THE FUTURE OF SINGULARITY

< click to witness the end of the long tail - the complete product - the G-Simpod >

< click here to read i die daily - a fiction written in esperanto >

< click here for some text on the liberation of living inside the market (The New Way) >

< click to see the virtual remnants of the exhibition "we go round and round in the night" >

< click to read text on creating your own micronation - by mary mattingly and paul middendorf >

The Singularity of Humans

Marshall McLuhan said, “When an environment is new, we perceive the old one for the first time.” McLuhan also wrote at great length about Continuity in Discontinuity, or chiasmus: the reversal-of-process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. Kurzweil states that, with the exponential acceleration of development in technology and so-called progress, the human condition will reach a point when we can no longer process our environment from our present perspective as the accelerating speed of growth outpaces our faculties. However, Bertrand Russell made an excellent point, saying that if the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream. Perhaps it is only with the acceleration of change that we can notice and react to it. Finally, Vernor Vinge defines the Singularity as the postulated point or short period in our future when our self-guided evolutionary development accelerates enormously.
The Singularity, though, has been a condition felt by humans that perhaps began before Gutenberg, with alphabets, cave paintings, with artistic expressions that removed us from ourselves, and with the Greeks who abstracted and objectified nature by creating their own cosmos. With these advances, humans need and accept history as myth and an “electric merger of past present and future become today”. In 1962, the philosopher William Barrett used an image of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture to illustrate his book, Irrational Man. Irrational Man is a story told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead. When the condition of existentialism was defined (maybe with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the first half of the 19th century, described by philosopher Edmund Husserl and his student Heidegger, but perhaps we finally had a poster-boy with Jean-Paul Sartre), we understood Ivan Turgenev’s nihilism, which Heidegger defines well as "there is nothing left of Being as such," and we understood existentialism as the consciousness of death, the purposlessness of life, the individual construction of identity to fill the void of meaninglessness. Giacometti was friends with existential and surrealist writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and André Breton.
The discussion of human civilization evolved from a human-death dilemma to human-machine civilization. Kurzweil is predicting singularity as a future happening, but as far as I can tell, it is already here and will continue to grow. It has been depicted by artists from Giacometti to Bellmer, to Friedrich, Goya, Godard, to some interpretations of Reinhard’s black paintings, to name just a few. Technology aids in abstracting us from our face-to-face community, and can be a surrogate for real people. When people are imbedded with different forms of technology, from the wireless to the plastic to the drug, and when we procreate solely outside of the body, we just continue the abstraction from nature and person that began before the Greeks invented the cosmos.

singular:
c.1340, "alone, apart," from O.Fr. singuler "single, separate" (Fr. singulier), from L. singularis "single, solitary," from singulus (see single (adj.)). Meaning "remarkably good, unusual, rare" is from c.1400, though this was a common meaning of L. singularis. (www.eytmonline.com)

Other Definitions of Singularity

Mathematical Singularity - a point where a mathematical function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved.

Technological Singularity - a theoretical point in the development of a scientific civilization at which technological progress accelerates into infinity or beyond prediction. This is believed to occur when artificial intelligence or intelligence amplification reaches a certain level.

Singularity - (operating system) - an operating system research project by Microsoft.

Gravitational Singularity (physics) - an infinity occurring in an astrophysical model, involving infinite curvature (a mathematical singularity) in the space/time continuum, namely black holes, white holes and worm holes.

According to the standard big-bang theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. Singularities are thought to be zonesof in finate density that exist at the core of "black holes." The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density. Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, and infinitely dense.

The Prandtl-Glauert singularity (sometimes referred to as a "vapor cone"), is the point at which a sudden drop in air pressure occurs, and is generally accepted as the cause of the visible condensation cloud that often surrounds an aircraft travelling at transonic speeds, though there remains some debate. It is an example of a mathematical singularity in aerodynamics.

(http://www.big-bang-theory.com/ and www.wikipedia.org)