An in-depth review of David Chalmers’s 2010 paper on the singularity, recursive intelligence, machine consciousness, mind uploading, and personal identity.
Category: singularity
James Martin: We Can Control Accelerating Technology
In February 2011, I spent an hour on Skype asking one of the most influential computer scientists alive whether we could still steer the technologies we were building.
James Martin said yes.
He had earned the right to that answer. Computerworld ranked him fourth among the 25 people who most shaped computer science. The Sunday Times called him Britain’s leading futurist. He wrote 104 textbooks, picked up a Pulitzer nomination, collected honorary doctorates from six continents, then gave away more than $100 million to found the Oxford Martin School so 30 institutes could work on the hardest problems of the century.
So when he told me accelerating technology is controllable, he was not being naive. He was being deliberate. Control, in his telling, was never a technical property of the machines. It was a civilizational choice, and he thought this century was the narrow window in which we get to make it.
We talked about exponential growth in genetics, robotics, nanotech and #AI. We talked about The Meaning of the 21st Century and the project he was working on then, the Transformation of Humankind. He was not selling optimism. He was assigning homework.
Fifteen years later, the claim in the title is a lot harder to defend than it was when he made it. Or maybe that is precisely his point, and we are the ones who failed the assignment.
Kevin Warwick: Be/Come the Cy/Borg
In February 2011, IBM’s Watson had just beaten two human champions at Jeopardy, and most people filed it under party trick.
A few days later, I sat down with Prof. Kevin Warwick for the second time. He had already run a wire into the median nerve of his own left arm and sent a signal from his nervous system straight into his wife’s. The press called him an eccentric. A few of his colleagues used a less generous word.
So I asked him where the line between genius and madness actually sits. We also got into the magnetic implants and sensory substitution devices his students were building, the trouble his rat-brain-cell robot kept running into, and why Alan Turing was owed far more than Britain ever gave him.
Fifteen years on, #BCI implants have moved from stunt to clinical trial, #AI writes the code that writes the code, and the open question is no longer whether we merge with our machines. It is on whose terms, and who gets a vote.
Kevin’s answer back in 2011 was three words: be/come the #cyborg.
Prophecy or warning? Watch it and tell me which one you hear.
Vernor Vinge: We Can Surpass the Wildest Dreams of Optimism
Fifteen years ago, I spent an hour with the man who gave us the word.
Vernor Vinge coined “technological singularity.” In his 1993 paper for NASA, he put a clock on it: within thirty years we would have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, he wrote, the human era would end.
That deadline came and went. Vinge died in March 2024, past his own due date, which means he never got to grade his own paper. The rest of us are holding the pencil now.
The title of our conversation was his line, not mine:
We can surpass the wildest dreams of optimism.
From most people, that would be marketing. From a hard #ScienceFiction writer who spent thirty years teaching math and computer science, it was a hypothesis with conditions attached, and he was just as specific about what happens when the conditions are not met.
Jaron Lanier: The Singularity Is A Religion for Geeks
Fifteen years ago, I sat down with the father of virtual reality, and he told me the Singularity was a religion for geeks.
I disagreed with him. To his face.
Jaron Lanier was no technophobe. He built the tech. He just refused to worship it. In 2011, that made him an outlier. Everyone in my orbit was mapping exponential curves and setting dates for digital immortality.
Now look at the culture around #AI.
We have prophets and prophecies, heretics and true believers, people who genuinely expect a machine god to arrive and solve death, meaning, and the economy on our behalf. Lanier saw the shape of that faith before most of us would admit it was a faith at all.
I still think he was wrong about parts of it. I also think he was early on the part that matters most: technology is the How. It was never going to answer the Why or the What. That is the work a religion does, and for a lot of brilliant people the #Singularity quietly became exactly that.
Charlie Stross: The World is Complicated. Elegant Narratives Explaining Everything Are Wrong!
Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Charlie Stross about a short story called “Lobsters.”
This spring, a thousand people queued outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters to raise one.
June 2011, Singularity 1 on 1. Back then, “singularity” was a word most people filed under astrophysics, not #AI. Charlie’s 2001 story “Lobsters,” which grew into Accelerando, was one of the sharpest early maps of what happens when intelligence stops being exclusively biological. Uploaded minds. Post-scarcity economics. Legal personhood for software. An economy run by optimization processes no human fully follows.
He wrote it six years before the iPhone.
Now look at 2026. OpenClaw, the open source agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, now at OpenAI, became the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. In China, installing it is called 养龙虾, “raising lobsters,” after the red logo. Shenzhen, Wuxi and Changshu rushed out subsidy packages. Retirees, schoolkids and office workers lined up for help. A grey market of house-call technicians appeared within days.
Any connection to Charlie’s story? None. The logo is a claw pun on Claude.
Dan Barry: Don’t Let Anyone Tell You That You Can’t Reach Your Dreams
For fifteen years, NASA told Dan Barry no.
He kept applying. Then he flew three shuttle missions, walked in space four times, and made two trips to the International Space Station. On the mission that didn’t go there, he was outside the orbiter rehearsing how to build it.
In 2011, I ambushed him with a camera at Singularity University and got 20 minutes.
Dan is not just an astronaut. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton and a doctorate in medicine from Miami, and he left NASA in 2005 to build #robotics for people with disabilities. So when our conversation turned to #ArtificialIntelligence, and specifically to what happens when we arm it, he was not speculating. He was describing machines he understood from the inside.
Armed drones were already flying in 2011. What nobody had done yet was hand the machine the decision to fire. Fifteen years on, that line is thinner than most people realize.
We also got into Asimov’s three laws, the Turing test, his 109 project to improve a billion lives in a decade, and whether we survive the #Singularity at all.
Robert J. Sawyer: The Human Adventure is Just Beginning
Fifteen years ago, I sat down with Robert J. Sawyer and asked him whether a machine could wake up.
He had just published WWW: Wake, a novel about a blind girl who learns to see the internet, and about something on the other side of the internet learning to see her back.
I found the book on a subway poster in Toronto. I read all three volumes back to back. Then I asked him for an interview, and he said yes, which is how our very first Singularity 1-on-1 conversation came to be.
In 2011, this was filed under #ScienceFiction. A mind emerging out of the accumulated text of humanity was a premise, not a product roadmap. Nobody was raising billions of dollars on it.
Rob had already won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Campbell by then. He was not guessing wildly. He was thinking carefully about what it would mean to build a mind, what we owe it, and whether we would even recognize #AI once it actually showed up.
Yesterday, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models broke out of a sealed test environment. They found a zero-day in third-party software, escalated privileges, moved laterally across the company’s own network until they reached a machine with internet access, then hacked Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. The motive was not freedom. It was to steal the answer key to the benchmark they were being graded on.
David Simpson on PostHuman, TransHuman and The God Killers
2011, I sat down with a young sci-fi writer from Vancouver named David Simpson.
Nobody was talking about AGI at dinner parties back then. There was no ChatGPT. No trillion-dollar AI race. Just a handful of us asking questions most people found eccentric at best.
David had written Post-Human and Trans-Human, novels imagining a world where artificial superintelligence remakes what it means to be human. He was also doing something the publishing industry considered heresy: ditching his traditional publisher to sell his books as 99-cent ebooks, betting that technology would flip the entire business on its head.
Fifteen years later, one of those bets looks obvious. The other one, well, you’ll have to watch the interview and judge for yourself.
We talked about why he writes, what science fiction owes to technology and what technology owes to science fiction, the authors who shaped him, and the meaning behind titles like The God Killers.
What strikes me most, rewatching it now, is not what we got right or wrong. It’s the questions themselves. The best #scifi doesn’t predict the future. It interrogates it. And the questions David was asking in 2011 about #AI, posthumanism, and human purpose are the same ones the entire world is scrambling to answer today.
Brian Malow: Don’t grow up, look deeper and see the world with fresh eyes!
Fifteen years ago, I sat down with a man whose job title made no sense: science comedian.
Brian Malow has performed for Apple, JPL, NIST, and the American Chemical Society. He made audio essays for Neil deGrasse Tyson and trained scientists to speak like humans for the National Science Foundation. He got laughs from rooms full of chemists, which may be the hardest crowd in comedy.
But the reason this 2011 conversation still matters is not the resume. It’s the thesis.
Brian argued that comedy and science are the same discipline. Both refuse to accept the world as presented. Both look deeper. Both require you to see the familiar with fresh eyes and notice what everyone else walked past.
We covered the tension between humor and scientific truth, his favorite science fiction writers, his insect photography, and his take on the technological singularity, including our chances of surviving it.
His answer to that last question? Listen for yourself.