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Singularity.

Vernor Vinge\'s Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to \"upload\" our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker\'s next novel would have it) Postsingular.

The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It\'s the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity \"the rapture of the nerds,\" an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.

At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.

The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn\'t send out transporter-equipped drones -- instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn\'t hope to explain them.

Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it\'s the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality. 

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When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil

(Originally published in Asimov\'s Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005)	

It\'s not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a spiritual one.

The Singularity -- a notion that\'s crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge -- describes the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our \"progress\" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds.

Singularities are, literally, holes in space from whence no information can emerge, and so SF writers occasionally mutter about how hard it is to tell a story set after the information Singularity. Everything will be different. What it means to be human will be so different that what it means to be in danger, or happy, or sad, or any of the other elements that make up the squeeze-and-release tension in a good yarn will be unrecognizable to us pre-Singletons.

It\'s a neat conceit to write around. I\'ve committed Singularity a couple of times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton Charlie Stross, the mad antipope of the Singularity. But those stories have the same relation to futurism as romance novels do to love: a shared jumping-off point, but radically different morphologies.

Of course, the Singularity isn\'t just a conceit for noodling with in the pages of the pulps: it\'s the subject of serious-minded punditry, futurism, and even science.

Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He\'s a serial entrepreneur who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields of optical character recognition (machine-reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through a careful review of the literature and the judicious application of first principles and reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of Heinlein novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest
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