JASON SILVA: We're all gonna be supermen living inside of Matrix-like environments, but it's
not gonna be a prison, it's gonna be our ultimate liberation.
We will be the gods that we have invented.
JASON SILVA: I'm really a big fan of Ray Kurzweil and his "singularity".
The term "singularity", and there have been several by some accounts, is a term derived
from physics to describe what happens when you go through a black hole.
When you go through a black hole in physics, the laws of physics as we know them no longer
apply.
You know, time travel...all these things that supposedly could happen, right.
It's a metaphor that's been borrowed to describe when we...when the equivalent happens in the
human-machine civilization.
So, one singularity was the invention of language.
Kevin Kelly says that that singularity and what happened afterwards, the world after
language would have been inconcievable, impossibly inconcievable to those standing on the other
side of that line.
I mean, try to tell the non-speaking ape about a Shakespearian metaphor and that's the level
of transformation we're talking about.
JASON SILVA: So this next singularity empowered by the convergence of exponentially, uh, emerging
technologies like biotechnology which is manipulating the information processes of biology, nanotechnology,
which is to manipulate matter at the level of the atom and insert computation into matter,
and A.I., which is to create non-biological intelligence that's not subject to the limitation
of the human brain, the converging forces of those three things are sending us towards
what seems to be another singularity as big in scale as the invention of language was.
You see, information technology is progressing so rapidly and it's bootstrapping on it's
own complexity in an expotential way.
It's the reason that there's a billion times more computation in our smart phones today
than there were in 60 million dollar super-computers that were half a building 40 years ago.
Computation is gonna be occuring on scales that can be fit inside our bodies.
I mean we're talking about molecular sized computers writing software for our minds and
bodies.
The confluence of all of these things coming together over the next 25-30 years is gonna
be trillions of times more advanced than anything that we can conjure up right now.
And so we have achieved more change in the last 100 years than in last billion years
thus far.
So when you look at what's coming, he says, we should call that a singularity because
it's an appropriate metaphor to describe what happens when you go through a black hole and
it's like...we don't know what's gonna happen after that.
We just know that things are gonna get really weird.
JASON SILVA: Once we create a substrate that can house human level intelligence or greater
than human level intelligence, then we can transfer our consciousness over.
But that provides like a kind of a paradox because how do you transfer your consciousness
over there?
What is left over here?
Is it gonna be two yous?
But Kurtzweil has an interesting answer.
He says that's not what's gonna happen.
What's gonna happen is that we're gonna replace more and more of our biological components
with non-biological components.
So it's gonna be lots of baby steps.
So you know, at first, it'll be like, ok we got this new digital neocortex and we're gonna
insert it and it's gonna merge with your biological neocortex and then we have like this new synthetic
brain stem, you know.
That's what we'll do.
So eventually more and more of us will be non-biological until all of us is non-biological
and that essentially will achieve the same effect.
People say, oh this is unnatural, the singularity is us playing God and he's like wait a minute,
wait a minute.
People used to be really scared of writing when it was first invented, you know.
Wasn't it Socrates who said if we write things down our brains will atrophy.
I mean when you look...when you try to explain a telephone to our ancestors, man, it sounds
like witchcraft.
It sounds heretical.
Oh, you speak words into it and it converts your voice into little things that fly through
the air and reach the other side of the planet and reconstructs your mind on the other end
so people can talk to you.
I mean, the technologies we take for granted today are impossibly complex.
I mean people already are getting like synthetic hips, you know, or hip replacement or titanium
knees or whatever.
So eventually, when we can create replacements that are as complex as parts of the brain,
we'll replace those parts.
But it's not gonna be a prison, it's gonna be our ultimate liberation.
Imagine radically upgrading our intelligence.
Imagine billions of times more creativity.
That's what's at stake.
Freedom.
Freedom from every concievable limitation.