Singular U February 4, 2009 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

So the Singularists are at it again, this time with a university.  Never mind that the oft-promised but seldom-evidenced Singularity has yet to even hint of arriving.  Kurzweil and his devoted followers will point to anything as proof of this modern-day Messiah.  The university “claims it will prepare its students for an impending technological singularity.”  If their server crashing from too much load on the first day is any indication, we’re a long way from such future-breaking asymptotes of technological progress.  Terrence McKenna called the same thing Timewave Zero, and it sounds a lot like New Age hooey to me.  Make up your own mind, but read this quote first from the article linked above:

“We’ve solved lots of problems with processor design and manufacturing, but growth in what we can do with those processors has run into a wall because of the uneven distribution of progress—cranking up processor speed isn’t an option because we haven’t solved our energy problem, and adding more cores provides limited returns because we haven’t figured out how to make writing multithreaded software easy. Meanwhile, other areas of promise, like high-temperature superconductors and carbon nanotubes, have languished because we haven’t figured out how to make them cheaply in bulk. If we’re en route to an inevitable singularity, it’s not a particularly well marked route.”

I’ll better that: it’s not even particularly well defined.