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The Technological Singularity pp 193–208Cite as

The Emotional Nature of Post-Cognitive Singularities

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Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Summary

The next evolution of intelligent, physical life on earth will be to artificial, super-intelligent agents or even entities we might call ‘post’- or ‘trans’ humans. And, contrary to popular opinion about the man-made advanced intelligences, these entities will not be just information-driven machines devoid of emotion. Instead, today’s computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) science has set us on the path that we fully anticipate a technological Singularity event. From this event we expect the emergence of intelligent, living entities that have the capacity to integrate massive amounts of data, but this computing will be controlled by emotional mechanisms. These new forms of life will live side-by-side with humanity so the real, foreseeable problem of this post-Singularity, post-cognitive era will be an existential one—and a possible misalignment between us (humans) and ‘them’ (the new entities). The different forms of life will pursue different goals, likely to be mediated by different, or even opposite, emotional syntaxes. How humans will interact with these new post-cognitive, emotional Singularity Entities has yet to be defined, but new social patterns will surely emerge.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See: http://www.cyc.com/, accessed on May 25th, 2014.

  2. 2.

    From: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Big_Mechanism.aspx, accessed on May 25th 2014.

  3. 3.

    Se Nevada Laws http://www.leg.state.nv.us/Session/76th2011/Reports/history.cfm?ID=1011, accessed on May 25th 2014.

  4. 4.

    See: http://www.brl.ac.uk/researchthemes/bioenergyselfsustainable/ecobotiii.aspx, accessed on May 25th 2014.

  5. 5.

    See: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/life's_working_definition.html, accessed on May 25th 2014.

  6. 6.

    See: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/life's_working_definition.html, accessed on May 25th 2014.

  7. 7.

    See at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/, accessed May 24th 2014.

  8. 8.

    See http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/, accessed on February 26th 2014.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the TECNOCOG research group (at UAB) under the project “Innovación en la práctica científica: enfoques cognitivos y sus consecuencias filosóficas” (FF2011-23238). I especially thank Ashley Whitaker & Toni E. Ritchie for their interest in my teaching and research as well as for their linguistic revisions. Toni offered disinterestedly his time and supervised the last drafts with a remarkable and contagious enthusiasm… I am in debt to you.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E08193, Bellaterra (BCN), Catalonia, Spain

    Jordi Vallverdú

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  1. Jordi Vallverdú
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Correspondence to Jordi Vallverdú .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Electrical Engineering, University of Essex, Essex, United Kingdom

    Victor Callaghan

  2. Economics Faculty, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA

    James Miller

  3. Univ of Louisville Dept. of Comp Engrng & Comp Sci, Louisville, Kentucky, USA

    Roman Yampolskiy

  4. Faculty of Philosophy Littlegate House, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Stuart Armstrong

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Vallverdú, J. (2017). The Emotional Nature of Post-Cognitive Singularities. 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_11

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