by James John Bell

Created on: March 11, 2008

The technological take over of the planet isn't just happening fast. It's happening at an exponential rate, already impacting much of the world. Contrary to the commonsense, intuitive, linear view, we won't just experience 100 years of "progress" in the twenty-first century-it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.

The near-future results of exponential technological growth will be staggering: the merging of biological and nonbiological entities in bio-robotics, plants and animals engineered to grow pharmaceutical drugs, software-based "life," smart robots, and atom-sized machines that self-replicate like living matter. Some individuals are even warning that we could lose control of this expanding techno-cornucopia and cause the total extinction of life as we know it. Others are researching how this permanent technological overdrive will affect us. They're trying to understand what this new world of ours will look like and how accelerating technology already impacts us.

A number of scientists believe machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence within a few decades, leading to what's come to be called the "Singularity". Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil defines this phenomenon as "technological change so rapid and profound it could create a rupture in the very fabric of human history."

The Singularity - When Technology Takes Over the World

Singularity is technically a mathematical term, perhaps best described as akin to what happens on world maps in a standard atlas. Everything appears correct until we look at regions very close to the poles. In the standard Mercator projection, the poles appear not as points but as a straight line. Each line is a singularity: Everywhere along the top line contains the exact point of the North Pole, and the bottom line is the entire South Pole.

The singularity on the edge of the map is nothing compared to the singularity at the center of a black hole. Here one finds the astrophysicist's singularity, a rift in the continuum of space and time where Einstein's rules no longer function. The approaching technological Singularity, like the singularities of black holes, marks a point of departure from reality. Explorers once wrote "Beyond here be dragons" on the edges of old maps of the known world, and the image of life as we approach these edges of change are proving to be just as mysterious, dangerous, and controversial.

There is no concise definition for the Singularity. Kurzweil and many transhumanists define it as "a future

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