‪The Transcension Hypothesis - What comes after the Singularity?‬

Uh-huh...

Let me say that I am more than a little skeptical of this "hypothesis."

What comes after the Technological Singularity will be pretty much, for humanity, the same thing that happened after the Industrial Revolution.

That's: humanity will just have a more complex world with which they must contend.

A hypothesis is by is by definition a theory. Proving the hypothesis is not the goal here. Simply a way to explore the infinite possibilities our exponentially expanding technologies present.

Stanislaw Lem imagined advanced A.I. superintelligences disappearing into black holes in his 1981 story "Golem XIV" (written in the form of a lecture by a superintelligent A.I. on the topic of 'toposophy', i.e. the levels of possible intelligence, rather than a conventional narrative), which can be found in the book "Imaginary Magnitudes" (pages 96-99 of the story in my edition, which are on pages 222-225 of the book). Here's a relevant chunk:

"Meanwhile we come to the next transition of the mind. I would have to drop a library on you to describe this stage of cerebral activities, so I shall restrict myself to the principles. Thought strikes root in deeper and deeper layers of matter: its relay races first consist of moderately excited hadrons and leptons, and then of such reactions as require enormous quantities of energy to be channeled and controlled. There is no great novelty in this, for protein, which is undoubtedly unthinking in scrambled eggs, thinks in a skull: one has only to arrange the molecules and atoms properly. When that succeeds, nuclear psychophysics arises, and the tempo of operations becomes critical. This is because processes spread out in real time over billions of years sometimes have to be re-created in seconds. It is as though someone wanted to think through the whole history of life on Earth in detail, and in a few seconds, since to him it is a small but unavoidable step in his reasoning. The mind-carrying capability of a quantum speck, however, is interfered with by the electron shells of wandering atoms, so they must be squeezed and compressed--the electrons must be forced into the nuclei. Yes, my dear physicists, you are not mistaken in seeing something familiar in this, for the sinking of electrons into protons begins to occur, as in a neutron star. From the nuclear point of view this Intelligence, indefatigably working toward autocephalia, has become a star--a small one, to be sure, smaller than the moon, and almost imperceptible, radiating only in the infra-red, giving off the thermal waste of psychonuclear transformations. That is its feces. Beyond this, my knowledge unfortunately grows vague. The supremely intelligent heavenly body, whose embryo was the rapidly growing, multiskinned onion of Intelligence, begins to contract, gyrating faster and faster like a top, but not even its near-light-speed revolutions will save it from being sucked into a black hole, since neither centrifugal nor any other force can resist gravitation at the Schwarzschild horizon.

"It is suicidal heroism when a seat of Intelligence becomes a veritable scaffold, for no one in the Universe is as close to nothingness as a mind which, in growing in power, engenders its own doom, although it knows that once it touches the gravitational horizon, it will never stop. So why does this psychical mass continue toward the abyss? Is it because it is precisely there, on the horizon of total collapse, that the density of energy and the intimacy of nuclear connections reach a maximum? Does this mind voluntarily float above the black pit that opens inside it, in order at the rim of catastrophe to think with all the energy which the Universe pours into the astral gap of its fugues? In that borderland of stayed execution, where the conditions of the toposophical pinnacle of the world are fulfilled, should one suspect insanity rather than Intelligence? Indeed pity, if not contempt, is deserved by this distillate of million-year-long metamorphoses, this supremely wise leviathan condensed into a star, who worked so very hard and so increased its powers, in order finally to get atop a black hole and fall into it! That is how you see it, isn't it? But postpone your judgment for a while. I need only a few more moments of your attention.

...

"I see a frightening-amusing feature in this edifice, whose total knowableness without reservation Einstein so confidently professed--he, the creator of a theory that contradicted his confidence, because it led to a place where it itself broke down, and where every theory must break down: in the world torn asunder. For it foretells sunderings and exits which it cannot itself penetrate; yet one can exit from the world anywhere, provided one strikes a blow at it, of the force of a star in collapse. Is it physics alone which appears incomplete under such constraints? Are we not reminded here of mathematics, whose every system is incomplete as long as one remains inside it, and which can be grasped only by going outside it, into richer domains? Where is one to look for them, if one stands in the real world? Why does the table made of stars always wobble on some singularity? Can it be that a growing Intelligence encountered the frontiers of the world, before it encountered its own? And what if not every exit from the Universe is equal to annihilation? But what does it mean, that one who leaves cannot return, even if surviving the transition, and that the proof of this impossibility of return is accessible here? Can it be that the Universe was designed as a bridge, designed to collapse under whoever tries to follow the Builder, so that they cannot get back if they find him? And if he does not exist, could one become him?"