by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2014
Around 2010 I read Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near (2005) and I was both impressed and inspired. Ray writes about the upcoming GNR Revolution: G=Genetics N=Nanotechnology and R=Robots (Artificial Intelligence). The Singularity part of this is that computing power is going to continue to grow exponentially and soon it will increase so much that the cyber world becomes in effect its own universe and pretty much runs all automated manufacturing and service affairs on earth -- The Singularity. This is going to happen soon, probably by 2050. Ray also envisions human consciousnesses as being able to become entities in this cyber universe.
This concept has been talked about by many people, but these days Ray is something of its patron saint.
My vision is a bit different, so I call my vision The Post-Snap World rather than The Singularity. The big difference is that while I envision self-aware cyber entities, I think their thinking is going to be as different from human thinking as human thinking is from cow thinking. In other words, what the cyber entities will be up to in the cyber universe is going to be beyond mankind's comprehension. What they will be up to and how they live their lives will be pretty much totally inscrutable to us human creators.
The result: Humans will live their Post Snap lives, and cyber will live their Post Snap lives, and the two worlds will be mostly different places. Humans won't have a clue. This is Roger's twist on The Singularity concept.
What follows are speculations on how the human side will conduct itself. This is the part of this brave new world that humans can understand.