I have been thinking all day about that theory that states that humanity faces a crisis within the next two hundred years, based on the sheer improbability of us being born in such a time of change, with all the millions of relatively stable years behind us and, if there is no catastrophe awaiting us, the millions of stable years ahead. I’d love to remember where I read that; it sounds Greg Egan-ish. I remember thinking it was silly when I first read it. That every year in every age was a time of great change, but the perspective of history makes it look stabler than it was.
Yesterday, the folks at BoingBoing linked to a podcast with Vernor Vinge, the SF writer noted for predicting the nature of the Internet as we have come to know it today, way back in the seventies, when the Internet was a collection of text-only documents shared by academic institutions with such wonderful programs as Archie, Veronica and Gopher.
He is also famous for predicting that society is changing so fast that it is exponential in nature, that if these trends continue, in a couple hundred years, humanity will be so far beyond what we now are, that we would have as much in common with them as a goldfish does with us. He called that event that separates us from that which follows us and we can never understand, the Singularity.
So anyway, I had some thoughts on that that I wanted to set down; but my daughter called, and said she was pregnant.
And everything changed. And I found myself on the far side of a Singularity; instead of being a parent, I become a grandparent. Some small child is going to call me Grammie Holloway some day. My daughter crossed her own Singularity, from being in control of her own life to being the servant of another.
I know how she feels… she has about as much relation to the girl she was yesterday as she has to a goldfish.
Singularities happen all the time. The little things can change worlds just as well as the big ones.
