After last week’s symposium, I have been thinking about a future that is shaped by this digital evolution of hypertext and the network.
I recently watched the movie Transcendence, by cinematopher-turned-director Wally Pfister. The film explores how scientific progress (artificial intelligence, technological singularity) challenges our human morals and individuality. The film was not amazing (being a blockbuster, the film focused too heavily of an individual story of a ‘transcended’ intelligence, whose transcendence did not seem to gain him any wisdom beyond a human’s, rather than investigating the deep philosophical debate that surrounds the topic – remembering to justify my criticism), but I have been interested in the concept of singularity. Although most commonly, the theoretical cause of a technological singularity is attributed to artificial intelligence (where the AI evolve to a point beyond human comprehension achieves singularity rather than humans ‘transcending’ to it – this can also be seen in the film Her, where the AI’s eventually move on from their service to humans), what I’m interested in is if humans are able to share all information at once with each other. (Similar to the behaviour of ants in a colony that I have mentioned in a previous post.) The hardware that we currently use to access this network of knowledge and communication will only get smaller, more ‘customisable’ (we already have Google glasses!!), maybe one day these devices will become a part of us. Would we not all be ‘transcended’ by our ability to access the boundless web of information? In this sense, hypertext and our network of information are just the first few steps towards such a future.