The Singularity

Just realized that I have not linked to Vernor Vinge’s article on the singularity (which you can read here). The reason I bring this up is this article which a coworker just refered me to. It talks about the coming robotic age (my appelation for it, not his) and it’s affect on our economy. The reasons this caught my eye are twofold: one, it evokes the idea of the singularity and what might happen when all of this technology accelerates to these speeds; and, two, the idea that our economy is not quite prepared to handle this sort of change.

The odd part of this is that two days ago a couple of my friends from work were sitting with me at lunch and this exact topic came up. I even referenced the idea of the self service lines mentioned in this article. I brought up the fact (yes, I said fact, you can’t argue otherwise) that our economy is going to run into some very peculiar difficulties handling this sort of thing. Ours (despite the conservative view to the contrary) is not a wellfare culture and we are not prepared for the scale of change in our working population that this sort of thing is going to bring about.

Somehow this also seems rather relevant to my last couple of posts. You can extrapolate for yourselves.