Hippies

Let me back up a bit. What few seem to "get", and most who do "get it" don't talk about, is that the whole "field" of "singularity thinking" is a put-on. And not a very original one.

Arthur C. Clarke had it on good authority that a certain, smart, early hominid reasoned carefully and concluded that if only he could find a sufficiently high tree, he'd be able to touch the moon. That, at least, was an honest mistake on the part of that hominid.

In the 1960s, a different set of false extrapolations drawn on anecdotal reports had a significant political effect. LSD, meditation, free love, communal living and anything else sufficiently Utopian and sufficiently frowned upon by The Man was thrown into a rhetorical soup which, it was promised, would convey transcendence upon all and sundry who partook. Why, maybe if we just concentrate real hard, we can levitate the Pentagon (wink, wink). That concoction was brewed by a diverse crew of self-promoters, tripped out true believers, agitators (of all political affiliations, including The Man his-self), Don Juans (chicks dug it), and subversives (a means to an end for breaking hegemony). Oh, wait, I left out the enterpreneurs who have milked that cash cow ever since (it's like that Beatles song which, I seem to recall, went "All You Need Is Cred").

Fast forward through the style changes, "crack epidemic", Reagan on drugs, and "greed is good" and suddenly the "Yippie / Yuppie Debates" aren't bringing in quite the revenue they once did on the lecture circuit.

And yet, this left the dominant hegemony missing something. After all, that thoroughly neutered 60s babble had at least one real and lasting effect: it politically de-activated large swaths of believers (and to this day). It turned out to be not very subversive at all. It turned out to steer believers away from the protests and, not infrequently, into financial and criminal ruin.

Nauseatingly, you could even then still find the same patter among the Silicon Valley old-blood elites, complete with knowing winks. It became a way of saying, to inferiors, "I don't care to listen to reason, I'm acting by fiat. You need to get some Zen, some Tao, and do penance at a concert by the graying Grateful Dead after which I'm confident you'll appreciate the Wisdom of My Will." And among themselves, it meant, "Hey, who's holding? I haven't gotten high for a while?"

Still, the sparkle was gone. It was disreputable to promote transcendence through drugs and tie-die and jam-sessions. The problem for the Man was how to keep the hypnotic babble, but change the markers. Find something else to talk about besides LSD, so to speak.

Hello "singularity"! And how perfect. How perfectly neutering a transcendence-promising babble! It was an innovation:

Here, too, was a vague but exhausting "vision" of an unimaginable near future where everything is strange yet familiar. Whatever problems we may have today don't matter -- don't bother working on them. Work on that future of miracles instead. Don't waste your time questioning your employer or working to influence the government (except as its actions pertain to your stock option values), go work on that new Intel-inside universal remote control, instead, for it is in that direction that you will find immortality.

Today, "singluarity thinking" has devolved a bit into a parlor game. In a room of people yakking about it the game is to distinguish the con-artists, the dupes, and the knowing-wink-play-alongs. It's great sport and, meanwhile, it still gets regular slashdot space, now IEEE space, sells books, sells lectures, attracts potential trading partners to dinner ("Kurtz will be there!"), and dazzles the kids.

A singularity is coming but it isn't quite a technological one. It's the singularity first posited by the philosophers of the Firesign Theater. It's the moment -- and perhaps it will come at a Ted conference or maybe an O'Reilly Foo -- it's the moment that happens shortly after everyone realizes there are no dupes left in the room, just pretenders, and one of them dares to announce "I think we're all Bozos on this this bus."