The Coming Singularity

There is a concept buzzing around called a Singularity. I've heard of it a couple of times recently, once from an old Science Magazine Podcast from 2/16/08 and more recently from an NPR Science Friday Podcast from 6/6/08.

You may have heard of the term Singularity when applied to Astrophysics. They call the first moment of the big bang a singularity because there is no way to know what comes before it.

In the sense I'm referring to here, it's also describing an explosive change that one cannot see across, but in this case, it's something that's going to happen to humanity in the future.

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Vernor Vinge. He started writing for Analog Magazine in 1966, so I'm sure I've read much of his short story works, since my father was an avid reader of Analog since I was very young. But the book that I really liked was Across Realtime, which was a compilation of short stories built into a novel. In the novel, a technology called a bobble is invented and used as a weapon of war. Big silvery bubbles are generated by this technology, which they later find out are not frozen matter, but bubbles of frozen time. Once they realize what they have, the technology is used to travel (one-way) to the future.

In the story, everyone that goes into their bubbles of stopped time that emerges about a hundred years later emerges to find out that the world is suddenly empty of people. Unsure of whether there was an invasion or some other kind of catastrophe, many of them got back in their bubbles of frozen time and skipped forward far into the future. No one ever could answer what happened to all the people, but they guessed that it happened suddenly. Did they wipe themselves out, experience the religious idea of rapture, or did the "graduate" and evolve into the next form of human, possibly a pure energy form? In Vinge's book, it was this unsolved mystery, but in real life, it's seen as a possible future.

Ray Kurzweil has a book called The Singularity Is Near where he explores this concept. He believes that technology, in particular machine technology, is growing on an exponential growth curve. This means that it accelerates and even the rate of acceleration is speeding up, to the point where it quickly outstrips our ability to comprehend it. The question is whether this is going to be a cause for mourning or celebration. If humans are going to graduate to some new form soon, what will happen to life as we know it? Are we going to forget the simple pleasures of enjoying a cool clear day, walking in the woods, eating a good meal, and laughing with friends? Are we talking about an existence like the Borg in the Star Trek series? I find the whole concept as difficult to grasp as religion.