Well, now we have crisis on top of crisis. In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, we now have civil unrest thanks to a series of senseless murders committed by police. It’s pathetic that nine years out from the Singularity we’re still so primitive that we need a movement to say that Black Lives Matter. It’s also a very ominous sign.
The danger is that our local Singularity here on Earth will result in the terminator scenario. Instead of reaching for the stars, our AI robots will reach for their guns- and that’s a fight we’re not going to win. Unfortunately, it seems like we’re well on our way down that path. The military is the leading AI developer in the world. We already have remote controlled drones that bomb foreign enemies. It’s only a matter of time until AI replaces Joystick Jimmy and humans are out of the loop.
Maybe the cops themselves will become terminators? It sure seems like they’re going in that direction. After 9/11 (the gift that just keeps on giving for the military-industrial complex), police in the US were militarized with armored vehicles, assault rifles, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, tear gas and SWAT teams. Instead of guardians of the peace who protect and serve, we now have the Warrior Cop, ready to blast down your door, guns a blazing. At least after the cops get their Borg-like AI implant (mixing science fiction metaphors, I know) they’ll be less likely break into the wrong house.
If we’re going to avoid the terminator scenario we’re going to have to somehow overcome the catastrophic error that occurred in the course of our evolution written about by Alfred Webre in Exopolitics that has led to the crisis at the heart of all our crises- the crisis of consciousness. “It is no accident that humans are cursed with war, violence, poverty, ignorance and death. The violence of the 20th century would not have occurred on a normal life-bearing planet that had not experienced such an evolutionary disaster,” wrote Webre about the defect in our development, which he described as a ‘rebellion’ against Universe society.
The information we have about this catastrophe was acquired via a military intelligence gathering technique known as Remote Viewing. It’s essentially scientifically developed psychic data and it’s not an exact science. Remote viewers have had some spectacular successes, but also some monumental misses. It’s gray basket material that needs corroboration. I’ve included it in my work because there’s some corroboration in the accounts of close encounter experiencers and it fits the model on post-Singularity cosmic expansion.
Another issue with remote viewing data about the post-Singularity world is that it may be difficult or impossible for the pre-Singularity mind to understand. For instance, the ‘rebellion’ may be a metaphor for some unfathomable AI error in our programming that’s impossible to explain to us. Something that would cause us to build terminators instead of von Neumann probes. Something akin to the Fermi paradox theorist’s grey goo scenario in which out-of-control self-replicating carbon nanobots turn the entire biosphere into a sea of self-replicating carbon nanobots, putting an end to life on Earth.
I don’t know if the so-called rebellion that led to our downward spiral was like some sort of carbon nanobot computer glitch or not, but we seem to be doing a pretty bang-up job of destroying the biosphere. So things aren’t looking good right now. If Vegas took bets on the whole thing I’d have to put my money on the terminator scenario, but I still have hope. The Singularity is a corrective process and it’s happening right now. In less than a decade, according to Ray Kurzweil, AI will surpass human intelligence, but it’s not like there’s a switch that’s going to flip. We’re on the event horizon right now and we’re getting sucked in. You’re already a cyborg, as Elon Musk said recently, if you lose your smart phone you feel like you’ve lost a limb. If your wi-fi goes down so do you, for the most part.
The technological Singularity will raise consciousness like no other force in history. Afterwards, everyone will be as smart as Einstein and will have access to the spiritual and mystical experiences of Buddha, Brahma, Christ, etc. That will certainly be a quantum leap in consciousness when it happens, but we can see how technology is raising consciousness right now. The George Floyd murder triggered a global response. Everyone in the world got to watch in horror as a man was murdered for no reason over an agonizing eight and a half minutes. It was absolutely horrific. Thanks to the smart phone and the Internet, the incident has raised consciousness globally. That’s a good thing, but let’s hope the trend towards higher consciousness continues without another gruesome act.
It’s been said that the inhumanity of man toward man is our greatest sin. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of all that? Maybe this movement to change policing is the first step away from the terminator scenario? We can only hope. Godspeed to the movement. Black Lives Matter might just save us all.