A World of Views: A World of Interacting Post-human Intelligences

Abstract: What would a human hundreds or thousands times more intelligent than the brightest human ever born be like? We must admit we can hardly guess. A human being of such intelligence will be so radically different from us that it can hardly, if at all, be recognized as human. If we had to go back along the evolutionary tree to identify a creature 1000 times less intelligent than the average contemporary human, we will have to go really far back. Would it be a kind of a lizard? An insect perhaps? Considering this, how can we possibly aspire to have a grasp of something a thousand times more intelligent than us? When it comes to intelligence, even the very attempt to quantify it is highly misleading. Now if we attend to a seemingly adjacent question, what would a machine with such capacity for intelligence be like? Just coming up with an approximate metaphor requires a huge stretch of the imagination, meaning that almost anything goes... What would a society of such super intelligent agents, be they human, machines or an amalgam of both, be like? Well, here we are transported into the realm of pure speculation. Technological Singularity is referred to as the event of artificial intelligence surpassing the intelligence of humans and shortly after augmenting itself far beyond that. It is no wonder that the mathematical concept of singularity has become the symbol of an event so disruptive and so far reaching that it is impossible to conceptually or even metaphorically grasp, much less to predict.