Singularity (Part 1 of 9): Hard Rapture*

1. Faster computers memory storage, retrieval, and processing more efficient.

2. World-wide web increases in volume and complexity. Search and navigation through web improves. With faster computers able to store, retrieve, and manipulate larger amounts of information: navigation through the web becomes more immediate.

3. Faster computers enable more immediate and complex 3-D image construction and manipulation. Standard commercial computer has processing power to construct, manipulate, and navigate through fairly detailed VR (virtual reality) spaces. Sites on the web begin to incorporate VR formats. Vicinity becomes term for VR site City standard web vicinity format.

4. Developments in image recognition leads to 3-D scanner technology. 3-D scanners look like hand held video cameras. 3-D motion scanner.

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

* "The future ain't what it used to be." Yogi Berra

"The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as Moore's law. In the mid-1970's Gordon Moore, a leading inventor of integrated circuits and later chairman of Intel, observed that we could squeeze twice as many transistors onto and integrated circuit every twenty-four months...² There is a gentle but unmistakable exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth... it took three years to double the price performance of computing at the beginning of the twentieth century and two years in the middle, and it takes about one year currently... ³ For These reasons, it is reasonable to expect human brain capacity, at least in terms of hardware computational capacity, for one thousand dollars by 2020... By 2050, one thousand dollars of computing power will exceed the processing power of all human brains on earth."⁴

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; 56,68,126-7

2. “It can’t continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens... We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit.” Gordon Moore, April 2005, Techworld

3. "But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities." Bill Joy, Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us, Wired Magazine

3. "Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

"Carlyle couldn't help guffawing. 'They torched off their own Hard Rapture!'⁵ "...Once you reach singularity, there are further singularities within it, faster and faster, and in very short order the intelligences involved have fucked off out of our universe, or lost interest in it - we don't know. What's left is incomprehensible artifacts."⁶

Ken MacLeod, Newton's Wake; 26-7.

5. "Rapturist theology, which was popularized in the U.S. in the 19th century by a renegade Irish Anglican preacher named John Nelson Darby. A proponent of a prophetic branch of theology known as premillennial dispensationalism, Darby asserted that a series of signs—including wars, immorality, and the return of the Jews to Israel—signal the End of Days. Once the end is nigh, all true believers will be raptured to meet Christ. After that, Darby taught, the world will enter a horrifying seven-year period of Tribulation, during which a charismatic Antichrist will seize power. But in the end, he prophesied, the Antichrist will be vanquished by Christ at Armageddon, and Christ’s 1,000-year reign of peace and justice will begin. This, in brief, is the theology taught by evangelists such as Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, and many others—including Tim LaHaye." Craig Unger, American Rapture Vanity Fair Magazine.

6. "As an alternative to the excessive and often sterile spaces of rationalist planning, Aldo van Eyck proposed that architects plan buildings and cities of 'labrinthine clarity,' substituting a strict hierarchy of spaces with more multifarious order." Simon Sadler, The Situationist City; 30.