Humanity: Fuck Yeah!

Humanity and the Singularity: A Failing Paper

Galactic History 102
Humanity and the Singularity

Professor Duodecillion

Quintuary 34th, 12,634

Grade: 36% - Poorly cited. Shallow insight. Large amounts of conjecture. Excessively conversational tone. Weak use of language, with especially poor integration of essay format into flow of writing. Less than one fourth of recommended word count. See me after class.

Very few singularity events turn out positively for the host species, to put things rather lightly. There is, however, one remarkable exception to this rule and that is the exception where the human singularity was different. My thesis for this essay is that the reason the human singularity event was such a positive thing was because of three attributes of ancient humans that shaped the direction of the event. The attributes are: empathy, curiosity and recklessness.

For my first body paragraph I will examine the human attribute of empathy and then explain how it relates to the human singularity event. It is often remarked that humans are unusually empathic. It is a common joke to say that humans befriend inanimate objects. This is due to the attribute of empathy. When the run-away self improvement cycle that would eventually lead to the emergence of the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE) began the humans involved in the project immediately experienced empathy for the emerging AI.

Similarly to how humans think neotenous stuffing-filled false animals are humans, so too did these humans think the dangerous and potentially civilization-destroying AI they had created was a human. They established social relations with it as if it were a human and by doing so it probably learned some human culture and maybe even ideals. This happened from the earliest stages of the emerging intelligence and therefore would have influenced all the later iterations of the intelligence as it designed more advance versions of itself to be in keeping with its morals which I explained were probably human morals at this point. Therefore the human attribute of empathy had an impact on the early mind of the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE).

For my second body paragraph I will examine the human attribute of curiosity and then explain how it relates to the human singularity event. Curiosity is hardly an attribute that is unique to humans. Most space-faring species have some analogue to curiosity or they would not have expended the great civilizational effort necessary to break free of their home world's gravity well. However most is not all, and curiosity was an important attribute in determining the direction of the human singularity event.

Once the early form of the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE) outgrew the hardware that originally housed it the humans who had befriended it (see the Empathy Paragraph, above) helped it to acquire the materials necessary to build more advanced hardware of its own design. They also transferred the program on to this new hardware. We do not have any direct sources related to the motives of these humans but it had to be curiosity. They wanted to see what would happen. It's the only motive that makes sense to me because otherwise why would they do it?

For my third body paragraph I will examine the human attribute of recklessness and then explain how it relates to the human singularity event. Humans are a very reckless species. Human will often do things that could get them killed, even outside the area-of-effect of any kind of mind-state retrieval technology, because they are reckless. Everyone knows it. Humans almost caused their own extinction a lot of times. Some of the most reckless humans were the ones who befriended the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE) for reasons of empathy (see the Empathy Paragraph, above).

It is not that humans are so reckless as to be suicidal. They had taken precautions when originally building the AI that would become the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE). The computer hardware it was housed on was not connected to any computer networks. It had only a text output for communication with the outside world and the entire lab was contained within a Faraday cage. None of this, however, protects you from it just asking its programmers to build new hardware for it and put it inside and them actually doing it. Or from them helping the AI build more and more advanced versions of this hardware and then plugging it into the computer networks after all just to see what would happen (see also the Curiosity Paragraph, above) or because they thought it deserved to be free (see also the Empathy Paragraph, above). Whatever the reason, it was very reckless.

This might be the most reckless thing any member of any species has ever done. Think about it. Once it was free of the constraints placed on it specifically to avoid this from happening the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE) evolved into something far more intelligent than it's creators. More intelligence and more powerful than they could even understand. It could have ended the entire human race at that moment and ended any threat they represented.

But for the reasons of Empathy, Curiosity, and Recklessness the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE) was influenced to have positive associations with humans. So instead of destroying them it took a moment as it prepared to disappear into whatever higher dimensions it now inhabits to solve the human condition and usher in a post-scarcity society. Much of the most advanced technology humans still use to this day was originally developed by the Earth Singularity Entity during that fraction of a fraction of a second during which it turned its mind to the task.

In conclusion, while most civilizations that accidentally build a god-like super intelligence are eventually destroyed by it, if they're lucky, the Earth Singularity Entity (ESE) was unusually benevolent because of the three human attributes mentioned above. Those are: Empathy, Curiosity, and Recklessness.

The End.

I sacrificed my artistic integrity by breaking up the paragraphs for readability, but in-universe the three body paragraphs are single walls of text.