One Singular Sensation

There has been much talk--someplace, I'm sure--about what has been called the "Singularity." Ray Kurzweil's latest--The Singularity Is Near, for example, discusses it, and it is becoming the big topic in contemporary science-fiction. What is the "Singularity"? It's supposedly a real thing, referring to the point at which technological advance happens so fast that even the near future cannot be predicted with any accuracy. (This is actually a great relief to those of us who write forcasts of our various industries and worry about being wrong.) More specifically, it can be defined as:

A future event in which technological progress and societal change accelerate due to the advent of superhuman intelligence, changing our environment beyond the ability of pre-Singularity humans to comprehend or reliably predict. This event is named by analogy with the breakdown of modern physics knowledge near the gravitational singularity of a black hole.

Basically, once we develop thinking machines that can replicate themselves, that's the ballgame. Many experts (to the extent that there can be any) feel that the Singularity will arive sometime in the 2030s. So watch out.

There are many SF authors writing about post-Singularity life, and reading Charles Stross's Singularity Sky makes "traditional" SF (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, even Philip K. Dick, my favorite) seem downright quaint. It makes one almost nostalgic for the future of the past. Or, as Yogi Berra once said, "The future ain't what it used to be."

I came across an interesting year-old article in Popular Science about the convergence (there's that word again!) between SF and reality.