Started listening to the book "The Singularity is Nearer", simply amazing ideas that Ray Kurzweil, opened with. It is impressive to see thinkers like this and OpenAI creators, ponder on the future of humanity as a whole. Not just for themselves, their immediate families or tribe but for humanity as a whole.

As per this piece of writing, for context, globally, we are already inextricably attached to machines, especially in the form of cellular phones, whose penetration is very high, though not 100%. I think this is part of the singularity, closer man to machine.

I assume thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, imagine a singularity as silicon-carbon based life, where artificial technology is embedded in our biology and we can seamlessly harness its powers. So to make a call I think of my mom and biology tells her brain that I want to communicate with her.

Though the current exciting events around mapping the human brain to silicon and replicating human like responses i.e artificial intelligence, make machines more useful for us. I posit that increasing human computational power via machines is not the needed advance towards the singularity but improving our communication would be the next stage of our evolution.

Many schools of thought exist as to our evolutionary history and what makes homo sapiens different from our common ancestor with chimpanzees. Undoubtedly, advanced communication, using a wider vocabulary (human language), understanding wider varieties of facial expressions, and body postures, has helped advance us.

With this in mind, and supported by the observation, that computer technology has advanced not only when computational power increased but when computers were applied to communication, ala, netscape navigator, facebook, whatsapp etc. Technologies that enhance our ability to communicate would be key to advancing towards the singularity.

While this advance occurs, thinkers have to be cautious of the adverse effects of enhanced communications, destructive memes spread faster. It becomes easier to intimidate and bully people with always on access, if silicon were in our brains how do we shut off communication, without the ability to distance ourselves. Guardrails would be needed before such technology becomes mainstream.

So, AI tools that improve our communication would take us to the next level. Imagine chatting with a AI about a specific topic, and the AI develops themes about the topic, then if another person has a question and you are not available. You can talk to the AI. Better still people interact with an AI over a long period of time and AI records responses and back feeds these responses to itself and can actually replicate the thoughts, emotions, motivations or these people. In a way we would be living forever like this.

More fantastically, would be when genetic modification can be done to gametes and the offspring produced from this can create carbon based semiconductors and have brain signals directly produce radiowaves which can be captured by other wireless devices and transmitted onwards.