I’m fas­ci­nated by the idea of the tech­no­log­i­cal sin­gu­lar­ity. I’m still not sure whether it’s just a fan­ci­ful cre­ation of hope­ful sci-fi authors, or the actual not-too-distant fate of mankind. The fact that it’s sup­posed to hap­pen within my life­time both scares me and makes me look for­ward to it. I com­pletely under­stand why some call it Nerd Rapture.

The prob­lem is that I’ve been hav­ing trou­ble explain­ing it to other, less nerdy peo­ple around me. Quite frankly, the fact that the sin­gu­lar­ity, espe­cially as a philo­soph­i­cal con­cept, is not the eas­i­est con­cept to explain only makes it more appeal­ing to me, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try. Here is my first attempt.

Good ol’ Wikipedia defines the sin­gu­lar­ity as “the hypo­thet­i­cal future emer­gence of greater-than-human intel­li­gence through tech­no­log­i­cal means, very prob­a­bly result­ing in explo­sive superintelligence. Since the capa­bil­i­ties of such intel­li­gence would be dif­fi­cult for an unaided human mind to com­pre­hend, the occur­rence of a tech­no­log­i­cal sin­gu­lar­ity is seen as an intel­lec­tual event hori­zon, beyond which the future becomes dif­fi­cult to under­stand or predict.”

How exactly we’ll reach that point is less inter­est­ing to me than the idea that there will be a point “beyond which the future becomes dif­fi­cult to under­stand or pre­dict.”  Dur­ing an early morn­ing philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion with the girl­friend (we have those for some rea­son) I won­dered whether we are in a post-singularity world in com­par­i­son to peo­ple from the past. The whole notion of the sin­gu­lar­ity rests upon the rapidly accel­er­at­ing pace of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment, after all, and a mod­ern day smart phone would indeed be a mys­te­ri­ous, mag­i­cal object to any­one from more than 70 years or so ago. But would they relate to our world the way we would relate to the post-singularity world?