Doomsday

I’ve been long interested in how we construct reality, but I’ve mostly thought of it in psychological or technical (not technological terms) –  like how we project a persona or how images or words in film or literature create meaning.  Obviously technology has or will soon have the ability to create possibilities of experiences that were not previously available.  Here, I use  the word “experience” as opposed to “reality.” But the question of what is reality is at the base of much of what we have read for this week.  Further, I find it most interesting to cast this question of reality into apocalyptic terms.

Quinby calls the social domination allowed by technology “technopression” and argues that it presents and seeks to control power, truth and morality in an apocalyptic mode.  Technology allows for the dream of transcendence of human limitations,  a millennialist dream she says.  Indeed, the idea of transcendence of human form and constraints squares well with ideas in BOR about the impurities of flesh and the promise of freedom from sin once the end arrives.  It’s also the 144,000 undefiled by sex who will be saved.  But stepping aside from this obvious reference, technopression’s problems are more insidious.  Programmed perfection as Quinby calls it, or Vinge’s “utraintelligent machine,” both seek to change a current reality into a new, sanitized one.

With the advent of the Singularity, which Vinge casts as an Apocalyptic event , will come a change in time or nature of intelligence.  He argues that more detailed knowledge of science takes away from the fantasy of what is possible.  Vinge also points out that truly productive work will become the “domain of steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.”  IA creates cynical elite, which corresponds to an apocalyptic mode of electism, where only a select few are worthy of redemption.  But Vinge also points out that we are the initiators of the inevitable.  Thus, the Singularity raises issue about free will and determinism.

In Vinge’s post-Singularity world, pieces of ego can be merged/copied and “size of self awareness can grow or shrink to fit nature of problems under consideration.”  The SQUID device promises exactly this new reality, one which Quinby sees as having an alienating effect.