If you’ve got any spare change, the Lifeboat Foundation of Minden, Nevada, has a worthy cause for your consideration. Sometime this century, probably sooner than you think, scientists will likely succeed in creating an artificial intelligence, or AI, greater than our own. What happens after that is anyone’s guess — we’re simply not smart enough to understand, let alone predict, what a superhuman intelligence will choose to do. But there’s a reasonable chance that the AI will eradicate humanity, either out of malevolence or through a clumsily misguided attempt to be helpful. The Lifeboat Foundation’s AIShield Fund seeks to head off this calamity by developing “Friendly AI,” and thus, as its website points out, “will benefit an almost uncountable number of intelligent entities.” As of February 9, the fund has raised a grand total of $2,010; donations are fully tax deductible in the United States.

The date of this coming “Technological Singularity,” as mathematician and computer scientist Vernor Vinge dubbed the moment of machine ascendance in a seminal 1983 article, remains uncertain. He initially predicted that the Singularity (sometimes referred to, in less reverential tones, as the “Rapture of the nerds”) would arrive before 2030. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose book The Singularity Is Near was turned into a movie last year, places it in 2045. Those predictions are too conservative for Canadian science fiction juggernaut Robert J. Sawyer: in his WWW trilogy, whose third volume, Wonder, appears in April, the Singularity arrives in the autumn of 2012.

If anyone is ideally suited to bring this rich vein of sci-fi angst into day-after-tomorrow territory, it’s Sawyer. In addition to sitting on two of the Lifeboat Foundation’s advisory boards, the fifty-year-old Ottawa native is one of the most successful Canadian authors of the past few decades, with twenty novels to his credit, including The Terminal Experiment (which won the 1995 Nebula Award for best novel), Hominids (which won the Hugo Award in 2003), and FlashForward (which in 2009 was turned into a short-lived television series on ABC starring Joseph Fiennes). He’s also a meticulous realist, setting his novels in real scientific milieus such as the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory; the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland; and, in the WWW books, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s his nerdly grasp of the real-world march of scientific progress that makes the books work — and, ultimately, makes the Lifeboat Foundation sound a little less crazy than you might initially think.

In the trilogy’s first volume, Wake (2009), Sawyer introduces us to Caitlin Decter, a blind teenage math whiz who regains her sight, thanks to an advanced retinal implant — and, through a side effect that Sawyer manages to make surprisingly plausible, gains the ability to “see” the underlying structure of the data streams that make up the World Wide Web. Decter’s presence in cyberspace helps spark the awakening of a nascent consciousness embodied in the billions of lost information packets bouncing aimlessly around the Internet. With Decter’s help, this “Webmind” begins to absorb all the information on the web, becoming steadily more intelligent.

In Watch (2010), Webmind’s existence is revealed to the world — and the US National Security Agency (NSA) moves swiftly to terminate it before its powers can further expand, despite the fact that Webmind has rid the world of email spam as a goodwill gesture, and has pledged to work tirelessly to increase the “net happiness of the human race.” Webmind and Decter (along with her physicist father, her economist/game theorist mother, and a zany gang of other conveniently didactic characters) thwart the attack, and the volume ends with Webmind rejecting George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a world watched over by a pervasive Big Brother.

“It was the lack of observation that allowed genocides and hate crimes,” Webmind muses. “It was the existence of dark corners that allowed rape and child molestation.” But that will no longer be a problem, thanks to its “countless eyes, beholding all. The World Wide Web surrounds today. And that day — that wondrous day — is upon you now.”

Sawyer is a details man; his evocation of day-to-day life at the Perimeter Institute, for example, is spot on. But he’s also an ideas guy. “It’s absolutely the philosophy that comes first,” he told Philosophy Now magazine last fall. “I work out what I want to say thematically, what my arguments are going to be, and then discover the characters and the plot twists that support that while I’m actually writing the book.”

The resulting novels function as extended philosophical thought experiments. The themes in the trilogy, Sawyer says, include “game theory and altruism and consciousness studies and information theory and primate language studies.” And the science he describes is almost entirely today’s science, faithfully rendered. Just a few key facts have changed, most notably that consciousness has emerged spontaneously in a massively complex network, in a way that some scientists believe is possible and others don’t. (Arthur C. Clarke predicted essentially the same thing more than forty years ago, except it arose within the telephone network instead of the Web.) The WWW thought experiment asks two related but distinct questions: If it happens, what will humans do about it? And what should they do?

In principle, the advent of a highly capable artificial intelligence that can take over the cognitive burden of running the world sounds quite nice. As British mathematician I. J. Good wrote in an influential paper in 1965, “The first ultraintelligent machine [is] the last invention that man need make.” The reason is that any machine smarter than we are will also be better than we are at designing artificial intelligence, so it will be able to improve on its own capabilities. And that will immediately allow it to enhance itself even more, and so on, in an endless bootstrapping process. Good called it an “intelligence explosion”; Vernor Vinge calls it the “hard takeoff.” In an arbitrarily short time, any super-intelligence will evolve from being a bit smarter than we are to being incomparably smarter — and the balance of power between humans and their erstwhile tools will shift just as quickly.

Back in 2000, the influential Silicon Valley computing pioneer Bill Joy published a dystopian manifesto called “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” in Wired, arguing that the rapid advance of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and AI represents an existential threat to humanity. “Joy’s concern about AI is simple,” Sawyer explained in an article in the Globe and Mail. “If we make machines that are more intelligent than we are, why on earth would they want to be our slaves? In this, I believe he is absolutely right: thinking computers pose a real threat to the continued survival of our species.”