Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

“Annihilation from Within”

Some recent commentary on the Washington Times website mentions Fred C. Ikle on existential risk:

Fred C. Ikle, one of America's foremost strategic thinkers, in his latest book "Annihilation from Within" (Columbia University Press), sees the ever-faster advances in brain science and computers merging to build superhuman intelligence systems. Brain-computer-interface (BCI) research projects are proliferating among universities in the G-8 major industrial countries and China. And when this quest succeeds, Mr. Ikle says it will trump the latest supercomputers (already up to 73 trillion operations per second) and the best human experts.

In a nanosecond of history, the evolution that took millions of years from primates to Homo sapiens will jump into the unknown. Homo connectus will relegate the obsolete nation-state and its dysfunctional institutions to artifacts of history, quaint but useless. This gigantic leap of history will "obliterate all previous notions about military power, pose a fundamental challenge to all religions, and eventually upend human civilization."

Ikle outlines the importance of anticipating superhuman intelligence and nanotechnology, emphasizing that the conflict between religion and science and the fundamental mystery of what's on the other side of the Singularity:

Religious resurgence, Mr. Ikle notes, has "spread through Africa, lit fires throughout the Muslim world, and can be observed in the United States." And for mankind he foresees that "its cultural split will become wider, unless the calamity of annihilation from within forces societies to close the chasm between the two modes of human activity. Short of such an upheaval, the societal and religious modes of human activity cannot catch up with the ceaseless momentum of science." By clinging to government structures designed for 4 million in the age of nanotechnology with 300 million people, institutions are as useless as Model-T Fords in a NASCAR race.

Mr. Ikle notes the growth of computer capabilities during the last 50 years has been greater than the growth of the brain's intellectual capability during hundred thousands of years. The quest is now on for superhuman intelligence. Its attainment, says Mr. Ikle, will revolutionize all prior considerations about national security. The door would then be open to a fundamental transformation of the human condition. "We can no more imagine the political order of this new world," he writes, "than a group of chimpanzees in the forest can comprehend what goes on among humans in a nearby village."

Hat tip to James Hughes and the existential risks list, maintained by the WTA. Nice to see "transhumanist" existential risk concerns getting airtime from the best mainstream minds in the world.