Biointelligence Explosion

Despite this witches' brew of new technologies, a conceptual gulf remains in the futurist community between those who imagine human destiny, if any, lies in digital computers and hypothetical artificial consciousness; and in contrast radical bioconservatives who believe that our posthuman successors will also be our supersentient descendants at their neural networked core - not the digital zombies of symbolic AI run on classical serial computers.

Digital creatures need not be "zombies" - any more than human beings are - and they certainly don't need to run on "classical serial computers".

There is a gulf much like the one David describes - but the "bioconservative" position seems unbelievable to me - the future will be engineered.

Metaphorically, the Biointelligence Explosion represents an "event horizon" beyond which humans cannot model or understand the future.

As usual, the idea that we cannot model or understand the future is bunk. Wolfram goes on about this too - with his "computational irreducibility". Popper had much the same idea - in "The Poverty of Historicism". What is it about the unknowable future that makes it seem so attractive?

Many thanks Dr Manhattan. A scholarly version plus a bibliography ( PDF: http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/biointelligence-explosion.pdf ) will appear in Springer's forthcoming Singularity volume (cf. http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/central-questions.html ) published later this year. Here's a question for lesswrong members. I've been asked to co-author the Introduction. One thing I worry about is that causal readers of the contributors' essays won't appreciate just how radically the Kurzweilian and SIAI conceptions of the Singularity are at odds. Is there anywhere in print or elsewhere where Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowski, say, directly engage each other's arguments in debate ? Also, are there any critical but non-obvious points beyond the historical background you think should be included the introductory overview?