrasse Tyson if he agreed with this. “I find it hard to argue against it,” Tyson replied. “Statistically  . . . it’s hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid, in a parent’s basement, programming up a world for their own entertainment.”

Now, I agree with Hawking, Musk, and Tyson that if the Singularity does occur, there would be a very good chance that it would either destroy us or enslave us. But thankfully, I don’t believe for a nanosecond that the Singularity will occur. It’s more likely that pigs will start making cotton candy.

A Case of Misplaced Optimism

Because of our accomplishments with computers, some think a computer can go from being a machine processing zeros and ones (electrical ons and offs) to a machine possessing consciousness. That’s quite a leap! This has been dubbed by mathematician Yehoshua Bar-Hillel as the “fallacy of the first step.” Ruben Harutyunyan summed up Bar-Hillel’s point: “early progress does not imply that subsequent steps of the same kind guarantee an eventual solution” (emphasis mine).¹⁴ Just because computers are becoming faster and faster and faster doesn’t mean that one day they will be able to think on their own. There’s nothing inherent in the concept of “faster” that would cause it to become conscious. As Hubert  L. Dreyfus in Minds and Machines put it, “Climbing a hill should not give one any assurance that if he keeps going he will reach the sky.”¹⁵

So for the Singularitarian, how does a computer become conscious? Again, they’ve got nothing! But if you’re desperate to escape death and you don’t want to submit to the Creator, none of this matters—they must believe the Singularity will save them.

Again, it gets worse. Even if we could produce something that is wired exactly like your brain, naturalists like David Chalmers admit, “It is true that we have no idea how a nonbiological system, such as a silicon computational system, could be conscious. But the fact is that we also have no idea how a biological system, such as a neural system, could be conscious. The gap is just as wide in both cases.”¹⁶

So those who admit they have “no idea” about how consciousness even works tell us that computers can become conscious. But Chalmers opines we should assume it’s true since “we do not know of any principled differences between biological and nonbiological systems that suggest that the former can be conscious and the latter cannot.”¹⁷

There it is. They believe that our own consciousness arose from purely material stuff, so it must be the case that machine consciousness can somehow arise from purely material stuff. Chalmers’s conclusion isn’t based on science because, again, he has “no idea” how a computer could become conscious. What makes it seem possible to Chalmers is the philosophical assumption that materialism/naturalism is true.

Chalmers, who spends his professional life on this subject, admits that we “have no idea how a biological system, such as a neural system, could be conscious.” How do faster processing speeds and more advanced programming make a computer suddenly self-aware with a will of its own—i.e., become conscious? C.  S. Lewis explains the naturalist’s dilemma:

If naturalism is true, every finite thing or event must be (in principle) explicable in terms of the Total System. I say “explicable in principle” because of course we are not going to demand that naturalists, at any given moment, should have found the detailed explanation of every phenomenon. Obviously many things will only be explained when the sciences have made further progress. But if Naturalism is to be accepted we have a right to demand that every single thing should be such that we see, in general, how it could be explained in terms of the Total System.¹⁸

But naturalists cannot even explain in principle how consciousness arose or how a computer might become conscious. They just know it must be possible because we are conscious.

Or, there’s a God! And this is one of the arguments for the existence of God. How does that which isn’t conscious—purely material stuff—produce consciousness?

Singularitarians Are Doing Metaphysics, Not Science

The idea that humans could create something conscious is based on the notion that our brains, with their hundred billion neurons and thousand trillion connections that became conscious, evolved into the creative creatures we are by luck. Extreme luck. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious luck. Singularitarians believe that life came from non-life, that complexity came from disorder, and that consciousness came from that which had no consciousness. This and only this enables the notion that the technological whiz-bang called the Singularity can spring from molecules in motion and one day give them immortality. That’s never going to happen!

  But the good news is that Jesus really was raised from the dead, and the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, tells us that those who believe in him “shall not perish but have eternal life.” In Jesus you can live forever—trust in that!

—This article was adapted from Clay Jones’s book, Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It (Harvest House 2020).

Notes
1. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Penguin, 2005), 7.
2. Ibid., 27–28.
3. Ibid., 377.
4. Ibid., 8.
5. Ray Kurzweil, “Superintelligence and Singularity,” in Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Susan Schneider, ed., 2nd ed. (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 148.
6. Irving J. Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (April 1964): http://web.archive.org/web/20010527181244/http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Computing/Good-IJ/SCtFUM.html.
7. Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity” (1993): http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html.
8. Ellie Zolfagharifard and Victoria Woollaston, “Could robots turn people into PETS? Elon Musk claims artificial intelligence will treat humans like ‘labradors,’” The Daily Mail (March 25, 2015): dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3011302/Could-robots-turn-people-PETS-Elon-Musk-claims-artificial-intelligence-treat-humans-like-Labradors.html.
9. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind,” BBC (Dec. 2, 2014): bbc.com/news/technology-30290540.
10. Neil Strauss, “Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow,” Rolling Stone (Nov. 15, 2017): rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-the-architect-of-tomorrow-120850.
11. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 212.
12. Ibid. note 8.
13. Andrew Griffin, “Elon Musk: The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is ‘one in billions,’” Independent (June 2, 2016): independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-ai-artificial-intelligence-computer-simulation-gaming-virtual-reality-a7060941.html.
14. Ruben Harutyunyan, “The Limits of Modern AI: A Story,” RoosBix (April 2022): https://roosbix.com/technology/the-limits-of-modern-ai-a-story.
15. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “A History of First Step Fallacies,” Minds and Machines (May 2012): https://philpapers.org/rec/DREAHO-2.
16. David J. Chalmers, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis,” in Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Susan Schneider, ed., 2nd ed. (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 202.
17. Ibid. Earlier, Chalmers writes, “There is nothing even approaching an orthodox theory of why there is consciousness in the first place.” Ibid., 201.
18. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (HarperOne, 1996), 17.