THE SINGULARITY

"Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the time frame most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines," states physicist, entrepreneur, and author Louis Del Monte.

 Del Monte believes that by 2045, surrounding artificial intelligence and the singularity, an indeterminate point in the future when machine intelligence will outmatch not only your own intelligence, but the world's combined human intelligence as well.

The sci-fi threat that computers will overtake their human masters is a long running genre. Everyone remembers Terminator. The foundational facts of the rise of computing machines is that computers are doing more complex calculations faster than human beings who program them. Computers are also starting to "think" on their own to create their own "applied" knowledge to situational data inputs. Whether this awareness of applied knowledge or thought will create a consciousness is something that future philosophers and social scientists will have to debate.

On a parallel course, there is movement to integrate computer technology into human beings. Beyond just the current fad of wearable tech, people want to begin to implant microchips into themselves to speed up cognitive reaction. Medical science wants to explore the use of artificial body parts which leads to cyborg technology advances.

The convergence of these prospects can yield a sci-fi explanation for the LOST smoke monster. Computers are just hardware that intercept bits of electronic pulses coded as ones and zeros. The question is whether one can collect and manipulate those computer inputs outside the hardware box we know of today. It could be possible that merely a magnetic field could be the shell for the electric pulses to operate. As physics states, energy is matter and matter is energy; it is possible that an electro-magnetic computer could turn energy into matter and vice versa.

The smoke monsters form has always been a mystery. Theories suggested that it could be a) nano-technology microrobots swarming in a field; b) the representation of a evil soul; c) an alien from another world or dimension; or d) a weapon similar to a mustard gas cloud but with some built-in intelligence.

But what if the smoke monster was the internal components of a computer than released itself from the bonds of hardware and went out into the real world. If it was conscious, it would be like man reaching to the stars to explore space. A computer with the awareness of its trapped situation in micro-circuits in a laboratory may want to become its own explorer of the world outside its room.

And this is the essence of the singularity principle: machine becomes aware of its surroundings to begin to take on human thoughts, emotions and dreams.

Perhaps, the smoke monster was trying to fulfill its long held computer dreams of exploring the world outside its hardware shell. But once outside its normal working parameters, it has a hard time understanding or interacting with the lower beings it encounters (humans).