On the Singularity:

The rise of the internet marked the beginning of a new era in human history. For the first time, humanity was united across the world; unfettered by geography, race, or time. The internet is to the world as breaking light speed is to the universe.

However, the growth of technology can have consequences just as alien as the breaching of the solar system. Raymond Kurweil’s theory on the Singularity, which posits that technology grows exponentially rather than arithmetically, suggests that “there might conceivably come a moment when [computers] are capable of something comparable to human intelligence” (Lev Grossman, 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal). However, since technology would not stop there, the human race must follow either one of two paths: either Artifical Intelligence will enslave us with superior technology, or we will enslave ourselves.

The latter is supported by mankind’s voracious appetite for advancement. The internet increases in speed each year, and grows into near infinite. Video games advance their graphics and gameplay to near simulation of real life. Every new invention makes life easier, and supposedly “more humane.” Even death is just a disease to Singularitans—something to be cured with science, regardless of human consequences. A God-Complex justified by mathematical efficiency and precise calculations. As Grossman notes, “Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them.”

Aldous Huxley predicted this tendency to eradicate human discomfort in his novel Brave New World. The humans are engineered in bottles, mass-produced like just another machine to serve “Society.” Each factory strives to outdo its input, and to outstrip its competitors. Mr. Foster, a factory worker, notes that Mombasa created over 1700 twins from a single embryo. “Still,” he says, “we mean to beat them if we can.” Man’s desire to compete and yet to bring comfort to society provides more than enough proof for Kurzweil’s theory. After all, if humanity can create an infinite world on the internet, less than a century after inventing the computer, then it can remold the real world less than a century after that.