It always surprises me when i hear that people have a 2012 fixation. It reminds me of one storyline in Philip K Dick’s “Confessions of a Crap Artist”, which i heard was based on a real-life sequence of events in California (to the extent that any sequence of events happening in California can be called part of “real-life”). A group of people are convinced that Everything Will Change, and that Only They Will Be Saved. They pick a definite place and time for it to happen, out of the ether. The protagonist doesn’t turn up at the meeting due to a nested complex of personal reasons. And what happens when Everything Still Looks More Or Less The Same? The group blames the person who didn’t show up; they start Talking About It Even Louder; and life goes on.
I decided that i had a weird theory about The Singularity back in 2002, when i actually read Vernor Vinge’s writing about it for the first time:
This is my theory:
How people look at, and talk about, The Singularity, is dictated by their experience of orgasm. Either it’s a one-shot, big pulse, big mess, and all over, or it’s a series of augmenting waves, each driven by the impetus of the last, without a definite endpoint, just a glorious supercession.
Of course even the best orgasm has to stop sometime. Then what happens? You nap for a little while, get up and have a snack, go to the toilet, and life goes on.
[...] I think i still hold to my weird theory about the singularity: i don’t think we see a big shift, a kind of “Boom!”, everywhere at once, but a series of supercessing waves, each building on the last. I don’t think there is a need for a totalising narrative; shared stories differ in every place. [...]
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