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wheN the siNGularity is more thaN a literary device
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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-perfor-
mance 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 infor-
mation can emerge, and so sf writers occasionally mutter about
how hard it is to tell a story set after the information Singular-
ity. 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
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