Singularity Feedback Loop

In this short essay, I’ll examine the idea of the Singularity Feedback Loop. I’ll touch on Trans- and Posthumanism (which I’ll shorten to Transhumanism) but the focus will be this discipline’s dreaded and awaited messiah: the Technological Singularity.

Growth and Singularity

The idea of Singularity is simple: once men create a machine capable of producing a better machine than humans could, it then repeats this process indefinitely. At the birth of the computer, intelligence became a physical product - and thus it can be manufactured by machines. With the emergence of generative AI models we have seen working computer code written by computer code, however, these are still much less complex than the generating program. Based on the exponential growth of computers’ transistor counts (known as Moore’s law), it’s not too difficult to theorize something similar for AI.

But even Gordon Moore acknowledged the “red brick wall”, beyond which growth is impossible, due to physical limitations. And as anyone who has learned system theory knows, even feedback - no matter how explosive it is - is limited by the boundaries of the system it’s part of. Growth forever is possible, in the case of asymptotic growth, but this isn’t a continuously accelerating process. To think you can create something out of nothing or more out of less contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. You would have - even if not in the traditional sense - made a perpetuum mobile. And the thing that can create something out of nothing has always been a religious deity.

The Singularity is religious

And so the followers of this discipline created their own religions - extropianism, singulitarianism - they believe something that’s above the laws of the world as we know it. And from it, they seek to free mankind from its flesh prison, much like traditional religions. But unlike how the followers of other religions claim to have seen or heard their deity, or at least know someone who has; not a single person has made contact with the Singularity, as it doesn’t exist yet. And if you ask me, it’ll never transcend the realm of fantasy, as it’s impossible to create something from nothing.

The Singularity is the Philosopher’s Stone

Humans always had the desire to create the ultimate creation. Since the middle ages we have tried to make perpetual motion devices, and to this day charlatans are trying to sell them as “free energy devices”. A similar invention, that also made its way (conceptually) to Transhumanism is the philosopher’s stone, sought by the alchemists. This device would have provided its wielder eternal life (much like Transhumanists would like to artificially surpass death) and infinite wealth and prosperity (another goal of Transhumanism) by turning ordinary metals into gold.

Even though the alchemists never succeeded in their original goals (now we see why they didn’t even have a chance) their contribution to natural sciences is not negligible, and they had a comparable impact on the arts and literature. They never reached eternal life nor infinite wealth, but from their “failed” experiments came fragments of knowledge, on which modern science is built. So I keep smiling at the Transhumanists - as long as their methods are kept clean, I want them to carry out their experiments, and even though they won’t succeed, we can still be grateful for their “failed” attempts.