Multiple Singularities

It really shouldn't be this way.  How could people have discussed more than one Singularity?  I'm no Ray Kurzweil, but I thought it was supposed to be that one moment when artificial intelligence exceeded our own.  If only people had paid attention.  You shouldn't do things just because you can.  My son and I disagree on that point.

But people loved the new buzz word and there we have it.  We have battery singularity, the crude oil singularity, blah blah blah.  I think all of that dilution just made it less real when people started talking about it.  And they weren't talking about it because they wanted to.  They were talking about it because it was a real thing.  It had happened.  We just didn't know it yet.

This all would probably be easier to write about if opium was still easily available.  Or at least that's what I imagine would be the case given that Edgar Allen Poe scares the shit out of me.  But perhaps the darkness in his head was more born out of his heart than some Asian opiate.  But still.  It has to be easier.  I'll just have to settle for Coors Light.

Of course there were a lot of people that said that they saw it coming.  They didn't.  They were in fact more crazy than the rest of us.  They didn't see anything but the nose in front of their face.  They were insane.  We were too, we just didn't know that our insanity had consequences that exceeded enriching ass-hats like Lady Gaga.

The world tells you things, you just have to listen.  That isn't very helpful advice.  Because the world is shouting all of the time with a cacophonous blabber of a degree that you can't understand it all.  There is too much.  The data flood is not a modern phenomenon.  We are just able to quantify it more that we were in the past.  The world overwhelms us with inputs.

We can't help but make inferences about how it all comes together.  I had a friend, an engineer trained at MIT, a smart guy.  But he recounted how when he was a kid and set traps to catch game, he ended up with all sorts of theories about how and why it worked.  He was able to come up with patterns.  Patterns with likely no statistical confidence.  But he had them.  And he was one of the smarter ones.  That stuff has to be trained out of us.  We are prone to all sorts of fallacies.  And this was one of the more dangerous ones.