Abstract
The technological singularity is defined as a hypothetical event in which artificial intelligence would be capable of recursive self-improvement or of autonomously building smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of an intelligence explosion, that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding. We review the different opinions expressed around this idea and around the idea of transhumanism. We also analyze the phenomenon of panterrorism and the theme of the anthropocene. I formulate the hypothesis that the transdisciplinary interaction of philosophy and spirituality with other sciences, exact and human, is the privileged means of resistance to the new barbarism. I call transdisciplinary philosophy the philosophy which integrates the transdisciplinary methodology.
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Notes
- 1.
Max More & Natacha Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader – Classical and contemporary essays on the science, technology, and philosophy of the human future. Wiley-Blackwell, John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex, 2013.
- 2.
Sigmund Freud, Le malaise dans la culture, Flammarion, Paris, 2010.
- 3.
Marcel Gauchet, ‘L’attraction fondamentaliste’, talk at the workshop ‘La psychanalyse et le fait religieux’ organized by Association ‘Espace analytique’, Campus des Cordeliers, Paris, 19 March 2016.
- 4.
See, for example, Bruno Latour, L’Anthropocène et la destruction de l’image du Globe’, in Emilie Hache (ed.), De l’univers clos au monde infini, Paris: Éditions Dehors, 2014: 27–54.
- 5.
Clive Hamilton, Requiem pour l’espèce humaine – Faire face à la réalité du changement climatique, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2013, trans. to French by Françoise Gicquel and Jacques Treiner. Original edn: Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species – Why we resist the truth about climate change, London: Earthscan, 2010.
- 6.
Idem: 44.
- 7.
Paul Cruzen, Albedo enhancement by stratosferic sulphur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma, Climatic Change, 77 (3–4): 211–220.
- 8.
Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species, op. cit., p. 198.
- 9.
Basarab Nicolescu, Transdisciplinarity as a methodological framework for going beyond the science and religion debate, Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion 2 (2007): 35–60.
- 10.
Basarab Nicolescu, From Modernity to Cosmodernity – Science, culture, and spirituality, State University of New York (SUNY) Press, New York, 2014.
- 11.
Basarab Nicolescu, From Modernity to Cosmodernity – Science, culture, and spirituality, op. cit.
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Nicolescu, B. (2017). Technological Singularity: The Dark Side. In: Gibbs, P. (eds) Transdisciplinary Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56185-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56185-1_11
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