The One-Pronged Revolution

Some could argue that the Singularity is already here; that point in time as Ray Kurzweil famously popularized after which our technologies improve at such an exponential rate that even tomorrow becomes incomprehensible to today.

I would argue we have just about arrived with the contours of the eventual metaverse being rather cleanly delineated by Mathew Ball is his “Metaverse Primer” and the arrival of ChatGPT.

It is true that the world of atoms still has some catching up to do—but in the world of bits we are rapidly approaching the zeroing out of whole domains: when unlimited computer storage is as good as free, the cost and availability of computer processing is effectively unlimited through for example Amazon’s AWS or my preferred service DigitalOcean, and with mass quick iterative software innovation, deployment and orchestration of microservices becoming possible because of technologies like Docker—the barrier to having really powerful ubiquitous software act upon the world, whether to solve problems, for increased luxuries, or even entertainment, becomes an absolute abundance as Peter H. Diamandis would argue.

A hefty amount of this software and technology possibility and potential, however, may go untapped as it is inevitably subject to the even more complex whims of human nature.

The question then becomes how to have the commensurate revolution in human intellectual, ethical, and political spheres to fully realize the fruits of work pioneered by the likes of Alan Turing on up to the Googlers—when, on the other hand we are faced with the barbarity of Afghanistan August 2021.

In other words: will the Singularity be televised before the climate crisis truly catches up with us?