The Singularity and Socialism

The rate at which technological progress accelerates has become a subject matter of both scientific investigations and philosophical thoughts. The second half of the 20 th century was dominated by technological innovations informed by scientific thoughts-thanks to Artificial Intelligence. The course of the first quarter of the 21 st century is mostly marked by an ever-increasing technological progress affecting almost all dimensions of human life. Such a progress raises a number of questions on what the future of both human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence will look like. Hypothetically, the growth of technological advancement is uninterruptedly and exponentially leading to a time "Technological Singularity." To this hypothesis, both scientific and philosophical approaches approve the possibility that humans might live in a world they design with Artificial Intelligence; and they are all teleonomic-based mechanical explanations of intelligence. This possibility is confirmed by a retrospective consideration of how Artificial Intelligence has revolutionised the social world. This article argues that the technological singularity hypothesis needs not only mechanical explanations but also teleological explanations if the future of humanity depends upon Artificial Intelligence.

Zenodo, 2024

What if you had to teach a child to play chess? At first, you're the one being taught, and then the child learns to do it better than you. Now just imagine if it’s artificial intelligence (AI) learning to make itself better at something that we’ve never thought could be possible, and that’s chess. This self-improvement happens at an exponential rate, potentially leading to what has been termed the "technological singularity" - a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence so dramatically that it fundamentally transforms civilization.

2010

Abstract This paper reviews different definitions and models of technological singularity. The models range from conceptual sketches to detailled endogenous growth models, as well as attempts to fit empirical data to quantitative models. Such models are useful for examining the dynamics of the world-system and possible types of future crisis points where fundamental transitions are likely to occur. Current models suggest that, generically, even small increasing returns tends to produce radical growth.

Why Vernor Vinge’s 1993 essay “What is the Singularity?” seems too compelling to be believable.

Wikipedia [2] defines it as a Technological Singularity (TS). Technological singularity is a hypothetical moment in the future when technological development becomes fundamentally uncontrollable and irreversible, which generates radical changes in the nature of human civilization. Similar or similar definitions exist in other literature.

2012

"Contemporary 'Singularity' thinking has its origins in Vernor Vinge’s influential proposal of the emergence of greater-than-human artificial intelligence (AI) as an ‘event horizon’ in human history. This notion finds its technological basis in the exponential development of information technology during the 20th century, as expressed in 'Moore’s Law'. However, the pace of development of information technologies is uncertain, and the predictions for the date of emergence of a 'Singularity' are pushing it farther into the future. An analogy can be established with religious eschatology and its trademark anxiety for a form of Rapture. 'Singularity' thinking's ancestry can be traced back to the utopian thinking of Campanella, as well as positivistic utopianism, the works of eschatological thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, and the speculative writings of computer scientists. More recently, it has become a common trope in speculative fiction. This heritage is acknowledged in the writings of V. Vinge, which have laid the conditions for the rise of a 'technological singularity'. As an heir to the utopian tradition, 'singularitarianism' espouses a theory of human history as progress towards better forms of existence. Scientific and technological development would be destined to accelerate humankind into a post-human condition, with the creation of artificial intelligence as the milestone signalling the beginning of that new era. The acceleration thesis of ‘singularitarianism’ and its inherent uncertainty have given rise to a variety of positions, ranging from the enthusiastic (as, for example, N. Bostrom, R. Kurzweil, or H. Moravec), to the sceptic (including B. Joy, J. Lanier, R. Penrose). Rarely have they been the object of a sustained philosophical approach (an exception would be D. Chalmers’ “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”). The 'Singularity' scenario integrates images, metaphors, notions, and hopes also present in cyberculture: the central element of technology, its interfaces with humans, hybridization, mind-body dualism, the moral nature of AI, and the coexistence between humanity and AI. As a result, this paper addresses a needed critical characterization of 'Singularity' thinking, exploring some"

In this paper I seek to shed light on the notion of a ''technological singularity''.