Historical Singularity

Historical Singularity is a concept pioneered by Vernor Vinge in this essay, written in 1993:

• http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html

Briefly, the idea (by analogy with regular singularities) is that there come times in historical progression beyond which it is impossible to make meaningful predictions. Something happens which changes the world so radically as to make it literally incomprehensible to those living in pre-singularity times. Such developments are one-way transitions; once done, they cannot be undone.

An often-cited example is the development of agriculture. To a hunter-gatherer society, the implications of agriculture are (in theory) impossible to appreciate. And by virtue of being able to support a larger population and so forth, an agricultural society cannot go back to a hunter-gatherer society. Well, not without a lot of people dying.

Anyway, the theory further states that the development of AI will be a Historical Singularity. Once AI exists, it is inevitable that better A Is will be generated, either by man or by A Is themselves. This is presumed to be a runaway process, and at some point A Is will become the predominant thinking species. The course of human history will be impossible to predict because it will be dependent on factors outside of humanity.

See Charles Stross' Accelerando stories for a recent example of this line of thought.

One other feature of Historical Singularity is that it occurs concurrently with an accelerating rate of change. The argument goes that the rate of change is now faster than ever before in human history, making developments such as AI near-inevitable. Writers such as Norman Spinrad point out that arguably a man living from 1850-1925 would have seen changes every bit as fundamental and frequent (telephone, railway, global war, antibiotics, quantum theory) as those seen by a man living from 1925-2000 (internet, genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, television, space travel).

So, is it going to happen or not? We don't - can't - know for sure. The best we can do is keep our eyes open: <http://www.singularitywatch.com/>.

The term 'singularity' was coined by Vernor Vinge, who talked about 'The Technological Singularity' (<google:%22technological%20singularity%22>); the only person who's ever used the term 'historical singularity' seems to be Ray Kurzweil, and even then, he doesn't make a big deal about it.