Epic Magazine | 3 January 2011

Spend enough time tapped into the newest new music, the important older music, the freshest look, the slickest blogs and you begin to think, I am sharp.  I know amazing things that most people have no clue about, at all.  You sneer anytime Papyrus font appears anywhere and quietly laugh when someone mentions this “new” band they just heard called The xx.  You develop a sense of confidence knowing that there exists a tiny group of actually cool people who know what’s truly up, and that you are one of them.

Then one December day, you attend a conference at Caltech in Pasadena, CA.  A friend of yours asks you to take some photos for this conference, and you agree, begrudgingly, because you have to maintain this air of like borderline snobbishness that comes with justifying your in the know-ness.  Plus, you’re ready for this thing, mentally.  You don’t own a TV anymore and you are intimately familiar with the term Singularity and could define it, if asked.

You arrive at this conference, Humanity+, start taking a few shots with your totally authentic, manual focus 85mm portrait lens.  The talks begin.  Gradually, the entire central illusion around which you’ve built this affect of cool is like gone, because you just heard a talk from Dr. Suzanne Gildert, a condensed matter physics PhD, on how the most prolific entity in the universe is not a human, but a photon, because check out how they can live, self-sustainably, for tens of billions of years.

That is only the beginning.

There ‘s a talk from Robert Tercek who reports that every two days, human beings create as much information as they did from the dawn of recorded history until 2003.  That 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  That the singularity is not a clearly defined moment, rather a series of events that occur as technology begins to usher change at exponential rates.

You laugh along with the crowd as Alex Peake, a computer science ninja, quips “Even though our kids are going to be weird, and part machine, we still have to be there for them.”  You attempt to wrap your head around a talk by Dr. Geordie Rose who reports that using a quantum-computing concept called “compressive sensing” you can sample one byte in a million of a one gigabyte movie file and, after some heavy computation, reconstruct the original movie with almost perfect fidelity.

After two days at the conference, you accept that there are things that you just don’t know.  That there are intensely talented post doc research fiends who have spent decades aspiring toward transhumanism, as in like disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death are unnecessary, undesirable, and avoidable.  That mind uploading (as in, the sum total of your life experiences uploaded onto a hard drive = you live FOREVER) is one of many possible diverse singularity outcomes.  That when the first machine with artificial intelligence greater than humans does emerge, its just as likely to turn itself off, as it is to try and take over the world.

You’re not sure how seriously you should take all this stuff, but if an artificial intelligence ever does rise up and attack, you definitely want the transhumanists on your side.

Written by Zachary Urbina