Summary
This paper explores the relevance of ecological limitations such as climate change and resource exhaustion to the possibility of a technologically-mediated “intelligence explosion” in the near future. The imminent risks of global carbonization and loss of biodiversity, as well as the dependency of technological development on a healthy biosphere, are greatly underestimated by singularity theorists such as Ray Kurzweil. While development of information technology should continue, we cannot rely on hypothetical advances in AI to get us out of our present ecological bottleneck. Rather, we should do everything we can to foster human ingenuity, the one factor that has a record of generating the game-changing innovations that our species has relied upon to overcome survival challenges in our past.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Maxime Chambers-Dumont for assistance and anonymous referees for helpful and stimulating comments. I am grateful to the University of Lethbridge for supporting my work in many ways. Any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations remaining in this paper are entirely my responsibility.
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Peacock, K.A. (2017). Energy, Complexity, and the Singularity. In: Callaghan, V., Miller, J., Yampolskiy, R., Armstrong, S. (eds) The Technological Singularity. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54033-6_8
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