Survivors from Earth

Someday you may answer a knock at the door to find waiting there a nice man from the Government who will offer you a choice. In reality, the nice man would be no man at all, but an android or a cyborg, and the choice you will be asked to make will involve, at the very least, your spiritual death. You see, the Government will have decided that it no longer needs citizens.

The mistake you made? Was it not voting for that anti-technology candidate ten years ago? Watching too much Star Trek? Believing in the false religion called Science?

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Surely this is a science fiction. Right? Right?

In "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", Vernor Vinge of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at San Diego State University predicts that humans could be supplanted by superhuman intelligence of their own creation within thirty years. The paper saw daylight at a symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in March of 1993. At that time it may have seemed a wild fantasy, even reckless technophobia. But that was before the human genome had been unraveled and cloning had been demonstrated, before the gigaflop, massively parallel computing and neural networks became commonplace.

That which, in the fifties, we thought might happen in a million years some, like Vinge, think will happen within the twenty-first century. Specifically, one of several outcomes:

(1) A super-humanly intelligent machine, one which can invent even more intelligent machines, will initiate a technological explosion that we will not be able to control. This suddenness, a jump from here to there without transition, is what Vinge thinks it is fair to call a singularity, The Singularity. The major changes would be over in a matter of hours.

(2) Computer networks "awaken" overnight, perhaps incorporating human minds in the matrix.

(3) Computer/human interfaces, implants perhaps, create a man/machine hybrid, a cybernetic organism with superhuman qualities, a Cyborg, Borg (if you're a Trekker).

(4) Genetic engineering provides a way to produce a superhuman intellect biologically.

Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its chief scientist, sees the need to "rein in" certain technologies in order to keep them out of the hands of "crazy people". In particular, he is afraid of nanotechnology, genetic engineering and robotics. Probable developments in these areas, he argues, would give individuals the means to make anything they can imagine. What if they imagine new diseases they can build on their home computers?

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