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[new] Ah, singularity.... (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#6)
by ericscoles (eris at antikoan) on Wed Oct 1st, 2003 at 01:42:59 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info) http://antikoan.net/

... such a noble dream, to bring forth our successors into the world...

I wonder how Arthur Clarke feels about the Singularists. He always loved to speculate that our "purpose" might be to create our successors through technology.

Singlularism, like New Economism, seems to me to be another new flavor of Catastrophism: "Everything's gonna change, and it's gonna change REAL FAST!" You'd think we would have learned by now that while everything's changing all the time, most things are also staying the same in all the really important ways. For example, we still breathe air, the sun still "rises", corporate bodies still have more power than individuals, and people still want to touch, taste, and feel things the way they grew up doing.

But maybe the deMause camp of PsychoHistorians are right -- maybe we're wired by our peri-natal trauma and birthing drama to always look for catastrophic or cascading changes in the world. Or maybe it's simpler yet, of course: after all, changes are just easier to see when they're bigger and sudden, than when they're smaller and gradual.

But I digress. The singularity, if indeed anything like it ever does happen, won't be something we recognize as it happens. It will be something that we approximate after the fact. And, as such, its its place in time, space and nature will be determined by how we define it. It's not a real thing in any objective sense -- it's a point in time that only makes sense in terms of human understanding, and then, only after the fact.

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Cyborg Liberation? | 6 comments

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