Kenny's Singularity Analysis

Kenny Fox

9/26/11

Period 7

Dominguez

Singularity

Singularity is a very interesting concept. The thought of one day creating a form of artificial intelligence is startling enough as it is, but to merge with them as pointed at in the article “The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” is simply baffling. It can be both a good and a bad thing. There's no telling what the results of such a thing can be; as stated by Lev Grossman in the article “It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. There are a multitude of possibilities that can arise. It can be good in that it aids the life style of humans; but bad, as displayed in numerous movies, should the machines take over and annihilate humanity. I don't feel that merging with machines would exactly make us “less authentically human” until the point that we stop making decisions, feeling emotions, and creating for ourselves.

Bernard, in Brave New World, has these feelings of something missing that he should be doing with his life. His displays this thought in his viewpoint on women. In this futuristic novel he holds many views of today that would be said to be romantic, but he is in that new world. I'm struggling to draw a direct correlation to what Bernard is on to. I believe he is simply being romantic and drawing away from this mechanical human that everybody else seems to be. Bernard was always said to be a little different than everybody else, because he was a little normal in our world. Furthermore Bernard does show some signs of singularity in the novel that shows that he is truly human and feels emotions to prove that he is more than just another piece of this Giant mechanical Brave New World that they live in.