The Singularity concept got a nice dose of publicity yesterday, with Instapundit blogebrity and soon-to-be New York Times columnist Glenn Reynolds coming out strongly in favor of the Singularity. (For those of you not in the know, Reynolds is kind of a big deal – his blog scores a million visits per week.) Like other big media people when they get their teeth on the idea, it begins with the standard Vingean definition (technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence) then phases into the broader, technology-centric Kurzweilian definition (guarantees of extended life, peaceful fusion with machines, etc.) This is where Singularitarians like to come in and repeat the mantra: the Singularity is about greater intelligence, not more technology. Greater intelligence will likely end up inventing and applying new technologies for a variety of ends, but thinking of the Singularity primarily as “really cool tech” misses the point.

The Singularity is about breaking through the millennia-enduring glass ceiling of Homo sapiens cognitive capacity. There are people that can bench press 500 lbs, and people that can barely manage 100. There are atheletes that can run a five-minute mile, and there are geeks that can puff through a mile in under ten minutes. There are people that do AIDS research and there are people that couldn’t tell you what a cell is.

But there is nobody who can bench press twenty tons. There is no one that can run a mile in two minutes. And you’d be hard pressed to find someone that can take one look at the details of the AIDS problem, and have a full cure within a couple weeks. All these tasks represent abilities, and there are winners and losers for each ability. But the fact that we all belong to the same species puts us in the same general category of competency, no matter what ability you choose. Sometimes it is hard to realize this, because we only have other humans to compare ourselves with.

A naive human might look at a champion weightlifter and think that he’s seeing the best there is and the best there ever will be. But think – if we evolved on a planet with higher gravity, all of us might have stronger muscles, and then bench pressing 500 lbs would simply be average. Scientists have developed artificial muscles 100 times stronger than those we possess.

If we created a cyborg with artificial muscles and had this strongman lift weights, could we predict the result?

Largely, yes. He’d be able to lift a hell of a lot of weight. But the little quirks that would come from superhuman strength are the sort of thing that excites scriptwriters and fans of science fiction and comics – maybe the cyborg would get from place to place by jumping instead of walking, for example. Or maybe he would move his furniture solo rather than with a four-man crew. The fact of the matter is, we wouldn’t be able to predict exactly how a superstrong human would live or act – we’d have to actually create one and see how it got through life with his or her own unique perspective.

The uncertainty would be far more explosive if we had a means of enhancing human intelligence. It would be far more difficult to predict how a superintelligence would think or act than to predict the actions of a superman. A superman would still have human needs, wants, desires, emotions, thinking habits, flaws, and motivations. A superintelligence, especially in the form of an AI, could have completely rearranged desires and ways of achieving them. It could circumvent restrictions placed on it through sheer cunning, cleverness, and social engineering. A superintelligence might be able to walk into a lab and point out ten different things the resident scientists never thought of, accelerating research by years or even decades. You wouldn’t be able to predict the moves a superintelligence would choose in a chess game, though you could predict it would win.

That is what the Singularity is about. The only reason that technology so frequently enter into the discussion is that technology is the only way we know of to plausibly create a superintelligence. Characteristic of Singularity discussions is mentioning the feedback effect – smarter minds would be better at upgrading their own intelligence. Imagine if, rather than technology, we used magic to manipulate the external world. Then we would create superintelligence with a particularly powerful magic spell. The superintelligence would then invent more incantations and sorceries, and use them to further expand her magical repertoire. Perhaps in a parallel universe, this is how Singularities happen.

The Singularity discussed by folks like Glenn Reynolds and Ray Kurzweil is more about the next stage of technology than it is about the next stage of insight, intelligence, wisdom, cleverness, sociality, or morality. Singularitarians are merely looking at technology as the only available means to a very worthy end – intelligence smart enough to improve its own intelligence recursively. So next time you see the words “technology” and “Singularity” in the same article, remember that there are people out there calling themselves singularitarians who don’t really care about shiny gadgets all that much. We just want to explore the potential for smarter, more benevolent types of thinkers.

What reading this Glenn Reynolds article does do is show us that transhumanism – not singularitarianism – is becoming radically more mainstream. And a particularly blasphemous form of transhumanism as well. Reynolds talks about…

Limitless lifespans, if not immortality, superhuman powers, virtually limitless wealth, fleshly pleasures on demand, etc.

This is pretty serious stuff to be discussing on a level-headed website like Tech Central Station. And it certainly would look pretty insane in a New York Times column. More:

people once looked to supernatural sources for such now-mundane things as cures for baldness or impotence, only to find those desires satisfied, instead, by modern pharmacology. Yet that hardly makes those who place their faith in pharmacology members of a religion — or, if it does, it makes them members of a religion that is distinguishable from those dependent on the supernatural. … How do we know that people want the kinds of things that advanced technology is supposed to offer? Because they’ve been trying to get them through non-technological means for all of recorded history.

Reynolds’ article defends transhumanists and other secularists who see mankind’s future lying in technological and scientific advancement rather than Heaven and Jesus. The classic knee-jerk reaction to transhumanist ideas for the unexposed – “the whole thing is a damn cult”. Not only does he dismiss assertions that the Singularity or transhumanism is a religion, but states that, in fact, the prospect of achieving things we’ve wanted throughout history through technological means is something to embrace and be excited about, rather than write off.

Christianity talks about achieving eternal life, joining a perfect society, and experiencing endless happiness by being good people on earth. Standard atheism is the cynic’s answer – “you guys are all dreaming, but we’re savvy intellectuals who know that life actually sucks and after death there is only rotting of the body”. It’s cool to be a cynic. It’s easier to demolish a complex argument than create a well-supported one from scratch.

Then along comes the prospect of serious life extension. Nanotechnology that makes products for the cost of their raw materials. Cyborgs flying around and seeing with ultraviolet vision. Etc.

The atheists cry bullshit, because it sounds too similar to the Christian doctrine that originally let them down intellectually. But these are real prospects – and they have no right to dismiss them off-hand without serious investigation.

But high-profile people like Reynolds, who end up writing articles like this, are telling these people to give the ideas another look. Reynolds seems to be coming out of the closet as a transhumanist in a feisty way, and this is just as he’s going to work for the New York Times.

Some people, like venemously anti-transhumanist journalist John Bruce, are terribly unhappy about this. The guy writes a blog with post after post attacking Reynolds, and whining about his pet peeve – cryonics. (On the lighter side of things, Bruce’s hobby is working with model trains.) Conservative legislators in Missouri are even kicking around ideas for an amendment to the state constitution, “Regulation of Human-Animal Crossbreeds, Cloning, Transhumanism, and Human Engineering Is Reserved to the People”. These two pages are highly LOL-worthy material, and I encourage you to look into them. I’m sure that John Bruce would especially appreciate your thoughtful feedback on his posts.

On the more futurism-friendly side of the blogosphere, transhumanist Phil Bowermaster covered the article, and added his thoughtful analyses on the issue. He has also opened a Singularity survey, which you should participate in, for great justice. Post your answers here if you’d like.

Thanks to big boys like Reynolds coming out for us little fringe futurists, we will surely be free to talk about omnipotent transhuman AIs without accusations of religiosity. Everyone knew we were entirely secular to begin with, right? Not a smidgin of cultishness to be found, as any well-educated gentleman or gentlewoman can testify.