LifeFuel Ray Kurzweil's singularity is the most legit cope around in the 21st century.

[Fontaine]

For youngcels who don't know it yet, Ray Kurzweil is a famous inventor who infamously proposed the concept that the "singularity is near". The singularity is an hypothetical point in history where machine intelligence and high technology progress faster than our capacity to assimilate them. Many famous scientists and technologists had foreseen such an event before Kurzweil.

He was widely mocked as a crackpot, yet all his predictions so far have come true - that is, if you add 10 years to them. Kurzweil suffers from a personal bias where he mildly underestimates the time necessary for progress to happen, perhaps due to his old age and fear of death. Other than that, he's pretty reliable and recent events have tended to lend credence to him. Google's victory in Go was not expected by the majority of academic AI researchers.

He published two major books worth reading and even buying, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.

These readings can, and should be completed with James Barrat's Our Final Invention, and Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence.

Even if the chronological predictions are erroneous, there's ample evidence that the singularity, despite all its oddness, will indeed happen one day. If you're not here anymore to see it, you can at least take comfort, dying on your hospital bed, in the notion that the human species as we know it lives its last days.

Even if the whole theory is completely bonkers, it is psychologically very adaptive to believe in it. It's a great substitute to religion for nerdy atheists. We should consider ourselves very lucky to have this.

 

[Asianmanletcel]

it's a great cope for those who want to have AI waifu bots or AI destroying this world

 

[Fontaine]

it's a great cope for those who want to have AI waifu bots or AI destroying this world

It is a great cope in general because it proposes a teleology ("how will history end") and an apocalypse ("when will history end") from a materialistic and atheistic standpoint.

Kurzweil managed to create the first atheistic religion with both of these features. He will likely go down in history as a genial Prophet in the likeness of Abraham.

Communism, fascism and Nazism were all atheistic religions but had no real teleology, or apocalypse, making them imperfect.

A teleology and an apocalypse are necessary to reap the full psychological benefits of religion.

 

[blackcel]

While fancy stuff like Amazon's Alexa and self driving cars are neat and all, AI is nowhere near general enough to really be called intelligent, and I am not sure it will ever get to the point where it can be intellegent and help us reach the singularity. Machine learning is a much better term for what we have today as these are purpose built machines that can adapt to new data as time progresses, a.k.a. learning. The only way for the singularity to occur is for machines to be able to have the ability to invent new technology, which simply isn't possible with the algorithms available to us today. All machine learning algorithms require input from a human in some way or for. Either a human has to tell it what to learn, or a human has to make sense out of what the machine learned.

If the singularity ever comes, it won't be a gradual thing. Someone will drop some absolutely amazing tech on us, causing the world to change nearly overnight.

 

[ColdLightOfDay]

Sounds very interesting, will definitely check this out. Is this the source of your transhuman mindset?

 

[Fontaine]

Sounds very interesting, will definitely check this out. Is this the source of your transhuman mindset?

Yes, along with many other philosophers (I am very eclectic and don't care about the politics of philosophers):

- Dr William Pierce, of neo-Nazi fame. The very author of the extremely crude "Turner Diaries" was also an intelligent and dedicated opponent to Christianity, and devoted part of his intellectual career to finding a replacement to this religion. He had dubbed it "cosmotheism"; it was a pre-transhumanism.

- The Unabomber, whose manifesto against technology merely proved to me that technology was both extremely powerful and unstoppable.

- Mitchell Heisman, Jewish philosopher who published a lengthy manifesto as a suicide note, in which he expanded on the themes of nihilism and atheism, and proposed the singularity as a way out.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and paleontologist who tried to reconcile Christianity with his modernist views (a doomed endeavor: there will never be reconciliation between transhumanism and Christianity, for a multitude of important reasons), and whose books contain an early description of what a singularity could be.

Many more I forget. These were my main influences, with Kurzweil undeniably at the top.

Ever since the age of 12, I had labored to find replacements to my atheism, atheism that I found extremely unsatisfying psychologically (to this day I am still convinced atheism is merely a poison pill). I thought I had found an acceptable substitute in white nationalism until I realized the many flaws of this pseudoreligion. I went through periods of bleak despair until I finally found the trail of transhumanism and singularitarianism, ironically shown by a major figure of the WN movement. The union of Jewish thought and Nazi thought can do wonders, who knew.