I first encountered this idea in Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near a few years ago (given as a gift by my good friend David Macaluso), and fell in love with the topic. The book discussed mind-digitization, human fusion with technology, nano technology, and raised interesting thoughts about genetics, evolution and death. I read this book at a time when I was also researching topics like quantum computing, teleportation and dabbling in the philosophy of human nature, evolution and consciousness. Needless to say, the book played a role in shaping many of my views today and how to look into the future.

But as with any new and fascinating topic, the novelty wore off and time brought perspective and a critical eye. And that’s where I have been for the past few years. Fascinated, but critical. Yet, I find myself defending the ideas of the Singularity quite vigorously. Not because I am fully convinced of their validity. But because the issues that they raise seem to be playing an ever increasing role into our lives.

In defending Singularity research, I find myself answering the following the points.

• The Singularity is not possible. The premise assumes that we will be able to understand everything about the human brain and human biology and the universe. History shows that whenever we think we have a holistic view of the universe, science reshuffles everything again.

Even if the singularity is not possible, it is an interesting topic to discuss for the questions that it raises about philosophy and technology. We are shaped by technology every day. Technological advances have spread across the world and have influenced every significant culture in the world. There have been few things throughout history that transcended and influenced all cultures of the world as rapidly as recent technological advancements have – take for example, the cellphone. If for no other reason, that seems to be a good reason to think long term of what we, as a species, seem to be building.

• Even if it’s possible, I disagree with the overall vision and don’t want to support it. (i.e it feels like a new religion with technology at it’s center)

There are many things I don’t like about the Singularity. It raises very uncomfortable questions about humans, nature and our place in the universe. One thing that it does not do is dictating the direction of where technology is taking us. We are all part of a system that is taking us in the direction that the Singularity is pointing us towards. It is our modern economy in finance and technology research that is powering this machine.

• Even if it’s correct, I don’t want to support these ideas. It might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We would have to change more than just wacky futurist ideas to prevent us going down this path. The institutions and research powering our world are based on the belief that “progress” must continue to sustain our way of living. If we are concerned of possibly “losing our humanity” then we need to be willing to give up many of our modern niceties – which is a topic that also interests me and enjoy entertaining. But I believe that it is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It a building of foresight. And it’s best to have thought about the complications of these issues before we have to deal with them directly.

Another book, which I just recently acquired – and recommend for pragmatic view of technogical change – is Francis Fuyikayama’s Our Post-Human Future, where he addresses specific political ramifications of the change we are experiencing.

While Moses was complicated man, and views on him vary a great deal, one thing that fascinated me about him was his use of social spaces. Here is a excerpt from a recent New York Times piece:

Perhaps the most powerful architectural expressions of that mission were the 23 public swimming pools with bathhouses Moses built in a five-year period beginning in the mid-1930s. A graceful colonnaded arcade shelters the shops and restaurants at Orchard Beach; the vivid geometric forms and intricate tile and brick work of the McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, celebrate the therapeutic value of communal exercise. For Moses, those projects were part of a broader strategy to reinforce middle-class neighborhoods and deter residents from fleeing to the suburbs.

Moses believed large landmark projects provided an anchor for communities to build around, like the McCarren Park Pool, in our very own Brooklyn, which at it’s peak held 6800 swimmers and served as a social hub.

But such projects could not work today. No one has the type of power Moses had during his reign, and communities are often now built with a Jane Jabobs-like philosophy in mind; that is, emphasis, on restoration, not on construction. But now technology is again changing the idea of a city, and the role of social spaces.

BusinessWeek recently ran a piece that looked at the transformation of the coffee shop into the modern age social office. Technology, especially wireless, is changing how people meet and work together. I wrote a post titled “Reading Buildings,” a few months ago, where I wondered what libraries would be like if accessing of information became even less centralized:

What I find bizarre about all this is that when you walk into a Barnes & Noble all the seats are taken, so it seems that “reading buildings” of some sort have some demand. Maybe it’s the social setting or maybe it’s the Starbucks. Actually, that could be the future of the library: a big empty building that people bring their electronic books to so that they can read and drink their coffee in a social setting… quietly.

While technology poses the potential problem of atomization, it does pose an interesting problem for organizers and builders of social spaces: what sort of emphasis should there be on technology? Does bringing in technology, especially wireless, defeat the purpose of common social spaces? Or is that the new goal? Many websites now encourage meeting offline, but what are they to do once they meet?

I would hope not, but I recently read Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book, The Anarchist in the Library, and I encountered a curious quote from Time Warner CEO, Richard Parsons:

This is a very profound moment historically. This isn’t just about a bunch of kids stealing music. It’s an assault on everything that constitutes cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve out intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And the corporations wont be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: the country will end up in a sort of Cultural Dark Age.

The idea that “artists will have no incentive to create” without corporations’ monetary promise goes against everything we know about the creative mind. Through out human history, self-expression has existed under the extreme conditions, for little or no gain; if anything, self-expression has flourished under the most unrewarding conditions. Now we that the Internet provides a medium to share information, people will create.

A fundamental misunderstanding in the relationship between media industry and the artist has produced an environment that has led the industry to believe that they are the reason for creative output, not just a beneficiary. However, the Internet is bringing the power of production and distribution to the user. And if production and distribution — which are where historically media companies made their money — can be handled by users, then what will be left for the media companies? With the surge in content, will media companies need to become filters and editors? If not, then what is there?

The current media model depends on controlling the flow of information, and as information becomes harder to control their power will diminish. On the internet we see strong communities building around very specific niches. As these communities get stronger, they will become harder to compete with. I believe that these niches will develop into the next generation media companies. These will be the companies that the large media companies will need to compete with.

The challenges that the current media companies face remind me of what happened to AT&T in the 1990s. After being broken up into “baby-bells”, AT&T was left providing only long distance. It was just a matter of time before the “baby-bells” began eating away at AT&T’s business from below, and there was little AT&T could do about it.

I think Richard Parsons’ quote shows a misunderstanding not only in the reason why people share information, but also in the direction of new technologies. For that reason I do not have much hope for the current media companies to adjust. Their only hope is to change and change represents their demise.

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

This is quite possibly one of the most exciting pieces of technology that i’ve seen in a long time. It allows you to put together a series of photos, and using data from the images alone, the application detects the location and perspective and automatically recreates a 3D model that you to navigate as if it were one large detailed model. What’s exciting about this technology is that one day it might be possible to run this with a large photo repository, such as flickr, where there are millions of photos of places all over the world. This also has the potential of allowing us to recreate massive 3-dimensional models of popular cities, with a variety of perspectives.

You can see a video demonstration of this technology at Throw Away Your TV.

I can also see this becoming very useful if it were used together with global mapping software. Microsoft has also being developing technology that allows you to navigate streets using a car’s perspective. The difficulty in building a system of this sort is that that it requires all the information to be manually collected by people and all the data needs to be front loaded at the start of the project. This has the long term problem of becoming out of date very quickly, and I imagine that it’d be difficult to update, since cities change erratically. For example, restaurants turn over quickly, so analyzing the changes and updating individual parts of cities will become extremely difficult. With this technology, maps are organically updated by people who casually take photographs in cities. As the city changes and new photographs of locations come in, the application will automatically update those parts of the city. This even has the potential creating a timeline of the city, where you’ll be able to go back in time and navigate cities as it was years before.

I think this technology will become even more powerful if cameras come with built in GPS systems, where metadata, such as the location in earth, is stored in right on the photograph. This will allow applications to more quickly create massive and complete 3D maps of the entire world.

Another part of this project which is quite promising the potential development of “smart cameras.” These cameras will be able to retrieve information about locations and things you photograph from the internet, immediately accessible after you take the photo.

Photosynth begins by processing an image and creating a point cloud that gives the image a unique identifier, a DNA-like profile that describes the features that have been recognized in the image.

Photosynth could connect your photographs into a seamless web of images and information, allowing you to browse a virtual universe of interconnected scenes that constantly evolves and changes over time.

But I see this as the beginnings of the technology that will eventually create complete 3D and navigateable map of earth. It was probably hard to imagine that we’d have something as advanced as Google Earth available for everyone with a computer; where anyone can learn the layout of any city in the world. And today it seems hard to imagine that we’d one day not only be able to learn the city layout, but also learn shops on the corners of cities we’ve never visited.

UPDATE:
digg it?

Transhumanism (sometimes abbreviated >H or H+) is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human physical and cognitive abilities and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disease and aging. Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Possible dangers, as well as benefits, of powerful new technologies that might radically change the conditions of human life are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.

There is something exciting in knowing that we are potentially part of a generation that might see major transitions from what we consider human. I doubt we will see anything that resembles a cyborg, as imagined by Hollywood, but as prosthetics, nano technology, and systems that can control limbs using thought alone get more advanced, our generation will see, and hopefully come to accept, humans that are for the most part dependent on mechanical technology to live.

I wonder about the new kinds of debates that might arise from this shift, if any. The first beneficiaries from this technology will be amputess and people who’ve been badly mauled by accidents or war. There will be little resistance there. But as the technology becomes more commonplace and “enhancements” to human abilities become as common as surgery, I wonder how much resistance there will be towards this technology.

The ongoing debate about stem cell research makes people choose between destroying potential life and preserving existing life. This is a is very difficult issue and it pins two very similar and passionate types of people against each other: those who value about life. But future debates about humans, and the technology that blurs the definition of a human, I think, will be even more complicated. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to preserve life? Our humanity?