The Emotional Nature of Post-Cognitive Singularities

Abstract

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.