Annihilation From Within

An article in the Washington Times discusses a new book which states the obvious for those of us who have accepted the concept of technological Singularity, namely that superhuman intelligence is coming and when it arrives all existing human institutions and political structures will be obliterated.

From this article it doesn't appear the author uses the term "singularity" although that is exactly what he's discussing. The Singularity meme is beginning to replicate everywhere. It may even become the mainstream view before long, although whether that's a good or bad thing I can not say. Hopefully it will spur our leaders into considering the strategies and precautions suggested by groups like the Lifeboat Foundation. It could just as easily scare the hell out of them and turn them into Luddites.

Fred C. Ikle, one of America's foremost strategic thinkers, in his latest book "Annihilation from Within" (Columbia University Press), sees the ever-faster advances in brain science and computers merging to build superhuman intelligence systems. Brain-computer-interface (BCI) research projects are proliferating among universities in the G-8 major industrial countries and China. And when this quest succeeds, Mr. Ikle says it will trump the latest supercomputers (already up to 73 trillion operations per second) and the best human experts.

In a nanosecond of history, the evolution that took millions of years from primates to Homo sapiens will jump into the unknown. Homo connectus will relegate the obsolete nation-state and its dysfunctional institutions to artifacts of history, quaint but useless. This gigantic leap of history will "obliterate all previous notions about military power, pose a fundamental challenge to all religions, and eventually upend human civilization."