Remember way back when after my silent retreat the big question was how we will bring humanity forward as technology continues to progress?  Remember when I mentioned the Singularity movement?  Humans + machines = superintelligence?

TIME Magazine’s cover story this week is on Singularity if you have any desire to have the bejesus scared out of you.  I haven’t read the whole mag but intend to buy it today and learn more.  I try to be positive about all this.  I try to think “it will bring the whole planet together, peace will reign, illness will cease to exist, etc etc.”  Scares the hell out of me nevertheless.  The same disturbing questions remain.  Oh the humanity!  Will there be emotion?  Will there be love?  How will art manifest itself?  What will happen to the poor, the ignorant?  Will there be a super race?  Will choices be made not on ethics but on utility?  Will machines take over the world?

Maybe everything will just be very cool, pollution will end, the Earth will return to it’s Garden of Eden state, but with us still living on it, served by the machines (how will they be powered without continuing to destroy the Earth?  Oh well, the machines’ll figure it out).   Maybe it will just take us to another planet, now that would be awesome.  Maybe they will run silently, maybe music will be piped right into our ears, maybe noise pollution will end.  Maybe we will have lights implanted in our foreheads so that we don’t need major lighting in our homes at night, maybe light pollution will end.

Such a Pollyanna.  I hope it all ends well.  Let’s see, they are talking 2045.  I’ll be 91.  I remember when I was a kid we’d sit around and talk about how old we’d be in the year 2000.  46.  Whoa.  Really old, we thought.  Lucky to be alive in the year 2000.

I just hope that at age 91 they haven’t figured out how to keep me alive forever with my intelligence intact.  I couldn’t take much more of this.  Even an eternity of beauty too beautiful to comprehend would get to be too much after awhile, I would think.   I will want out of this machine eventually, whether it be plain ol’ me or computer enhanced.  Take me to your leader out in the universe, dude.