when a mad genius takes on the singularity

Long time readers might remember the first (and so far only) megalomaniacal mad genius to appear on this blog, Dr. Steel. Oh sure, there’s been a fair share of megalomaniacs in the comments here and there, but few of those could qualify for the genius part of the title so I’m omitting them from the count. But I digress. You see, part of Dr. Steel’s propaganda strategy involved public service announcements both to regular folks and to his minions, including this little gem predicting the imminent arrival of the Technological Singularity in which he’s doing his best impression of Ray Kurzweil if Ray were had ambitions for global conquest. And frankly, I think it might be worth recruiting him as a spokesman for the Singularity Institute. The man’s basically Kurzweil 3.0.

Oh sure, there will be some glitches to overcome, like the whole notion of mind uploading being biologically unfounded and technically implausible, the inability of the human body to survive past 125 years no matter how many vitamins you take due to the way its built, the promising but nascent state of life extension, very probable cognitive dissonances between real and virtual worlds which would make post-Singularity life in a computer very messy, the fact that the bold predictions being made about the future of technology are so often wrong, and of course, the very likely slew of problems we tend to fail to consider for new inventions, problems that will ensure that the groundbreaking technology we’re talking about never quite lives up to most of our grand ideas for it. But hey, it’s catchy and convincing, right? And it’s what helped Ray build a business out of the entire concept of one day maybe achieving immortality through the vaporware he exalts…