Jamais Cascio has this brilliant yet accessible way to clarify complex issues central to the understanding of the unfolding technological future. Here is an excellent presentation of the Singularity concept, which has become the buzz word of the future.

clipped from www.openthefuture.com The Singularity concept remains inescapable these days, although rarely well-understood Both are unfortunate developments, for essentially the same reason: the popularity of the term “Singularity” has undermined its narrative value Its use in a discussion is almost guaranteed to become the focus of a debate, one that rarely changes minds The version of the Singularity story that I think is well-worth holding onto says this: due to more detailed understandings of how the brain works, more powerful information and bio technologies, and more sophisticated methods of applying these improvements, we are increasingly able to make ourselves smarter, both as individuals and as a society. But as we get smarter, our aggregate capacity to further improve the relevant sciences and technologies also gets better; in short, we start to make ourselves smarter, faster

“At a certain point in the future, probably within the next few decades, the smarter, faster, smarter, faster cycle will have allowed us to remake aspects of our world — and, potentially, ourselves — in ways that would astonish, confuse, and maybe even frighten earlier generations. To those of us imagining this point in the future, it’s a dramatic transformation; to those folks living through that future point, it’s the banality of the everyday.”