Article on ideas by which the world will be ended
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We are fascinated by speculation about the end of the world, I think, because it paradoxically makes us feel safe. Global destruction is so grand, so overdramatic, that it doesn’t feel connected to our lives the way more immediate worries like cancer or Alzheimer’s are. We can dabble in morbid fantasies about our demise while believing that we won’t be the ones fated to see them realized. Then again, lots of people bet that they wouldn’t be the ones left holding overpriced Florida homes when the real estate market collapsed. We might lose this bet as well.
30 INFORMATION OVERLOAD Futurist Ray Kurzweil talks expansively about the coming “singularity,” a moment when human and machine intelligence become indistinguishable and the pace of progress accelerates unimaginably. If minds could be transferred to computers, Kurzweil argues, death would become meaningless. And if humans merged with their machines, the world as we know it would no longer exist. In the evolutionary sense, this could represent the emergence of a new species—Homo singularity?—that would be mostly technology driven. (And don’t ask what happens if the power fails.) Linguist Stephen Pinker dismisses this whole vision, likening it to the old predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered cars. But Kurzweil claims he can provide the date when the singularity will arrive: 2045, just in time for DISCOVER’s 65th anniversary. ODDS: indeterminate, but likely—human-machine merging is starting already.