Massaging Our Public Consciousness? Is the Coming Singularity an Elite Opinion Leader and Agenda Setting Agent?

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords? 

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity — the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts — might happen in just 16 years. 

But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen... 

Once the singularity occurs, people won't necessarily die (they can simply upgrade with cybernetic parts), and they could do just about anything they wanted to — provided it were physically possible and didn't require too much energy, Hibbard said. 

The past two singularities — the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions — led to a doubling in economic productivity every 1,000 and 15 years, respectively, said Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., who is writing a book about the future singularity. But once machines become as smart as man, the economy will double every week or month. 

This rapid pace of productivity would be possible because the main "actors" in the economy, namely people, could simply be replicated for whatever it costs to copy an intelligent-machine software into another computer.

If the newest Singularity becomes sentient, what will it do to and for human beings?

The mainstream media has discovered the coming Singularity. I first became aware of this concept while attending a panel at Worldcon here in Chicago last year. The idea of a paradigm shift where the sum total of computing power is greater than that of the totality of human intelligence is liberating while also being terrifying.

I am curious about if the Singularity will force a rethinking of basic categories of human social organization and interaction. Will race, class, gender, sexuality, and other markers of human difference be subsumed by our shared species identity in the face of A.I.?

Or will the Singularity take all of humankind's worst impulses towards creating social and political hierarchies, reproducing them with levels of cruel and precise efficiency that will make our Colonial and Imperial projects look like the work of ignorant neophytes?

Some scientists think we are already in the midst of the singularity. 

Humans have already relinquished many intelligent tasks, such as the ability to write, navigate, memorize facts or do calculations, Joan Slonczewski, a microbiologist at Kenyon college and the author of a science-fiction book called "The Highest Frontier," (Tor Books, 2011). Since Gutenberg invented the printing press, humans have continuously redefined intelligence and transferred those tasks to machines. 

Now, even tasks considered at the core of humanity, such as caring for the elderly or the sick, are being outsourced to empathetic robots, she said. 

"The question is, could we evolve ourselves out of existence, being gradually replaced by the machines?" Slonczewski said. "I think that's an open question." 

In fact, the future of humanity may be similar to that of mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of cells. Mitochondria were once independent organisms, but at some point, an ancestral cell engulfed those primitive bacteria, and over evolutionary history, mitochondria let cells gradually take over all the functions they used toperform, until they only produced energy. 

"We're becoming like the mitochondria. We provide the energy — we turn on the machines," Slonczewski told LiveScience. "But increasingly, they do everything else."

Thus, a question. When the Singularity comes into existence, the first thing it will likely do is hide from human beings. As the idea of the Singularity is mentioned more frequently by opinion leaders, the mass public is introduced to the concept, and thus prepared to accept it as an inevitable fact.

How do we know that the Singularity itself is not actually behind this shaping of public opinion in preparation for its reveal to the mass public? Given corporate media consolidation and the denseness of ties within (elite) social knowledge networks could the Singularity be massaging public opinion as we speak?