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?

Think­ing about it, the answer is no. The sin­gu­lar­ity would indeed be a sin­gu­lar event in human his­tory, com­pa­ra­ble per­haps only to that long for­got­ten moment very early in the his­tory of our species, when we decided to work together, make tools and shel­ters for our­selves, and farm the land.

I will try to illus­trate with an exam­ple. Let’s say we tech­no­mag­i­cally pluck Donatello off the streets of 1420’s Flo­rence and deposit him on any ran­dom street of any mod­ern city. Would he be bewil­dered? Absolutely. Would he be annoyed at being remem­bered more as a grotesque mutated tur­tle than mak­ing a badass sculp­ture of St. George? Per­haps, but we can’t be sure. There can be no doubt that 1420’s Flo­rence and 2010’s any­where are very dif­fer­ent places. Even 2010’s Flo­rence would look vastly dif­fer­ent to him.

And yet, the dif­fer­ence wouldn’t be that dif­fer­ent though, right? In fact, it would essen­tially still be very much the same. All cities still have streets. Peo­ple still wear clothes. These things may seem obvi­ous, but that’s the point. They are obvi­ous, even to some­one from the past. The same counts for tak­ing peo­ple from our time who are con­sid­ered “prim­i­tive” and have never trav­eled out­side of their area of liv­ing. An Ama­zon­ian tribesman might be shocked at our tall build­ings and lack of nature in urban areas, but he could least still find some com­fort in know­ing that those enor­mous struc­tures are made to con­tain peo­ple, for work or for liv­ing, just like the struc­tures at home. A red­neck Amer­i­can trailer trash evan­gel­i­cal meth­head would be shocked at all the gays and peo­ple with health­care in Ams­ter­dam, but would still think “well they still plug things in the wall to power them.” These com­mon­al­i­ties still exists if you go fur­ther back in time. The mid­dle ages, clas­si­cal antiq­uity, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, all of them full of peo­ple whole still ate food, got annoyed by unfa­vor­able weather, and pooped in holes.

Sure, the fur­ther you go back in time, the more the amount of com­mon ref­er­ence points starts to shrink. A house is a pur­pose­fully built struc­ture, and is there­fore fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from a cave. If you live a nomadic lifestyle and have never seen or heard of a city (because they don’t exist yet, per­haps), then the con­cept of a street must be very strange to you. As such, I could still try to say that a cave­man would see us as we would see the post-singularity enti­ties. But you know what, that’s still not true either. The sin­gu­lar­ity would rede­fine, recon­struct, and com­pletely re–every­thing what it means to be human. Even the cave­men still knew what it was like to be human. They may have thought that light­ning was a great big flashy fart by the Sky­god, but they still pooped in a hole, they still felt pain, and more impor­tantly, their brains were essen­tially the same as ours.

The world after the sin­gu­lar­ity would be com­pletely incom­pre­hen­si­ble to us. You might say that some­one from a thou­sand or two years ago could not have pos­si­bly imag­ined the world as it is today. I would agree with you, no doubt. But we’re not talk­ing about whether those peo­ple could see into the future. Even with our advanced knowl­edge (or per­haps because of it) we can hardly make reli­able pre­dic­tions a decade into the future (and in the case of weath­er­men, not even a day). What we’re talk­ing about here is if they could com­pre­hend it if we were to snatch them from their times and bring them here to face their trans­for­ma­tion into rep­til­ian car­toon action heroes. They would be shocked, absolutely, but even­tu­ally it wouldn’t be too hard to give them some kind of life with­out shel­ter­ing them in a recre­ation of their own world. The amount of com­mon ref­er­ence points would still be enough. You poop in a hole, you stuff food in your mouth, and you put shoes on your feet and you walk down streets. The world is essen­tially still built around the human body and brain.

But if the post-singularity world is a world with­out streets, build­ings, clothes, bod­ies, or even the con­cept of an indi­vid­ual, all of them being replaced by things that we couldn’t even imag­ine in our wildest sci­ence fic­tion fan­tasies, then we would be absolutely lost. That is why it is the sin­gu­lar­ity, because the world is so dif­fer­ent there, so inhu­man, that we couldn’t pos­si­bly get it.

It would be very fun if it really did hap­pen this cen­tury, wouldn’t it?