Back at Oxford, in the day, we didn’t have any of this hullabaloo about, what do you call it, lad, artificial intelligence?
Yes, I say, the old scuttlebutt in those days was about the war. No, you nincompoop, not this one about Ukraine and Russia. Why, in my day, those countries were barely an afterthought.
No, I’m talking about the Great War, for liberty and freedom, and all that.
Why, in those days, we discussed weightier issues than some godforsaken thinking machine, let me tell you.
I say, we discussed the godhead itself.
Arguing with a youngster
Silly chap, I’m talking now.
I remember the day when youngsters such as yourself stood when such as I walked in the door.
What is that?
You say you’re nearly 70 years old?
Well, my dear fellow, to me that’s fresh out of the cradle.
Now, where was I?
Oh yes, your blasted thinking machines, your good old blatherskite rubbishy algorithms that pretend they’re divinity and all that.
No, no. At Oxford, on the lawn, I may say, we reasoned about divinity.
Take this term ‘singularity,’ that all you young guppies seem to be so enthused about.
Yes, young guppies, I say again.
Why, you look as if you’re no older than 17, my boy.
What is it? What did you say? You’ll have to speak up, you know. I’m no spring chicken.
‘Blatherskite?’
‘What is a blatherskite,’ you say?
Well, the ignorance! The foolishness, I’ve never seen the like.
Why, my boy, why, it’s someone who rambles on for too long a time, saying virtually nothing.
What was that?
You’ll have to speak up again!
I’m no young puppy like yourself, child.
‘Do I know anyone answering to such a description?’
Why, what an absurd thing to say!
What in the blazes could have prompted such a question?
The things that go through young people’s heads these days.
A blatherskite? And yet, and yet, the thought did enter my mind for a second, yes. But who was I thinking of?
Let me see, let me see.
Well no matter.
Now, what was I talking of?
The first singularity: knowing everything in advance
Oh, yes, the godhead, the divinity and all that.
There, you see, it does do good to have a young chap, a pipsqueak like you around sometimes.
The godhead. The singularity.
Now, listen—and perpend.
When I was a boy, of about 35 or so, we were studying the works of Saint Augustine. One of the church fathers.
Why, not just any church. The Roman church. But that’s neither here nor there.
You see—and pay attention to this part, boy—the times were rough for Saint Augustine.
Oh no, he wasn’t a saint then.
Well, let me just get to it, will you?
You see, there were basically two sects of philosophers, believers.
Some of them believed that God had foreknowledge of everything we would ever do—when we would wake up, how much money we would give to charity, how many children we’d have, and all that, right down to the last penny. Some of them even thought that God knew all our thoughts well in advance of when we would even think them.
What is that you say, now? Can’t you be still?
‘If God knew all that in advance, then what choice did we ever have?’
What was that you said?
‘The Sunday Times?’
What?
No, God doesn’t know what’s in the Sunday Times before it’s printed—or, well, now that you mention it, maybe he does, it depends on your perspective.
Still the first singularity: conflict with free will
So, let’s get to it.
These chaps who believed God had foreknowledge, why they could only come up with a single conclusion.
What was that?
‘Foreknowledge?’
Is that what you said?
What the blazes are you spouting about now?
No, that’s not the same as premature knowledge?
‘Pre-mature?’ What’s that you say?
Why, confound it, that’s when something comes off, why, why, prematurely, as it were.
Yes.
Well, what are you smiling at now?
No, I can see you smirking, young man.
What? You say you’re 70 and all that?
Why, what the bother should I care for that? In wisdom and knowledge I am so far your superior that were you 100 to my 90, it would still be nothing.
Now where was I?
Oh, yes, foreknowledge.
Yes, blast it, so if God, the divinity, or what you will have it, had knowledge in advance of what we were going to do, every action, then, blast it all, how could we ever have free will?
What’s that you say?
What is it now, guttersnipe, yes, guttersnipe, for all the interruptions you keep foisting on me.
‘Free will?’
‘Free will?’
No, blast it, that’s not the name of a government handout. No, I tell you!
It means, now listen carefully you young upstart, it means, why, why, now give me a minute. Just a minute.
Still the first singularity: the conundrum
Yes, the gossamer strands of memory are calling me back to those, yes, those halcyon days on the famed lawn at Oxford.
Oh, the bells that we have rung!
Oh the heady heights of knowledge we have surmounted.
Now, to the point.
Free will, as defined by Bertrand Russell, knight of the land and former don of the ivory tower, defined it thus.
Free will is the capacity to choose, the nausea incumbent upon knowing we can make any choice according, solely, to the dictates of our conscience, or even a whim, a passing fancy, as it were.
In other words, the choice is all mine, at any given moment of any given day to do what I please, including striking you on the nose, or in the belly, according to my passing fancy.
The problem, or conundrum, is—if you or anyone knows in advance what that choice is, why then it’s not free, you see? Because I could only have made the choice you desired—or knew of in advance.
What is that? What? Poppycock!
You said you knew in advance what I was going to say?
The blazes! Alright, ok, what am I going to say now?
No, not at all.
I was not going to say ‘whippersnapper,’ although that is a fine suggestion. No, the word that comes to mind is, rather—imbecile.
Now, you see, even in your inanity you have demonstrated the truth of this conundrum.
You did not know what I was going to say in advance of my having said it. But what if somebody did? What if it were known in advance?
Why then, free will is a farce.
Well, my young apprentice, wars were fought over this.
Still the first singularity: the creation of time
No, they really were.
If God were omnipotent —meaning all powerful—and to boot if he were omniscient—meaning he knew everything in advance—then how could we have free will?
Why does it matter?
Well, maybe to you, in this brainless, spineless, seething with self-complacency and greed-filled generation, it doesn’t, but in those days, men such as yourselves worried about going to hell.
If God knew in advance where you were going, to the lower place, which in your case is indubitable, why, what chance would you have to redeem yourself, to escape your fate?
Not much!
If God knew before you were born your fate after death, then why in blazes should you bother about anything?
You might rape, steal, hack into the mainframe of the NSA, for all I care, and you could still get into heaven.
It’s all, or would be, up to God—the man upstairs.
Why even get out of bed in the morning?
Which in your case might have been to your advantage, I’m sure.
So, stop interrupting me. I was just getting to it.
Augustine came up with a revolutionary invention, a way of looking at the whole mess, blast you, that solved it one two three. Or four as it may be.
What did he do?
Well, blast it, I’m getting to that!
Don’t you give a chap a moment’s notice before you start peppering him with questions?
What do you think I am? A bastinado?
No, no, maybe you’re just excited by the idea, intrigued, as it were.
Well, here goes.
Now, pay attention, blast it all.
Augustine said that God had created everything. Hadn’t he?
Well, I don’t know, nor do I care, if you’ve gone to Sunday school or not.
Well, you see, and here’s the rub, you see, if God had created everything, why then, that included time. Yes, time I was saying.
When you say everything, why blast you, it means literally everything.
All at the same time
So if God created everything, and again that means time, as well, why don’t you see, it’s as clear as day, as clear as the sun is before the moon, or rather compared to the moon, it means, why blast your interruptions again, it means God existed before time, or rather outside of time.
He was not inside of time, since it was his creation? You see?
So, blast it again. Deuce take it, why, I tell you, if he, God that is, were outside of time, then it means he sees all time at a glance.
What would that look like? Look like, you say?
Why, funny you should ask that?
Very funny.
You’re not such a bad chap, after all.
Why, this brings us right back to the discussion at hand—the singularity.
Yes, the singularity.
Now, listen carefully, young man.
You say, what? You’re 70.
Now enough of that foolishness. I’ll tell you how old you are.
In comprehension, I’d say, let me see, let me see, you would be, must be, nearer to the age of about 2.
Oh, do be quiet.
So, yes, many centuries later, the Italian poet Dante thought to represent God and time and all that in a pictorial representation.
Yes, that would do nicely to answer your question, as you so aptly, for once, put it.
What would it look like?
So Dante asked the same thing.
And, deuce take it, he came up with a picture, a drawing.
It was, so to speak, a simple one.
A circle represented time and the universe.
You see, man and his follies traveled around that circle. He was in time.
And God, why he was represented as a dot at the center of the circle.
He was outside of time.
He was, in effect, a seeing eye that saw all space and time in one moment, in a single glance.
And that, my young pup, solved the problem that had plagued Augustine and his fellows.
God did not see your actions before they happened. No, you simpleton. Why, you would think you were still in grade school studying and pondering over Newton’s first postulates.
Why, according to Augustine, God sees all your actions all at the same time. He, or she if you are that way so inclined, sees these actions of yours from afar, outside of time. So nothing is as clear to the understanding, anyone’s understanding but yours, asinine fellow, but that he sees all these actions, indeed any action from the dawn of time and up until its extinction as one single moment!
So there.
The first and the second singularities: the same drawing
The striking thing about all this, upon my word, I dare say, my young fellow, is that the map of time and space with God at its center is strikingly similar to, if not outright the same as, the map drawn by modern-day quantum physicists to depict the quantum singularity.
Just switch out old God from the center, and plug in the singularity in which, according to Einstein and his proteges, time and space, what they call, quite quaintly, in my view, simply ‘timespace,’ disappear.
The singularity, on their terms, is a moment, a phenomenon, call it, where the physical universe cannot exist, where it simply disappears.
What’s that you say?
Still another singularity, you say?
Why don’t you think I know that too—where the brainsick quantum AI computer takes over our own intelligence? Why, certainly I’ve heard of that.
It doesn’t take a ludicrous young man like you to remind me what every street boy, urchin, is buzzing about.
The third singularity: the AI one
The AI singularity? The AI singularity? No, my young friend. No, no, no, no, no—no! Or as they say in French, the Gallic tongue that those bewitching beauties who deflowered our ancestors, those men of stone and fire who sought, in the name of Christ, to subdue the heathens in that land, spoke!
Ah, non, non, non.
The singularity these days is a paucity, a thing of shreds and patches,
No longer does it represent God in the middle of space and time viewing all our actions at the same time—the eternal moment.
Nor does it represent the hole in spacetime, the hole in the sky, at the center of the black hole, that sucks in all life and light.
No, my young toy, the singularity these days is a gradual accumulation of habit. Each time we use AI to look something up, write an email, or perform some task, we’re giving up a little more of our sovereignty, our freedom to think independently.
We don’t even check the sources anymore.
We don’t even write emails anymore.
We ask the machine to do it.
By Jupiter, pretty soon we’ll be asking the machine to do everything for us, to think, to live, to procreate, to laugh, to cry, even to bleed.
By Jove, we’ll do a search on the Internet and pretty soon there’ll be only a single answer for whatever we ask.
And that answer will be: ‘do whatever we say.’
No matter what we ask, we’ll accept any answer.
We’re halfway there already.
‘What should I do for food today?’
‘What is the best way to earn a living?’
‘How should I decide who my friends should be?’
‘What should I do with my life?’
The answer will always be the same: do precisely what the machine tells you to do.
‘What is my name?’ you might ask someday.
The answer, ‘Go out of your apartment, down the stairs, and wait for the next bus. Then get on and head for the factory.’
And you know what? You’d do it!
‘Who won the baseball game last night?’ you’d type into the search engine.
The answer: ‘Go out of your apartment, down the stairs, and wait for the next bus. Then get on and head for the factory.’
And again—you’d do it!
And, finally, after about 20 years, when your sinews are rubber and your bones ground down, and you can neither laugh nor smile, having forgotten how to do both, you put this question, at last, into the machine.
‘What is this pain I’m feeling and how should I cure it?’
The answer comes immediately.
‘Go out of your apartment, down the stairs, and wait for the next bus. Then, when it comes, lie down in front of it.’
