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Category: singularity

Desperate search for relief in a time of anxiety [a 16-year-old writes to Socrates]

Almost 12 years ago, a 16-year-old girl named Stefanie wrote to me the night before her senior year of high school. She could not sleep. She was terrified of the Singularity. And she wanted to know what she could actually do about it.

I still get these messages. More of them than ever, in fact. The names change. The fear does not. If anything, in the age of frontier AI, autonomous agents, and accelerating capability, the desperation in young people’s voices has only deepened.

What struck me when I went back to read my reply was how little I wanted to change. The advice I gave Stefanie has, mostly, stood the test of time. So rather than rewrite it, I am simply reposting it. A few of the things I told her then, and would tell any anxious young person today:

Be unreasonable. The reasonable person adapts to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself. All progress depends on unreasonable people. Shaw was right.

Think in decades, not weeks. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Persistence will be your best friend and your biggest enemy.

Prepare to fail. It took Edison thousands of attempts to make the light bulb. What matters is not how many times you fall, but how long you are willing to endure.

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Black holes may avoid singularities when charge and Hawking radiation combine, theoretical physicist argues

Black holes are regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing, even light, can escape. Einstein’s theory of general relativity breaks down inside black holes, either by the presence of a so-called “curvature singularity” or “Cauchy horizon.”

A curvature singularity is a point where density and spacetime curvature become infinite, the laws of physics break down, and matter is crushed into an infinitely small space. A Cauchy horizon, on the other hand, is a boundary beyond which the future cannot be reliably predicted by known physics theories.

Francesco Di Filippo, a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Frankfurt, recently carried out a theoretical study that challenges the assumption that black holes must inevitability possess either a singularity or a Cauchy horizon. His paper, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that the combination of electromagnetic repulsion from electric charge and quantum effects described by Stephen Hawking’s radiation theory could prevent the formation of singularities and Cauchy horizons in some black holes.

Geordie Rose: Machine Learning is Progressing Faster Than You Think

“Machine learning is progressing faster than you think.”

Geordie Rose said that to me in 2013.

Back then, it sounded like the kind of thing a quantum computing CEO says to drum up attention. Today it reads like a weather report.

Thirteen years ago, the D-Wave founder and CTO sat down with me for over two hours and laid out a thesis most observers found extreme: machine learning would become broadly available far faster than anyone hoped, and quantum computers would help us build AI by 2029.

The 2029 date sounded like science fiction.

It does not sound like science fiction anymore.

Continue reading “Geordie Rose: Machine Learning is Progressing Faster Than You Think” | >

Stelarc on Transhumanism: We Are in a Time of Circulating Flesh!

“We are in a time of circulating flesh.”

Stelarc said that to me 13 years ago. In 2026, it reads less like art criticism and more like a status report.

He had grown an ear on his arm. He had hung himself from hooks 25 times. He had let strangers on the internet choreograph his muscles through electrical stimulation, his body remote-controlled across continents.

Most people called it spectacle. I think it was inquiry.

Because long before deepfakes, before voice cloning, before AI agents wearing our faces, was already asking the question we now cannot avoid:

Where does the body end and the network begin?

Continue reading “Stelarc on Transhumanism: We Are in a Time of Circulating Flesh!” | >

Dr. Stuart Hameroff: Consciousness is More than Computation!

13 years ago, I walked into Dr. Stuart Hameroff’s operating room with a camera, a microphone, and a single stubborn question:

Is consciousness computation?

Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona, and co-author with Sir Roger Penrose of the Orch OR theory, said no.

Emphatically. Unfashionably. Against the entire weight of mainstream neuroscience and Silicon Valley orthodoxy.

At the GF2045 conference, where I first met him, Ray Kurzweil went out of his way to declare Orch OR “totally wrong.” Others called it speculative. Untestable. Unscientific.

Today, in the age of large language models, that argument is no longer a niche dispute among philosophers and physicists. It is the decisive question of our century.

Continue reading “Dr. Stuart Hameroff: Consciousness is More than Computation!” | >

Human vs. Machine Consciousness | Imperial’s Murray Shanahan

An interview with Murray Shanahan on philosophy and AI consciousness.

For more on how you can get involved with Cosmos including roles we are hiring for & how to receive our grants, visit: https://johnathanbi.com/cosmos.

You can read the full transcript here: https://www.johnathanbi.com/p/transcript-for-interview-with-…ahan-on-ai.

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Further Reading:
Professor Shanahan’s book on Consciousness: https://amzn.to/42rdsT0 (affiliate)

Timestamps:

Continue reading “Human vs. Machine Consciousness | Imperial’s Murray Shanahan” | >

Frank J. Tipler: The Laws of Physics Say The Singularity is Inevitable!

13 years ago, a Tulane physicist told me I didn’t understand the laws of physics.

That’s why, he said, I can’t see why the Singularity is inevitable. Or why it’s perfectly compatible with Christianity.

Fair enough.

Dr. Frank J. Tipler is the cosmologist behind the Omega Point. He is a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, and the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The Physics of Immortality, and The Physics of Christianity.

He didn’t come on Singularity FM to soften his views. He came to defend them.

In one hour we covered:

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The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

There is no dataset for grief.

No metric for justice.

No optimizer for legitimacy.

And yet we keep bringing the Hammer of AI to every problem we face. Climate change. Pandemics. Cancer. Energy. War. Political corruption. There is no problem that the omnipresent, all-knowing, all-mighty artificial superintelligence will not eventually crack.

This is a religion. Technology is its faith. Silicon Valley is its Promised Land. Entrepreneurs are its prophets. And we are all believers.

I should know. I used to be one.

In my latest piece on Singularity Weblog, I argue that some problems do bend to computation: fusion, protein folding, the genome. But others do not. They are not computable, only livable. And when we hammer them anyway, things break. Sometimes the thing that breaks is the problem. Sometimes it is us.

Continue reading “The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail” | >

2030 The Survival Singularity: Why Billionaires Are Panicking

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By 2030, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will change everything. While tech leaders publicly promise a \.

The “Nanobot” Singularity: Ray Kurzweil’s Terrifying Plan for 2030

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What if immortality and god-like intelligence were just a few years away?
Renowned futurist and former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil predicts that humanity is rapidly approaching a \.

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