Singularity

I’ve been reading a lot about the concept of a technological singularity recently. This is an idea that, while I had come across it fairly frequently in fiction, was not something I had translated to the real-world. It still seems enormously sci-fi:

A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

Some poking around turns up the fact that there’s an institute devoted to it, several foundations writing about it and even people popping pills to prepare for it.

So, what will having smarter than human masters allow us to do? Catch rabies and die, apparently.

Posted in Tech on Monday March 31, 2008.