A person named "Adam" commented on a recent blog-post of mine regarding the Singularity not happening in the year 2013. Adam thought my views were religious. Sadly Adam's logical fallacy is common amongst Singularity criticasters.
The name "Adam" is a
good starting point for explaining Adam's error because "Adam" has a religious resonance, but merely
having a name such as Adam, or Eve, does not mean you are religious. Not
everyone with the name Adam is the first human created by God. The
point is, dissimilar things can share attributes but sharing
attributes doesn't mean disparate things are similar-identical.
An
example of shared factors regarding disparate things not entailing similarity is gasoline and water, which are both liquids but
it isn't refreshing to drink gasoline when you are thirsty.
A
better example than gasoline and water is influenza and hay-fever, which
can both cause you to sneeze but it doesn't mean everyone who sneezes
has flu or hay-fever. Pepper can also cause people to sneeze. If
someone sneezed after inhaling pepper it would be wrong to say they had
flu.
Some medical procedures, for some people, can seem
miraculous, and are described in such manner, but this does not mean the
hypothetical wondrous medical procedure is actually a miracle. Science
has the ability to make our lives considerably better. God, according
to religious people, can also make our lives considerably better, but
this does not mean everything that makes our lives better is the work of
God, science is not God.
If science progresses to a level of
extreme sophistication where all diseases can be cured, some people
could mistakenly think God has granted us eternal life but scientific
life-extension is actually the application of scientific and technological
knowledge, it is not the work of God, it is not religious.
Immortality
does have a resonance with God's afterlife in heaven, but similar to
how the name Adam does not mean every "Adam" is God's first human,
immortality via science is not a miracle or religious.
Arthur C Clarke has stated any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I would add a qualifier by stating: only if you are
unaware of science. Adam's problem is that he is unaware of
science, he is are unaware of the rate of progress thus he cannot imagine
how science and technology will progress over the next 30 years, thus
my explanations regarding technology in the year 2045 seem like miracles
or magic to Adam.
Try to imagine how a human from 2,000
years ago would have reacted to electric lights, cars, iPhones,
computers, the Internet, elevators, spaceships, 3D-printing,
heart-transplants, stem-cell regrowth of organs, mechanical hearts, and
all the other marvellous inventions in the year 2013. They would
probably think we are devils, Gods, or wizards; they would fail to
comprehend how it is merely the application of science.
Technological
acceleration is difficult to grasp therefore instead of the year 2045
try to imagine how our world will have changed in the year 22045, that's
an extra twenty thousand years. Think about how much humans have
achieved during the past 1000 years and think about how a large part of
the achievement only happened during the past 150 years. Why did the
majority of achievements happen only in the last 150 years? What were
humans waiting for? The answer is simple, knowledge is initially
difficult to acquire during the early stages of learning but when
sufficient knowledge is gathered the pace of learning accelerates, this
is why electric light bulbs were only being first installed in homes in the early 1880s, and it is why the first successful telephone transmission of speech only happened in 1876. Now try to realise how our rate of progress is accelerating.
I would
be, or the Singularity would be, religious if I was saying: "God will
tell us how to make super-efficient 3D-printers with ultra-powerful
on-board AI."
There is however no praying, magic, and no God regarding the
Singularity, it is purely about very advanced science and technology, which arises from humans diligently learning, experimenting, and inventing. The world will be made a better place via scientific and technological
progress, massive breakthroughs. Looking at the
evidence regarding technological progress it is clear we will see around 20,000 years of progress this century based on the 2001 rate of progress.
Ironically
people sometimes think the Singularity is religious, it is ironic
because the religious taint upon civilization has hindered the ability
of people to think logically, thus logic is deemed religious. The
Singularity, due the scientific focus, is actually the opposite of
religion, the Singularity is very logical, but the legacy of religion is
that people often don't know how think logically thus we have logical fallacies where people make wild assumptions, they see a very loose similarity and
assume identicalness, it is the error of failing to look at facts, a
failure to ask questions, thus people assume the world is this or that
then they close their minds to the truth.
