nameandnature

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

The idea of the Singularity comes from an article by Vernor Vinge. Vinge says that, what with the progress in genetics and computer hardware (such as the trend computer people know as Moore's Law), it's likely that we will eventually create entities with greater than human intelligence. When this happens, those entities will know how to create entities even more intelligent than they are, and so on. With ever increasing speed, the curve of intelligence against time will move upwards, and our successors wlll pass beyond our comprehension (the name "Singularity" comes from the mathematical term for the place on a curve where an infinity occurs, such as at x=0 in the graph of 1/x). As Vinge writes:

This change will be a throwing-away of all the human rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye - an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that were thought might only happen in a million years (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.

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