If the Singularity proponents are right, the world is going to get really weird—but not in the way they expect.
The common present-day usage of the term “Singularity” actually has a few different definitions, depending upon who you’re talking to and how “serious” they are about the subject.
At the broadest end, the Singularity refers to a point in the future where technologically driven changes have hit so hard and so fast that people on the near side of the Singularity wouldn’t be able to understand the lives of people living on the far side of one; the lives of the post-Singularity citizens simply wouldn’t make sense to pre-Singularity folks. People who adopt this perspective tend to weave all sorts of future-y technological things into it, from radical longevity to personal robots to geoengineering, but always with the underlying point that these things are really disruptive to our lives. This is the usage that I am personally most comfortable with.
In its narrowest form, conversely, “Singularity” refers exclusively to the process described by Vinge, the creation of greater-than-human intelligence, which is then able to make itself even smarter, and so on in something that is occasionally called an “intelligence explosion”; whether or not the lives of post-Singularity citizens would make sense is an irrelevant question—the ultra-intelligent entities would be so much smarter and more powerful that human beings are little more than ants in comparison. People who adopt this perspective often get annoyed at the first group for talking about things that aren’t related to intelligence, and tend to see the Singularity as something that could easily lead to the End of Everything. Many of the people associated with the Singularity Summit take this approach.
Somewhere in the middle are those who take the intelligence explosion concept, and use that as the engine for all sorts of ultra-tech fun: brain uploads, “computronium,” endless digital lives lived in virtual worlds, and the like. These folks, as opposed to the former group, tend to see the Singularity as something generally desirable. They will, of course, acknowledge the potential for Bad Things to happen, but that’s not the thrust of their arguments. The Singularity as presented in Ray Kurzweil’s books falls into this category.
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