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There are however interesting alternate views on the rise of exponential technology. Most of these critics find technological progress underlies some nefarious underlying motives of elites, conspiracy cabals, or even the Devil himself.
We recognize that not all Singulatarians are Transhuman, and vice versa, and that there are a prism of beliefs and ethics associated with the groupings. For this analysis, we will simplify the debate however by grouping them in one cluster.
Many of the anti transhuman views are religiously based. Often Evangelical Christians see signs of the Revelation in Transhuman studies and the work of others studying the impacts of technological progress. Biblical literalists, like Tom Horn who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of singulatarianism and transhumanism nevertheless sees the movement as a way for Lucifer to return to power on Earth by resurrecting the Nephilim via transgenic manipulation. They believe that the ultimate goal of Transhumanism is the coming of the anit-Christ (the ultimate transhuman).
Religious 'scholars' like Horn imagine that men once walked with the dinosaurs and that giants walked among us as fallen angels. They track scientific advancement and exponential growth as fervently as many Singulatarians, however always through the prism of their interpretation of the Bible.
From Horn's Something Transhuman This Way Comes:
In recent years, astonishing technological developments have pushed the frontiers of humanity toward far-reaching morphological transformation that promises in the very near future to redefine what it means to be human. An international, intellectual, and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism has been embraced within the deepest and darkest chambers of military and national laboratories. There, genetics, robotics, brain machine interfacing, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and nanotechnologies are envisioned as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring...even perhaps our very souls.
Max More has long rallied against the religious view from the transhumanist and eupraxophy perspective.
A eupraxophy, a non-religious philosophy of life, plays a similar memetic role in that it is concerned to create or increase meaningfulness through a philosophical framework. In contrast to religion, eupraxophies are opposed to faith, dogmatism, ideological authoritarianism, and stagnation.
The concept of eupraxophy encompasses within it humanism, transhumanism (including Extropianism), and possible a future posthumanism. Humanism is a eupraxophy or philosophy of life that rejects deities, faith, and worship, instead basing a view of values and meaningfulness on the nature and potentials of humans within a rational and scientific framework. Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life rather than in some supernatural "afterlife". Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies such as neuroscience and neuropharmacology, life extension, nanotechnology, artificial ultraintelligence, and space habitation, combined with a rational philosophy and value system.
Finally, Extropianism is the foremost version of transhumanism. While all transhumanists as such will agree on many overall goals, they may differ over the principles that will get us to a posthuman stage. The philosophy of Extropianism affirms the values of Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, and Intelligent Technology, and Spontaneous Order.
-Max More, TRANSHUMANISM: Towards a Futurist PhilosophyAs exponentially progressing technologies begin to bring about some of the promises of the Singularity, such as human-like artificial intelligence and mind uploading, we can expect the debate between the belief systems to heat up. As Charlie Stoss put it:
Uploading ... is not obviously impossible unless you are a crude mind/body dualist. However, if it becomes plausible in the near future we can expect extensive theological arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire. Uploading implicitly refutes the doctrine of the existence of an immortal soul, and therefore presents a raw rebuttal to those religious doctrines that believe in a life after death.*
Conspiracy theorists represent another group that a significant proportion of which look on the exponential growth of technology with suspicion. It is intriguing that among religious and conspiracy theory naysayers, that a common notion that scientific and technological knowledge is thought to be from an other worldly source. Alternative media host Alex Jones, of Infowars.com, for instance, often cites that the elites, or Illuminati have access to advanced technology and are only parcelling it out to the rest of humanity as they see fit.
Conspiracies are intellectually attractive. The rabbit hole they lead you down can be deep, if you let it. Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
suggests a very realistic scenario, where conspiracies, cabals, underground organizations, Kabbalah, and mysticism self-refer to each other to such an extent that those intentionally creating fake mythologies (with the aid of a computer, no less) are sought out by the initiates and tortured to reveal their 'secrets'. Conspiracies no doubt exist and deciphering the underlying 'master plan' is an exciting pursuit and the stuff of great fiction, however the link between transhumanism is spurious at best.
Scientifically-based backlash is another group in disagreement with many transhumanist values. One of the key focal points of this criticism is based that such developments are not possible, or are not possible in the time frames put forward by Singularity proponents. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, wrote that The Singularity Isn't Near last year. His argument is mathematically based, countering the exponential doubling expected in Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns with reasoning that phenomenon like the human brain are too complex for us to understand.
Overall scientific progress in understanding the brain rarely resembles an orderly, inexorable march to the truth, let alone an exponentially accelerating one. Instead, scientific advances are often irregular, with unpredictable flashes of insight punctuating the slow grind-it-out lab work of creating and testing theories that can fit with experimental observations. Truly significant conceptual breakthroughs don't arrive when predicted, and every so often new scientific paradigms sweep through the field and cause scientists to reëvaluate portions of what they thought they had settled.*It is a forest and trees debate at the scientific level.
Writing for Wired, Mark Anderson outlined five reasons why the Singularity will not materialize (at least in terms of strong AI):
1. The mind is synchronized, but no one knows how. New York University neurologist E. Roy John has established that the hallmark of consciousness is a regular electrical oscillation, or gamma wave, readily detected by electrodes attached to the scalp. More recently, Wolf Singer and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, confirmed that brain cells flicker in time with the gamma wave. This flickering takes place among widely dispersed neurons throughout the brain with no apparent spatial pattern. What keeps these ever-shifting, widely distributed groups of cells in sync? Neurochemical reactions take place too slowly to explain the phenomenon. This mystery alone seems to demand a wholesale rethinking of AI's underpinnings.
2. Current brain maps are of little use in explaining awareness. For more than a century, the brain cell, or neuron, has been seen as a tiny switching station with multiple signals coming in through many input wires, known as dendrites, but only one signal going out through a single output wire, or axon. AI is based on this circuitry model. When it comes to consciousness, though, the model has its wires crossed. Singer has discovered that gamma waves — the indicators of consciousness — issue from the neuron's supposed inputs, not its output. Confusing matters further, researchers, including Takaichi Fukuda and Toshio Kosaka of Japan's Kyushu University, have revealed that many inputs interconnect, forming an altogether different set of networks. In other words, the vast strides made by neuroscientists in their attempt to map the brain may reveal little about consciousness.
3. The brain is faster than singularity theorists think. AI assumes that the neuron is analogous to a single computer bit. But it turns out that each neuron is supported by a supercomputer's worth of additional circuitry. MIT bioengineer Andreas Mershin and UCLA psychologist Nancy Woolf have independently confirmed the importance of microtubules, the scaffolding that undergirds each neuron, in animal memory and learning. At the University of Alberta, physicist Jack Tuszynski has developed computational models suggesting that these supposedly dumb structures could be smarter than previously recognized. Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona argues that trillions of computations per second take place in the microtubules of each neuron. If he's right, the brain's speed is 1028 operations per second — a trillion times faster than is generally thought — which pushes the vaunted singularity back by decades.
4. The on/off switch isn't where it's supposed to be. As it happens, doctors have a handy way to flick the switch of consciousness: anesthesia. When you're under, awareness is disabled, but everything else in the brain operates normally. So how does anesthesia work? Hameroff has come up with a simple model in which anesthetic drugs interact almost exclusively with microtubules; the rest of the neuron plays only a marginal role. This model is the closest anyone has come to a unified theory of anesthesia — yet it flatly contradicts the notion that consciousness arises from firing neurons.
5. Understanding consciousness may require new physics. In his 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose proposed that the classical physics ruling neurobiology can't explain consciousness. The mind, he declared, relies on the baffling mechanics of quantum physics. Although his point remains controversial, evidence in its favor is accumulating. Most recently, physicist Efstratios Manousakis at Florida State University showed that certain confounding quirks of visual perception are most easily explained by quantum mechanics. If consciousness is indeed a quantum phenomenon, then AI becomes an entirely new game. The singularity will have to wait for engineers to catch up.
In the end, questioning established truths, exploring alternative ideas and weighing multiple options are important to any serious field of study. While many of the religious and conspiracy theory based views are seemingly outlandish, many do have a complex series of philosophical underpinnings and inter-related series of evidence. For religion, the main underpinnings being faith itself and the Law of First Mention, are essentially invalidated via objective analysis.
What is interesting about such alternate viewpoints to Transhumanism and the Singularity are they do provide a source of ideas from a basic level. At the very least they are interesting and entertaining, at their most dangerous they are attractive to followers that may be hostile and even dangerous to opposing views.
The scientific arguments against the development of transhumanism are often based in religion, or in science that tries to prove hypotheses such as, "Moore's Law is about to end," or "the human brain is too complex to understand." As is almost always the case, these arguments play out over time and are often overcome by innovation and scientific progress.
The opponents to transhumanism will become more vocal and potentially more numerous as the Singularity approaches, and the debate will continue.
No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future is ours. - Max More
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