> Same with the Shingles vaccine.

They're giving Shingrex prophylactically now.

Right, text to "game".

Remember the Trek episode where we get to see Barkley's custom holodeck scenario with Deanna Troi's expy playing the role of the goddess of pleasure?

That kind of game?

I wish they had that 25 years ago.

That is the most immersive and smoothest real-time overlay I've ever seen.

The singularity is the result of human society being under the control of a superhuman intelligence, whether biological, artificial, or mixed. This includes rapid technological advancement and the society's evolution and goals being literally incomprehensible to mere normal humans of today.

The singularity is a post-human era. Unless the singularity is avoided (eg, by Drexlerian confinement, or perhaps Egan's argument that superhuman intelligence isn't a real thing and as such no singularity develops) physical extinction of humanity is not the worst possibility. Mere human level intelligences could be treated as simple computational devices like traffic light sensors.

The paper spends some time on the possibility of avoiding the singularity, and it's all in terms of preventing the unlimited development of superintelligence. That is what distinguishes a singularity from mere rapid technological growth.

Did you finish reading the paper?

Sorry you’re out of touch, not my fault.

This isn't just a random source, this is the primary source on the singularity in the modern sense. Vinge has been the primary promoter of the concept since the seventies. Well before Kurzweil shifted from creating computer companies to writing speculative fiction.

And the sentence you quoted doesn't say what you claim.

"The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence."

"Creation of entities with greater than human intelligence" is the important point.

The singularity is not just a faster technological revolution.

It's a change in the minds that drive evolution.

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

If the minds that run society are no different from ours it may lead places better (for us) than a singularity, but it will still be an imaginable society.

Those minds may be biological brains, digital ones, or a mix of the two. But the distinguishing characteristic of the singularity is that they are not merely human. And the resulting society will not be one that humans can understand.

They produced a society unimagined to the people who lived before. This is a commonplace phenomenon. It's just ordinary technological revolution. There are people alive today who have lived through one.

The singularity is not just more future shock. It's a change of state to one where the minds behind society are fundamentally different, more powerful, than mortal man.

It’s happened multiple times starting with the Neolithic revolution and farming.

That already happened.

The future meddling in the past is none so benevolent. Currently being made into a streaming series.

You haven't read "The Peripheral" I take it.

This is not a new theory. Greg Egan used it as the basis of his short story Mister Volition published in Interzone in 1995 and collected in Luminous in 1999. It's worth reading.

Go read Lockstep by Karl Schroeder.

Pekinese maybe. One of those terrible mutants with the crushed sinus.

The singularity is not just more "rapid change". It's not like the Industrial Revolution or the Information Revolution or the Internet. All of these things were still under the control of merely human minds.

Beings of mere human intelligence will be like animals after the singularity, compared to the vast and cool intellects in charge of the world. Asking a human about what it will be like is like asking a dog or a raccoon about the Industrial Revolution.

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

If it's actually the singularity the only answer is "we can't know". That's what makes it the singularity.

Google's is pretty useful. I bought an Echo Dot and returned it because Alexa was completely useless. Siri is better but it keeps changing and often for the worse.

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

People keep using this as a dumping ground for all kinds of futurological topics.

It's like eating Minecraft animals.

Wow, this is like feeding an expert system script into a neural network to create a machine-learning-based expert system. REALLY interesting, since it's explicitly encoding real-world information.

They may have shown entangled states of loosely distributed molecules throughout the brain correlated to brain activity, but I see no reason to leap to any conclusions about consciousness.