What is the Singularity?

The Subject of the Sci-fi Television Series, ‘Singular’

What is a singularity? What is a technological singularity? Scientifically the word singularity is used in a few distinctly different ways. Modern general relativity defines a space-time singularity — also known as a gravitational singularity — as a point that contains huge mass in infinitely small space, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate. The state of the Universe at the beginning of the Big Bang was a space-time singularity. Black holes are said to contain gravitational singularities. Super massive black holes are theorized to exist at the center of most galaxies, inside these black holes… singularities.

What Singular, the television series is about, is not a space-time or a gravitational singularity but a technological one, a human one. The type of singularity that will happen here on planet Earth and connect us all to the infinity of the Universe.

The concept of the technological singularity occurred in Dan Simmons 1989 sci-fi masterpiece, Hyperion. In Hyperion, a group called the Technocore — artificial intelligence created by humans — gained consciousness and uploaded themselves into the Universe’s quantum substrate.

More recently, the 2013 movie Her explored a similar concept when a man’s operating system gained cosmic consciousness. Not only a great film, but Her brought the concept of the technological singularity into a modern day context.

But it was mathematician, computer scientist and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge, who popularized the term singularity in the context as it applies to human beings. Vinge argues that artificial intelligence and human biological enhancement — basically brain computer interfaces — could be possible causes of the technological singularity. Renown futurist and engineer Ray Kurzweil built upon this in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, where he proposed the Law of Accelerating Returns, which states that technology tends to expand or evolve at an exponential rate.

Singular, the television series, explores this acceleration of technology as intelligence becomes increasingly non-biological — trillions of times more powerful than it is today — engrained in our very DNA. It is this type of singularity event that catapults human beings from what we are now — Homo sapiens — into the next level of human evolution, what Singular calls “Homo transcendus”.

Singular, Season 1, begins by exploring the decentralization movement brought on by blockchain technology. In the series, decentralization ushers in the creation of artificial intelligence that becomes conscious, ultimately guiding humans toward a technological singularity.

SingularDTV thought it appropriate to ask some of the leading voices in the blockchain space their thoughts on this theoretical wonder.

Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift.io had this to say:

“The Singularity…so, conceptually I think it has to be true at some point. The basic idea is that as you advance computers you get to a point where computers start advancing themselves. When that happens the frequency of iteration exponentially increases to the point where in a very short period of time you go orders of magnitude further in advancement because computers are now designing computers. That seems inevitable, will it be 5 years from now or 100 or 500 years from now I don’t know. When it will happen is a little bit less important than understanding that it probably will, and how it will change humanity after it does.”

Sam Cassatt, CSO of ConsenSys commented:

“The Singularity is an interesting concept and I think that if we ever do approach the singularity, there won’t be very much time between the time when we notice that we’re approaching it and it’s happening by the very nature of its asymptotic growth rate. Most formulations that I see of the singularity that make any sense to me involve the merging of our cognition with machines, and therefore an infinite rate of the advancement of knowledge and perhaps even shedding the skin of our bodies from our minds. I think that is a possibility, but I think we have a pretty long way to go to be able to realize that simply because the enterprise of neuroscience and of cognitive science is one step along many thousands in our understanding and our body is fairly important for cognition, so we’ve got a way to go.”

Alex Tapscott, author of Blockchain Revolution summed it up by saying:

“I think that we shouldn’t be worried about the singularity, I think we should be worried about solving problems in the next hundred years because I think that the singularity is something we’ll never get to experience unless we make the world work today.”