"The ramblings..." - I have an (as yet) undiagnosable, chronic, random tiredness problem with symptoms akin to ADD usually involved too (more details see my 'Illness CV'). Because of this I am usually unable to do tasks that require active concentration (like reading large blocks of text) or involve a high level of abstraction (like mathematics). Hence I can not construct ruggedly cogent arguments and analyses of technical subjects based on thorough research. However, I find that typing thoughts straight from my head is often easier than reading the equivalent volume of text, especially on a topic that is currently of deep interest.
"sci/tech contemplations" - With the 90s being my most formative years, I feel I have grown up with the concept of continuous (technological) progress embedded in my psyche. Computers really helped me shine as I reach secondary school education, so Moore's Law is something I *knew* well before I had a name for it. Excelling at science, particularity physics, I mistakenly undertook a degree in the subject: I was looking for the deepest kind of understanding (and to make a difference to the future through academia), but disillusion crept in as I struggled with progressively drier derivations, that failed to fulfil my A-level intrigue built up by pop-science books. Contemporary technology may all fall out of subtle revelations in the field of physics, and will continue to from a myopic viewpoint, but it is otherwise empty, too abstract to yield broad enlightenment.
"...Singularitarian" - In my first undergraduate year, but unrelated to my degree, I hit upon the book "The Physics of Immortality". It took my existing scientific understanding of reality and ran with it out to the end of the universe, towards a logically inevitable afterlife and the existence of everything imaginable in an Omega Point Singularity. Like David Deutsch, I grabbed hold of F.J.Tipler's core concept with both hands, while taking his connections to Christianity with more than a pinch of salt.
Concurrent with starting the degree that I should have done in the first place, Cybernetics, I discovered Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". Then more significantly still, Ray Kurzweil's flavour of singularity: the technological kind. Again, my implicit beliefs were crystallised. Suddenly the future had a time scale, one that put infinite promise within my probable life span. It turns out that ultimate meaning is something that is being built as you read this; it is unstoppably escalating complexity itself; evolution and diversification of genes, memes and temes (in most recent terminology).
'The Singularity' (as coined by Vernor Vinge) can in no way be dismissed as a heap of wishful thinking riding on an obscure proof (as with the Tiplerian kind, above); everything points towards this phenomena, more blatant than the a hand of a God. From the rate of brain size increase in hominids, to world GDP, to the dozen siblings of Moore's Law (applying to various types of technology), all inscribe a part of the same exponential curve. Looking closer, progress actually exceeds exponential trends, so steep it is near asymptotic: a burning bright wall beyond which it is actually impossible to predict what will happen, however much closer that time comes.
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The Singularity is such an important concept that I think it is worth (re)evaluating everything using the framework of it's core ideas.
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