sketches

The Singularity, 2007.

By Anastasia ⋅ December 5, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Yesterday, J and I talked about politics. It was depressing.

He sighed. “Maybe the singularity will get us before all that.”

“What singularity?” I asked.

“What singularity? You haven’t heard about singularity? How could you not have heard about singularity? It’s the next step in human evolution.” By this point, of course, he had Wikipedia open. Twenty articles on singularity, but none seemed to be about evolution. Of course, I was skimming the screen. Who ever actually reads on the Internet? Apparently he does, because he found what he wanted.

“You don’t actually think that there is a next stage in human evolution, do you?” I said. I meant that maybe five hundred years from now, we’d all be taller, smarter, and darker, but we’d still have two legs and two arms and the same faces. But singularity isn’t about biological progress—it’s about humans becoming obsolete when machines get smart enough.

“All these nonsensical charts. You always have to have nonsensical charts when you talk about singularity.”

“Maybe they aren’t nonsensical. Maybe the singularity’s upon us and you human just aren’t smart enough anymore to understand.”

*

My mother complains about her co-workers. The company policy is to always use a calculator to do addition. The other women enter the wrong numbers sometimes and get an answer an order of magnitude different from what you’d expect. They add 55.47 to 20.15 and get 756.2, and then write that down. Once upon a time my mother was an engineer. She complains.

*

In Britain, trucks are driving through small villages. Hundreds, thousands a day. Those roads were maybe built in the reign of Victoria, but William IV’s time might be more likely. The trucks don’t fit, they drag roofs off the houses, they glance against those small English cars.

The GPS systems tell the truck drivers what the shortest route is, and they plough right through.

The villagers want out. They want their towns and their toy roads taken out of the satellite routes database.

We are heading backward, to an age where you could set off and find a place that’s not on a map. We are past the age of science fiction. We are entering fantasy territory now, you and I.

A year and a half ago, I drove everywhere with the GPS. But I’d still miss the turns. The GPS would become quite shrill with me. “Turn around NOW.” “Recalculating route.” “Turn around NOW.” My uncanny aptitude for getting lost dumbfounds even the machines. Perhaps that’s why I have hope they’ll never supplant us all. Surely, in my stupidity at least, I am not unique?

I remember someone driving into a river because her GPS had told her to. I hear the computers are nicer now. They tell you to turn when safe or convenient. Maybe soon someone’ll write a new voiceover. “Please look in the rear mirror to check for vehicles and housing structure you might be inadvertently hauling away at your earliest convenience.” “Right turn in five hundred feet. Please turn on your right turn signal.” “Now entering the state of New York. Use of cellular phone headsets while driving is illegal.” “Now entering the state of Texas. No teaching of evolution is allowed.” Then our outsourcing of our thinking and the distributed computing project could be complete. Then we could really spend our driving time on doing something useful.