Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity

I read about wishful thinking to overcome the end of individual existence – death – by transcending and being encoded into a powerful silicon artifact. Actually, this entry was triggered by an interesting speculation in Nautili.us – “Why Alien Life Will Be Robotic” by Martin Rees, a British cosmologist and astrophysicist, and also the Astronomer Royal. As Sting once sang in a song, I do not subscribe to this point of view.

I am not convinced of materialism, but neither do I believe that dualism is a proven thing. We simply know way to little to be certain either way. One thing I do know is that the world and everything in it is vastly more complex on both the smallest scale (as Feynman once lectured, “There is a plenty of room at the bottom”) and the largest. It is also important to move away from reductionism despite its usefulness over the last centuries and start looking at systems thinking. Everything in the world is vastly more connected than our simple models can perceive. Just today I saw news of a study that “Bacteria actually communicate like neurons in the brain.”