In my approach to writing science fiction (or any fiction for that matter), I love the process of world building: the act of sorting out the basic rules of a story, the laws of magic or the progression of tech, putting them all in their place, and then figuring out where it leads. I know that sounds miserable to some, but for me it's tremendous fun.
In science fiction, there is a tendency to glom onto one advancement or other, then extrapolate the implications to a final conclusion. But if you try to actually take everything into account, and predict where we'll be in a hundred years, modern writers inevitably run into the brick wall of the singularity.
Depending on who you ask, the Singularity will happen within next ten years (no it won't), fifty years (a bit more likely), or two hundred years (only if we plateau soon). And then most people will simply say, "The what-now?"
To put it simply, the Technological Singularity was first proposed by mathematician John von Neumann in 1958 as the event where machines become smart enough to improve themselves at an exponential rate, creating an intelligence explosion that changes the face of humanity. It's called the Singularity, because like a physical singularity (a black hole) all of the rules as we know them fall apart.
That said, the idea has evolved somewhat over the last 60 years. Ray Kurzweil has helped both popularize and expand the concept into being a more holistic event where humanity will transcend into a new kind of being.
This of course has it's detractors, and has to led quite a few scientists calling it the "Futurist's new religion."
However, one of the most convincing pieces of evidence is one like this:
In science fiction, there is a tendency to glom onto one advancement or other, then extrapolate the implications to a final conclusion. But if you try to actually take everything into account, and predict where we'll be in a hundred years, modern writers inevitably run into the brick wall of the singularity.
Depending on who you ask, the Singularity will happen within next ten years (no it won't), fifty years (a bit more likely), or two hundred years (only if we plateau soon). And then most people will simply say, "The what-now?"
To put it simply, the Technological Singularity was first proposed by mathematician John von Neumann in 1958 as the event where machines become smart enough to improve themselves at an exponential rate, creating an intelligence explosion that changes the face of humanity. It's called the Singularity, because like a physical singularity (a black hole) all of the rules as we know them fall apart.
That said, the idea has evolved somewhat over the last 60 years. Ray Kurzweil has helped both popularize and expand the concept into being a more holistic event where humanity will transcend into a new kind of being.
This of course has it's detractors, and has to led quite a few scientists calling it the "Futurist's new religion."
However, one of the most convincing pieces of evidence is one like this:
You can find a silly number of graphs like this one online, but they all show basically the same thing. We are advancing at an exponential rate.
That aside, I think one of my favorite personal anecdotal pieces of evidence was from shortly after I'd written Shakespeare's Choice, in which I predicted the Singularity would take place in 2054. I'd presented the story to two of my research biologist friends, and afterwards, the one looked at me and said, "I don't buy it. It isn't going to happen anytime soon, because science has to be preformed by scientists. It takes long hours and years of patience to make a discovery, and this is just too fast."
We agreed to disagree, but no more than six months later, I listened to a science podcast in which a different researcher was discussing his findings. His team had found a protein that did something or other, and was statistically significant in performing in some kind of biological process. The actual discovery wasn't what made me smile. It was the fact that they had made the discovery by a new process in DNA sequencing that allowed them to analyze over forty thousands samples of their protein within the same amount of time it had taken them to analyze only one sample the year before.
What my friend failed to take into account was the multidisciplinary nature of the world we're moving toward.
And it'll only move faster.
I'm obsessed about the Technological Singularity, because I couldn't write a believable Science Fiction world with out it.
That aside, I think one of my favorite personal anecdotal pieces of evidence was from shortly after I'd written Shakespeare's Choice, in which I predicted the Singularity would take place in 2054. I'd presented the story to two of my research biologist friends, and afterwards, the one looked at me and said, "I don't buy it. It isn't going to happen anytime soon, because science has to be preformed by scientists. It takes long hours and years of patience to make a discovery, and this is just too fast."
We agreed to disagree, but no more than six months later, I listened to a science podcast in which a different researcher was discussing his findings. His team had found a protein that did something or other, and was statistically significant in performing in some kind of biological process. The actual discovery wasn't what made me smile. It was the fact that they had made the discovery by a new process in DNA sequencing that allowed them to analyze over forty thousands samples of their protein within the same amount of time it had taken them to analyze only one sample the year before.
What my friend failed to take into account was the multidisciplinary nature of the world we're moving toward.
And it'll only move faster.
I'm obsessed about the Technological Singularity, because I couldn't write a believable Science Fiction world with out it.