| Finding out the personal stories of how people become interested in the Singularity is always facinating. Here is one that might not follow the usual trend. |
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One of the most interesting things to learn about people interested in the Singularity, is what were the factors that led them to read about and, in many cases, become passionate about the impact of exponential technology, and the potential for an intelligence explosion.
For many, like Singularity Weblog's Nikola Danaylov and author William Herltling, the keys were reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near
and Charles Stross's science fiction work, Accelerando. While these books were essential to forming a conceptual framework of the Singularity, they were not my initial introduction to the subject.I was always interested in science and technology. As a child, I avidly read science fiction, but by no means exclusively. I was drawn to the social sciences as much as biology, chemistry and physics, and had an affinity for the arts. I ended up with an undergraduate degree in Political Science. For me, the key take-away from my undergraduate work was to question everything.
Following that, I decided that industrial design would be an ideal way to combine my multiple interests into a challenging career, and I completed my masters work in the subject. For my thesis, I explored many of the implications of new media technologies and how the importance of interface design was encroaching on the design of physical products. User experience design, as it has now become known, is now a separate field of study and a much sought-after job. I completed my education in August of 2001.
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Watching the World Trade Center towers fall on television was surreal. The airspace over London was quite for weeks afterwards, and security was ramped up to panic levels. Personally I felt angered, helpless and confused. The Anthrax attacks only fueled these feelings. There was a big assumption that the city would be targeted next. Needless to say, the job market for a rookie designer from outside the country was not too bright.
During my studies I did not have much time for free reading or side projects, so the period in London left me time to explore the books I had not got a chance to read yet, and explore the city's history and culture. At this time, I still was not aware of Kurzweil, or the Singularity.
The events of 9/11 were never far from my thoughts, as they remain for many. I returned to Canada and took up employment at a job where the only real benefit was frequent travel. I got to see a lot of the world this way, but it was a workaday experience, not that of an leisurely traveler. After a career transition, I traveled less, and with few other people around the office, began listening to the radio on the Internet, more for background noise than anything.
Around this time I first was introduced to the film, "Zeitgeist," and through it "Loose Change." The films have gone through several iterations over time, but essentially it brought me to question the events of 9/11, and stirred in me a political awareness that was admittedly unconventional. I began listening to Alex Jones, whose voice was prominent in much of the early cuts of "Zeitgeist." I began watching and reading things that were well into the fringe category, like "Empire of the City," below, and the work of Jordan Maxwell.
The concept of the New World Order (NWO) entered my consciousness.
Other conspiracy theories that caught my attention were the murals at the Denver International Airport (see top image), and the building of a large NWO bunker under the tarmacs there; false flag operations, rise of the police state, banking conspiracies and the Bilderberg Group/Committee of 300/Club of Rome.
What was the lure? Looking back now, I do see that there was some of the infotainment element in the films. Much of it was frustration with the presidency of George W. Bush and my sense, supported by my travelling that people, in the United States especially, were not thinking critically at all about what their leaders were doing. I recall being told by an individual that he would not shop at Target because the French did not support the War on Terror. He also home-schooled his children. This was not an isolated incident.
Admittedly the time spent on conspiracy-level 'news' was high, but the official answers for 9/11 remain to this day to be insufficient, and the results of the so-called 'War on Terror,' are abysmal and seemingly intractable. I never really believed 100% of what the conspiracy theorists were saying, but my skepticism was undoubtedly compromised for a time.
One thing that always gave me an opportunity to give my head a proverbial shake was when the conspiracy theory argument became tied to a religious anchor. I have never believed in a supreme being or god, and to me theologically-based arguments are non sequiturs by definition. Jones frequently relates to arguments against transhumanism as being against the teachings of Jesus or the Bible. The same goes for when arguments are based in occult or hidden knowledge.
Incidentally, quoting verses from the Bible or the Qur'an are frequently used by commenters on this site and others relating to transhumanism and the technological Singularity.
While I still check in on the conspiracy theory sites now and then. Alex Jones seems to promote his own products more than provide substantial 'facts' lately. The way the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was handled did bring up new questions, especially after nearly everyone involved was killed in a helicopter crash.
From Conspiracy to Singularity
Where things really turned around for me though, was when transhumanism and the work of Ray Kurzweil was introduced to me via the people speaking out against them. Transhumanism is the way the globalists will bring about the New World Order, according to many conspiracy theorists. Along with religion, many conspiracy theorists (I choose not to go into descriptions of any subsets), turn a blind eye to the technology they are using and attack it. At the root, this may just be a good way to sell herbal supplements and T-Shirts. It amounts to little more than crying wolf.
Along with Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines
and The Singularity Is Near I read Brynjofsson and McAfee's Race Against The Machine, a book that tied together what exponential technology might mean into a social science perspective. At this time, I also continued to explore other thinkers at this time like Juan Enriquez, Peter Diamandis, Aubrey deGrey, Ben Goertzel, and others. Once again, the optimistic discussion these thinkers presented did mention the risks of artificial intelligence, genetics research and nanotechnology, but they always put these issues into balance.
The conspiracy theorist tends to point out problems, without offering solutions. When my children were born, I also asked myself, what kind of world do I want them to grow up in?
The tongue in cheek novel, Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco was another book that profoundly changed my thinking regarding conspiracy theories. His newer work, The Prague Cemetery
, about the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, also shows how conspiracy theories can be fabricated and adopted. If any theory, from the NWO to the Singularity can be self-fulfilling, which one would be preferable for the future? |
It is interesting now, that the conspiracy theorist and the Singularitarian (or the transhumanist), are now represented as polar opposites by so many. According to Zoltan Istvan, "In my opinion, people that regularly subscribe to conspiracy theories probably outnumber transhumanists 100 to 1."
As Istvan writes, "Naturally, those holding power with access to mega-resources—the Bill Gates's, Al Gores, and Peter Thiels of the world—are excited about how radical technology and science are changing and improving the world. Instead of thinking how to control the masses, they're probably celebrating how technology is allowing the handicapped to walk via exoskeletons. Or the infirm to be cured via biotechnology. Or the dead to live via suspended animation."
For me too, going way back to high school, we had an assignment to defend either democracy or totalitarianism. Being a young, smug know-it-all, I decided that I would try to write about the later. Through my junior-level scholarly analysis of the topic, I was unable to do so, and so switched to the other side. For any society to be totalitarian for a length of time, they are dooming themselves to a society and culture of uneducated, non-thinking, non-innovating drones who will, eventually through enormous maintenance costs, bring down the whole system. In the conspiracy theorists' NWO scenario, the developments needed to bring about a transhuman future would be stalled by the controlling functions needed by the organization to maintain it.
Istvan hints of this in the The Transhumanist Wager
, as does Ayn Rand in Atlas Shugged. For the government(s) to maintain strict control over people and technology will eventually bankrupt the system. The cost both in dollars and human labor to maintain the secrets of some conspiracy theories alone are mind-boggling. Economics then seems not only to provide a solid argument to why a Singularity will come about, but disprove how an New World Order might come about.
I think, while I support the advance of science and technology in general, and along with this Kurzweil's arguments are very persuasive regarding the technological Singularity, the maxim "question everything" should still be applied.
How about you? How were you first introduced to the idea of the Singularity?
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