Kurzweil affirms that the post-singularity world will still be a human world, although transcending its biological roots; that the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a humane-machine civilization.The basics for ultimately saturating the entire universe with our intelligence is that computation will ultimately drive everything that is important, that the merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence is going to create something bigger than itself, and that will be accomplished not only by enhancing our personal intelligence with our own machine-intelligence appendices, but also, and mainly, by connecting all available intelligence, as in a universal wide web.
And those machine-intelligence enhancements will be far greater (many orders of magnitude greater) than our original biological intelligence. The participation of machine-intelligence in total intelligence will make biological-intelligence participation in it look like a tiny drop in a humongous sea of water.
That brings in the question of why bother with intelligence of biological origin… but that is not the point I want to get to (I am convinced that when we reach such a development biological intelligence will not even participate in the equation).
Let’s accept that even in such a scenario the resulting world will be human or, at least, that it will represent a human civilization, but will it be a plural human civilization world or will it be a single person/identity/intelligence civilization? Will we, in such a way, reach the absolute unity?
Thinking that intelligence is based in pattern-recognition (Kurzweil again), if the answer to my previous question is that the end result of such a process will be a one-intelligence civilization, I suggest that we take all necessary measures to assure that such final unity is only achieved in the very instant of complete saturation as, for what I can understand, the humane driving force of evolution has been not only comparison (pattern-recognition) but time-pressured competition (altius, citius, fortius), and real competition requires more than one, it requires 'the other' (inner competition is easily imaginable, and is a real driving force too, but I believe it is not the real thing).
Image: Flatliner
