The Singularity is Near

João Victor · Jul 30, 2021

Back in 1977 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story called True Love, right there he already assumed a big problem of our current society: the behavior with Artificial Intelligence(AI). In the short story, the programmer shares his whole life with the super computer, which in the end betrays him by handing him over to the police and steals his "love". It's can be sounded like a crazy thing to happen in the real world, but in the reality is more close than never.

An idea that got me lately is the singularity. Singularity is a term used for spirituality, spirituality that can be achieved by machines. One of the pioneers of this idea is Ray Kurzweil, reading his book The Age of Spiritual Machines you may notice that the accumulation of information, characteristic of an algorithm of large capacity, could, with some reason, take it from this accumulation and from the data crossing, to inquiries close to the human ones regarding your origin, destiny and function(or who knows, going far beyond human inquiries).

The fact that AI, probably, has a huge amount of stored data and an ability to relate them in an infinitely faster and more complex way than humans is fundamental for us to imagine the reach of their "theories" that characterize every form of spirituality.

Another detail: the spirituality associated with AI can be understood as the spirituality associated with it by its engineers and creators. Let's take Google as an example, behind the company is a whole "revolutionary" political, social, economic and psychological philosophy, which takes us directly to the community collectivism behind the origin of Silicon valley.

Google itself is a company that practices AI so discreetly that you don't even notice it on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, google is dying, you can read the techdirt post and draw your own conclusions. They have created such a confusing complex that they are getting lost within it.

The spirituality of these AI people, basically, collectivist and authoritarian, dressed up in a shallow discourse that the algorithms would free us from common and individual anxieties, leading us to a hive mind life of apps and data hands-on, uniting us in a "happy world" and in "network". AI creators understand that they must save us from ourselves by making us "addicted to services" that set us free. All this thoughts sounds dangerous and with an air of exaggerated domain on it.

In fact, not theology, philosophy or religion will lead us to the spirit world, but technology. Spirituality and science side by side, seems ironic, doesn't it?

In conclusion, people don't know what they are building and the problems it can bring to us, stop thinking of the AI control problem as a math problem, it’s a social and political problem, not a technical one.