However, if you look at that quote that postulates events after the singularity are “as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm”, we can imagine that that for post-singularity humans the idea of personal material wealth will most probably seem absurd and pointless – where is the payoff of accumulating vast piles of stuff, when all stuff is free? The numbers stored electronically in bank accounts will be as meaningless as an out-dated currency that is no longer in circulation.

It won’t be the case that wealth, resources and political power are redistributed equally – the concepts will simply cease to have any relevant meaning to our species.

There are definitely reasons to believe that certain people or organisations are hampering technological progress, when that progress will lead to their wallets getting lighter. This is normal, and will probably hamper progress, but I believe The Singularity is inevitable, whether we actively seek it out or whether it happens naturally.

A big part (perhaps the biggest and most difficult part) of achieving The Singularity is not technological superiority – that will arrive inevitably. The major challenge is cultural maturity: being able to accept the new direction of humanity, and the possibility of subsuming one’s identity beneath that of the civilization as a whole. And not all will go quietly. I imagine wars and cultural divides like we’ve never seen, splitting humanity into two or more distinct species (those who accept nanotech implants in their brains and the accelerated consciousness it provides, and those who hang on to archaic morals and stigmas about technology – just like today we still have Bush supporters). This theme occurs in a lot of sci-fi that deals with a post- or near-singularity humanity, probably because it seams like the most logical way for us to go.

Certainly we won’t all suddenly decide to upload ourselves into The Matrix and be happy about it, but as our planet dies it will become impractical to maintain our consciousnesses purely in a physical analogue form, and we will eventually have to allow our minds to expand into a more hospitable substrate than neurons and synapses.

Do you not think that there will be people who will purposefully sabotage things like this because it won’t benefit them becoming normal?

Sure once it happens there will be no need for ambition, but go to Donald Trump tomorrow and ask him if he would like to relegated to being just as good as everyone else, I don’t think he would dig it very much.

There are a lot of us that would love for this kind of thing to happen, but there are also just as many people that don’t want it to happen and have much more power than we do to influence things.

Summary: People are cunts

Thoughts?