Jason Silva explains the concept of technological singularity and how artificial intelligence is nothing to be afraid of.
“One of the apprehensions that people have about this technological singularity, which is really a metaphor.. metaphor borrowed from physics to describe what happens when you go through a black hole…Center of a black holes is singularity.. The laws of physics as we know them kind of collapse or implode they no longer apply..
It’s a great metaphor that we borrowed to use to describe what is going to happen with technology we’re going to hit this inflection point the singularity where it’s going to be like a runaway train builds on itself. The terminator scenario is that this artificially, artificial intelligence and this algorithm is going to wake up is going to achieve sentence and it’s going to turn on us but that’s I think an erroneous way of looking at it.
Some of the more optimistic futurists in Silicon Valley including people at Kurt Miller and Kevin Kelly for example who wrote “what technology wants” say that what’s going to happen instead is that we’re going to continue to augment our own thinking by uploading more and more and more of our own cognition or cognitive apparatus to non-biological intelligence.
So it’s not so much that that mind is going to ride that artificial minus and rise up against us but that we’re going to continue to become more non-biological. In other words we already offload cognition onto non-biological props when you write something down on a piece of paper part of your thinking is happening on that paper ,part of your thinking is happening by you moving your hand on that pen, part of your thinking is occurring when you stare at the contents of your own mind on that paper and reflect on what you wrote.
We already incorporate non biological aspects into our thinking apparatus. There’s a great essay written by these cognitive philosophers called David Chalmers and Andy Clark cognitive philosophers called the extended mind thesis which says that things like an iPhone or a smartphone already are manifestations and extensions of the mind and that mind is actually not limited to the brain. But that the mind exists in the feedback loop between brains tools and environments. So that that’s why we say our thoughts shape our spaces and our spaces return the favor. That’s why they say that everything we design is designing us in return.a
Marshall McLuhan says; “We build the tools and the tools build us” so what really exists our feedback loops, feedback loops of mind it’s not us versus them it’s all one large distributed intelligence that has biological and on biological parts. That’s why, I don’t think that we have anything to be afraid of it’s just billions of baby steps that increasingly extend an augment or creative capacity.”
Source: National Geographic
