The singularity is coming, there’s nothing we can do

I put the beers on the little table, pushed one across to him.

‘‘Tell me something new and interesting,’’ I said. He’s youngish and clever and he knows stuff, which is why I like to drink a beer with him.

‘‘Well now,’’ he said, and he looked around the bar. It was packed with young people drinking fancier drinks than I drank at their age. ‘‘How about the singularity?’’

‘‘Perfect,’’ I said. ‘‘What is it?’’ ‘‘It’s closer than you think.’’

‘‘I see,’’ I said, though I didn’t. ‘‘What is it?’’

‘‘The singularity,’’ he said and he sipped on his beer for theatrical effect, ‘‘is when the machines get away on us.’’

‘‘Go on,’’ I said.

‘‘As you know, Joe, computers keep getting more powerful. Already they do some things better than we can. Soon one of the things they’ll do better than we can is to program computers. So they’ll program themselves.

‘‘In other words computers will design the next generation of computers. And that generation will design the one after that. And every generation will be cleverer than the one before. And what will arise from this process is artificial intelligence, developed without our help and freed from the usual rules of evolution. Have I lost you yet?’

‘‘I’m not sure,’’ I said. ‘‘Evolution depends on chance mutations. Artificial intelligence won’t. It will be self-engineered. It will be its own creator god. So it will evolve at an exponential pace. What will emerge won’t be a new species. It will be a new species of species.

‘‘And though we will have been the creatures that set it in motion, we will become irrelevant to it. We will be to it as bacteria are to us. The new intelligence will evolve away from us at an ever increasing speed. And that’s the singularity.’’

‘‘Isn’t that just an old nightmare updated,’’ I said. ‘‘We’ve always been afraid of our own creative power. Your singularity is Frankenstein’s monster for a digital age.’’

‘‘Maybe so, Joe,’’ he said, ‘‘and there are plenty of well-informed people who’d agree with you. They argue that however powerful machines become they will only ever be tools.

‘‘Machines can never develop independent intelligence because they aren’t conscious. They don’t have beliefs, emotions or a sense of self. However good they may be at handling information, they will never be anything more than advanced abacuses. And nobody fears his abacus.’’

‘‘Quite so,’’ I said.

‘‘But others disagree, people as well-informed as Stephen Hawking. They say that consciousness is nothing special. It is just the product of a brain, and a brain is only a wet computer. Like an iPad, a brain consists of a memory and electrical impulses. The wonder of consciousness is merely programming we don’t understand yet. But we will.

‘‘As technology improves so does our capacity to study the brain in ever greater detail. In time we will be able to reproduce bits of it electronically. And once we’ve reproduced a bit of the brain it will behave like a bit of the brain. It will think and feel. It will like Trump or loathe him. It will have a sense of self.

‘‘And if you grant that possibility, then it’s all on. We will have a self-conscious machine with the power to reproduce. Or

"It's closer than you think."

rather we won’t have it at all. It will have severed the umbilical cord. It won’t need us. The big question is what will it do with us?

‘‘It may allow us to carry on, just as we allow other species to carry on so long as they don’t interfere with our lives. It may even keep a few of us in zoos for entertainment and instruction. But the point is that we cannot know.

‘‘This intelligence will evolve so rapidly it is quite beyond our imagination to guess what it might do. It will be an entirely new world, like nothing seen before. A new order of being. The singularity.’’

He paused and drank some beer and grinned and shrugged his shoulders. ‘‘So what do you reckon, Joe?’’

‘‘You said it’s closer that we think.’’

‘‘The consensus among those who believe in it,’’ he said, ‘‘is it will happen around 2045.’’

‘‘Gosh,’’ I said. I looked around the bar. The clientele looked happy and oblivious.

‘‘So when these people reach middle-age,’’ I said, ‘‘they could be put in a zoo by artificially intelligent machines.’’

He nodded.

‘‘Oh don’t be silly,’’ I said, ‘‘I don’t believe it.’’

‘‘Suit yourself,’’ he said. ‘‘Another beer?’’