splitting and merging

After going through the singularity you might go to a dance and meet two beautiful women and not be able to decide which one to dance with. No worry - I will have invented the splitting device where a person comes to a fork in the road of life and they can take both options. So you dance with both women and one of you dates one and the other, the other. Now with one you may fall in love but with the other, all you do is fight and you break up. Well by now I have also invented the merging device where you put two of you, having previously split, back into one.

A hundred years after that, or maybe it is ten years (who can tell?) the earth is overpopulated from lack of death and abundance of splitting (should I eat at this restaurant or that?) so a benevolent, omnipotent Governor decides that a lot of merging should go on.

Now you were told in kindergarten that you are unique and that there is no one else like you. Well that's not quite true. You are not even one in a million, but more like one in 5,000. So this benevolent, omnipotent Governor will merge all 100,000,000 of you into one mind. Even though you have all these memories you still feel like one person.

Now some people are more unique than others. Some great artists are 1 in a billion, so there will only be a few hundred crammed in there. At the other end of the spectrum there are really common people who are one in a hundred so they will be much more crowded.

That's the kind of future i see.

god's first whim

I've been thinking about the singularity a lot and I've been meaning to pick up Kurzweil's book on the subject. What strikes me is how opaque it is; one can infer nothing past it. It's like this:

What's interesting is that Kurzweil presumes that the progress continues in the accelerating manner even after the singularity begins. We ca make no such assumptions. If we can assume "wise control" we can't presume to know what that would entail. It may be very well that our newly invented Demigod masters may unanimously find it unwise to continue towards omnipotence. God is dangerous. If God is born, the fate of the entire world depends on God's first whim.