Are we dumb-asses for the future?

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I saw Ray Kurzweil on TV the other night (actually a web-cast of a TV show) where, as part of his Singularity hypothesis, he predicted that man and machine would be joined by, roughly, the year 2045. This melding of human and artificial intelligence will, by Kurzweil’s estimation, increase our intellect by something like a factor of one billion. OK. Maybe. Maybe not.

But, whether Kurzweil’s predictions are chronologically accurate or not, his concept seems inevitable. Living in a hyper-consumerist society where any edge or advantage can be worth millions of dollars (and clearly the bottom line trumps ethics), sooner or later augmenting our cognition is going to become the norm. (Oddly enough, it seems to me that the only way we might escape this predicament would lie in the first person to be 1,000,000,000 times more intelligent being clever enough not to let on or, greedily protective of the secret, blocking the access of others to the requisite technology. In that case the rest of us can soldier on in our relative imbecility as if nothing ever happened.)

In a post-Singularity world, humanity’s greatest literary accomplishments – let’s say the works of Shakespeare or Goethe – will seem something cute and quaint (at best). Our masterpieces will be akin to a second-grader’s finger painting compared to La Guernica.  Hamlet will have all the literary merit of an ill-conceived grocery list.

What I am wondering is whether or not we are at the end of a certain intellectual paradigm where nothing we’ve created artistically will endure. Are we as little as two generations away from being rendered meaningless? Will we seem pathetic 50 years from now? Is it possible to hope to leave a creative legacy in such a paradigm? I suppose that is not a publishing issue, per se, but one which will obviously effect what we think of as publishing. It’s also damned depressing.