In an era when artificial intelligence thinks and reasons like humans, the question turns back to the human brain. The new book "The Singularity Is Nearer" does not stop at predicting the future of AI. It asks how human intelligence is formed and, going further, what kind of being humans will evolve into alongside AI.
At the heart of the book is the author's signature theory, the Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM). It argues that the human neocortex does not store the world like photographs but instead finds patterns in repeated experience, links small patterns into higher-level ones and constantly predicts what comes next. Recognizing a face, reading emotion from an expression and expanding letters into sentences and stories all begin, in this view, with hierarchical pattern recognition.
According to the author, modern deep learning and generative AI likewise learn relationships and rules from vast amounts of data and use them to predict the next outcome, an approach that echoes how the human neocortex works. The book goes a step further and extends the question to whether an AI mind and consciousness could emerge from an information-processing structure with sufficient complexity and connectivity. One intriguing passage is a thought experiment called "You 2.0." If your memories, experiences, emotions and ways of thinking were perfectly copied into a digital system, would that being be "you," or another being identical to you? It is compelling in that a discussion of AI ultimately leads back to the old philosophical questions of human identity and consciousness.
What makes the book's central question all the more meaningful is that it asks what remains for humans in the AI era. While AI seeks the optimal pattern within a set goal, humans can change the goal itself and pose new questions. Not losing the "ability to choose an unfamiliar path" matters as much as the ability to use AI well.
The author advises against being preoccupied with whether AI will surpass humans. In an era when AI is rapidly expanding toward human levels of intelligence, the point is to focus on what we will keep as uniquely human capabilities. It is a book that speaks of the future of technology while at the same time asking about the future of humanity. 26,000 won.
