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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from howstuffworks.com.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, my name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick.

And Robert and I last time were talking about the rapture about Christian eschatology, religious eschatology in general, and secular eschatology of a technological nature such as the singularity, transhumanism.

And our discussion went so long that we decided to divide it up into two parts. So here is the second part of our conversation on the end times.

Okay, well I've got another futurist, a sort of techno futurist mindset that I think we can ask, is this a religion? Is it like a religion or does it just sort of like tickle some of the same weak spots we've got as many religions do?

So I want to talk about the singularity. Robert, do you feel good about the singularity? Do you feel bad about it? You think it's a bunch of hooy?

I feel good about it. I mean, part of that I think comes from just being a, I'm a fan of like the Ianian Banks culture series model of a post singularity post scarcity world in which the super intelligent computers have our best interest at heart.

They kind of look after us as kind of benevolent, semi-knowable gods. Yeah, okay, okay. Well, so I think we need to explore this idea because this to me is the core of this kind of topic we're talking about today, like technological eschatology.

So you could say that the singularity I think has come to have almost as many interpretations as the Christian eschaton. Right, like just like the Christian eschatologies, they're all sort of loosely related and grounded in similar beliefs, but they vary in the history of the world.

They vary in the explicit details or in the way you'd explain them, even if they're not necessarily contradictory. So in the most basic sense, the singularity is a hypothesis that technological innovation at some point in the future is going to reach a tipping point of unimaginable innovation that fundamentally changes the fate of humanity on a rapid timescale.

Very often it involves artificial intelligence. So I'm going to talk about three basic models just to give you an idea. One is the super intelligence model. And this is the idea that humans are going to create super human artificial intelligence.

So when you think about it intelligence, I would probably agree has been the most rapid driver of change in the universe up until this point, like in cosmological or geological history, what difference does 10,000 years usually make to anything?

You know, not a lot hardly any, but you think about how much earth has changed in the past 10,000 years due to intelligence. Once we reach the creation of machines with functional intelligence, exceeding that of any human, assuming that actually does happen, proponents argue that this super human artificial intelligence is just going to rapidly transform our environment.

The conditions of our lives and the capabilities of human civilization will be fundamentally transformed on a very huge scale. And they say so at the age of super intelligence is dawning and this is the singularity.

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