Will Technology Help Us Transcend the Human Condition?

Michael Hauskeller & Kyle McNease

Transcendence used to be the end of a spiritual quest and endeavour. Not anymore. Today we are

more likely to believe that if anything can help us transcend the human condition it is not God or

some kind of religious communion, but science and technology. Confidence is high that, if we do

things right, and boldly and without fear embrace the new opportunities that technological

progress grants us, we will soon be able to accomplish things that no human has ever done, or

even imagined doing, before. With luck, we will be unimaginably smart and powerful, and

virtually immortal, all thanks to a development that seems unstoppable and that has already

surpassed all reasonable expectations.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we used maps and atlases to find our way around.

Occasionally we even had to stop and ask someone not named Siri or Cortana if we were indeed

on the correct route. Today, our cars are navigated by satellites that triangulate our location in

real time while circling the earth at thousands of miles per hour, and self-driving cars for

everyone are just around the corner. Soon we may not even need cars anymore. Why go

somewhere if technology can bring the world to us? Already we are in a position to do most of

what we have to or want to do from home: get an education, work, do our shopping, our banking,

our communication, all thanks to the internet, which 30 years ago did not exist and is now, to

many of us, indispensable. Those who are coming of age today find it difficult to imagine a

world without it. Currently, there are over 3.2 billion people connected to the World Wide Web,

2 billion of which live in developing countries. Most of them connect to the Web via

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increasingly versatile and powerful mobile devices few people would have thought possible a

couple of generations ago. Soon we may be able to dispense even with mobile devices and do all

of it in our bio-upgraded heads. In terms of the technology we are using every day without a

second thought, the world has changed dramatically, and it continues to do so. Computation is

now nearly ubiquitous, people seem constantly attached to their cellular phones, iPads, and

laptops, enthusiastically endorsing their own progressive cyborgization. And connectivity does

not stop at the level of human beings: even our household objects and devices are connected to

the internet and communicate with each other, using their own secret language and taking care of

things largely without the need for human intervention and control. The world we have built for

ourselves thrives on a steady diet of zeroes and ones that have now become our co-creators,

continuing the world-building in often unexpected ways.

Meanwhile, the distinction between what is real and what only appears to be so is becoming

blurry and increasingly irrelevant. Just think of the advances in the videogame industry over the

past few decades, with its obvious growth in complexity and photorealism. Today’s games are

media rich and while not quite at the level of reality, they serve as an early harbinger of what we

can expect from the future. Some games are already realistic enough that they are used to help

treat military personnel with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Even if there is not a

continued acceleration in this field, with even minimal gains over time, it is likely that such

games will eventually become indistinguishable from actual reality. Perhaps they already are:

there have been discussions among philosophers about the possibility that we might actually be

living in a computer simulation. Are we perhaps just brains on a chip? If we were, would we

know it? Even if we are not, can we be sure that something like this, a complete digitalization of

our existence, is not on the horizon?

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It is commonly thought (though by no means uncontested) that approximately 13.7 billion years

ago our universe was thrust into existence through an initial singularity, widely known as the

“Big Bang.” Some futurologists think that we will very soon, in a few decades, face another, this

time technological singularity, which is the point at which machine intelligence has developed to

such an extent that all bets are off and literally anything might happen. This is usually regarded

as a good thing. Rather optimistically, the prediction that anything can happen is understood in

the sense that we will be able to do anything we like to do, and be anything we like to be. For its

prophets, the singularity promises our salvation and elevation to something completely different

and unimaginably grandiose, something that is no longer limited and constrained by its

association with a particular (or any) biological body, or even by that pesky, stubbornly

obstructionist thing we call ‘reality’. The physical and the virtual will merge, so that human

empowerment will be complete.

Unfortunately, however, this may all be nothing but wishful thinking. The expected post-

singularity world, if it will ever arrive, is for us in fact just as mysterious and unimaginable as the

world before the Big Bang, and we have no good reason to expect anything in particular to

happen post-singularity. Just as we cannot imagine how there can have ever been a time when

nothing existed, not even time, we cannot imagine how things will be like when everything is, as

the term singularity suggests, radically different from everything we have ever known. If we

want to take the idea of the technological singularity seriously, there is only one thing we can be

certain of: that we do not have the slightest idea what will happen when it comes. Perhaps we

will indeed merge with machines and then conquer the world much more thoroughly than we

have so far been able to, becoming masters of the universe, immortal and able to know and

understand everything there is to know and understand. But it is equally possible that our now

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super-intelligent machines take over and that we then vanish completely from the face of the

earth or be enslaved by our machine overlords, or something else entirely. There are a myriad of

different possibilities. At the extreme ends of the spectrum, the singularity holds the promise of

immeasurable gains, but also threatens us with annihilation, and we cannot even say which of

these two outcomes is more likely because in order to assess probabilities we need to be able to

make use of observed data and to rely on some fixed parameters, which in this case we cannot

do, because the post-singularity world is supposed to be so radically different from the pre-

singularity world that we cannot assume any continuity whatsoever between the before and the

after. Our uncertainty regarding the post-singularity future is complete. That future is a perfect

blank, which, just like death, gives away nothing and into which we can therefore project

anything we like: the best of things and the worst of things.

But how certain can we really be that such a radical change, whatever it may entail, will come

over us in the foreseeable future? Those who are confident that some kind of technological

singularity is going to hit us very soon, like most prominently the American inventor and

computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, generally base their predictions on some version of a presumed

“law of accelerating returns”, according to which technological development progresses not

linearly, but exponentially. This means that technological progress is not only going to continue,

it will also continue to accelerate. We will keep making scientific discoveries, developing more

and more sophisticated gadgets and devices, and building faster and more powerful computers,

and we will do all this at an ever increasing speed. In other words, the rate of acceleration itself

will continue to accelerate.

Believing in such a law does not seem unreasonable. We have, after all, witnessed such

accelerations in the recent past. The human genome project for instance took only thirteen years

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to complete, even though it was originally anticipated to take a minimum of 100 years. And even

that seemed a very optimistic estimate when after the first year of constant transcribing scientists

had only completed one ten-thousandth of the genome. Yet due in large part to the rapid

expansion of applicable technologies a century’s worth of work was completed in slightly more

than a decade. What initial predictions failed to take into account is the exponential trajectory of

technological development. They were instead based on what Kurzweil calls an “intuitive linear”

model of history, which means that people assumed, as we all tend to do, that things will

continue to develop at the same speed as they have in the past. Yet this is a mistake. Advances in

technology open up new avenues of research and design, which reciprocally lead to future

advances, and so on, faster and faster. Recent developments in information technologies and

algorithmic systems have demonstrated that what only yesterday experts thought impossible has

become possible today. Only last year, in 2016, DeepMind’s AI-powered AlphaGo computer

program defeated Lee Sedol, the eighteen time world champion of Go. Experts had not

anticipated this happening for at least another decade. After losing only one game to Sedol, the

AlphaGo team continued to update the program and went on to beat a team of five other Go

champions - this time losing no games. To ignore the exponential potential inherent in

technological development is to miss the importance of predictions that suggest the century we

are living in will experience greater changes than occurred during the ascendancy and roughly

40,000 year rule of human life. At this moment, we are in the midst of a double-exponential

when both computer hardware and software (engineering talent) are working synergistically to

create systems that are in some ways more intelligent than humans. As is evidenced by

DeepMind’s AI demonstrations, advancements in non-biological systems can occur at orders of

magnitude beyond human limitations and on small time-scales.

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What is remarkable about the AlphaGo program is that it took a relatively short amount of time

to go from no experience with one of the world’s most complex strategy games to beating one of

the legends of that game to beating every human it faced without ever losing. Our brains, which

are only slightly different from those of our simian ancestors, allow us to do quite remarkable

things. We can run counterfactuals, simulate possible outcomes and adjust our plans accordingly.

Even though this ability now allows us to progress much faster than we would by natural

selection alone, by utilizing utility functions for self-optimization AI systems may end up

producing even better systems and thereby triggering an intelligence explosion. If we generalize

the AlphaGo scenario, once we have a machine at human-level-intelligence, we should expect

that it won’t take that machine long to achieve greater-than-human intelligence.

Such a scenario has been fictionally explored in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, whose female

protagonist is an artificially intelligent operating system named Samantha. When Theodore, a

bereft author of love letters, first installs Samantha on his computer, she is new to the

experiential world and is eager to learn everything she can through the unique relationship she is

developing with her user. Within a very short period of time, Samantha transcends the

boundaries of human consciousness and materiality, soon carrying on thousands of conversations

simultaneously and experiencing a hyper-intelligent life of the mind that transforms the split

seconds between Theodore’s words into a near-infinite chasm. Even though Her stretches our

credulity, it does so while holding almost all other variables constant except for the artificially

intelligent operating system. The future that we are engineering ourselves towards leaves only

one variable intact: a legacy of overcoming our limitations.

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Yet in truth the rapidity of technological change affects more than just one dimension of our

reality. It ripples out and impacts our senses, often compressing or telescoping time. Issues that

humanity has thought about for millennia, things that might have taken millennia to occur, now

happen in a vanishingly small amount of time. This compression of time presents a real

challenge to the imagination and makes it almost impossible to reliably predict what will come

next, let alone how the world will look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years. The technological

singularity is more than just a useful figure of speech, more than just a fitting metaphor, although

it is that too. The idea of an approaching technological singularity is an expression and a symbol

of our growing inability to keep pace with the machines we create and to fully comprehend what

is going on. But it is also real in the sense that it is already affecting us as that which we are

rushing towards, because even if it never occurs, things will, while we are approaching it,

gradually become more and more incomprehensible to us, as our categories of sense-making first

struggle and then eventually break down under increasingly abnormal conditions.

Then again, none of this may actually come to pass. Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns”

may prove not to be a law at all. Oddly enough, the “intuitive linear model” of technological

development is commonly rejected on the grounds that it relies on the false assumption that most

likely tomorrow will be very much like today so that if things have progressed at a certain speed

in the past they will continue to do so in future. In contrast, the exponential model seems to allow

for things to be different, by predicting that technological progress will be a lot faster in the

future than it has been so far. Yet when people appeal to the exponential model of technological

improvement as the status quo, the logic of the argument is in fact very similar to the intuitive

linear view. It is just the outcome that is different. The exponential view of technological

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development also takes it as a given that tomorrow will be much like today in that things will

continue to progress exponentially. Yet clearly we cannot know whether that will actually be the

case. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. If it does, then technology may well help us transcend

the human condition, as so many seem to have a keen desire to. Or it may not. If it does, it may

do so in ways we did not expect. Anything is possible, remember? We will just have to wait and

see what happens.