Lughnasa                                                                         Harvest Moon

The singularity is near.  Can we prevent the takeover of the machines?  Will technology devour us, turning the master-slave relationship upside down in Nietzschean irony?  Life with intelligent machines has become a reality already.  Are we too late, doomed to follow our lemming-like path of one more gadget to disaster?

Doubt it.  First.  Depictions of the apocalypse have been failing since the notion first muscled its way onto the human imaginal stage.  We’re very good at predicting the end and equally talented at forgetting that it never happened.  In the Hebrew scriptures there was only one way to tell a good prophesy from a bad one.  Did it foretell events?  If so, good prophecy.  If not, bad prophecy.  And prophecies of  the end time have, so far at least, been wanting.  As proof, I offer the fact that I’m writing about
them.

Second.  Events do not occur in a vacuum.  That is, even if a singularity event or its near cousin came to pass, it would have been preceded by other advances outside of its ambit and the fact of its occurrence itself would shift matters in ways unpredictable.  These interacting variables would almost certainly create a less dire circumstance than techno-gloomy gusses anticipate.

Third. Remember Malthus?  He had a simple idea about food production and the carrying capacity of the earth.  He bet we would return to subsistence level agriculture once the population outstripped the food supply.  Hasn’t happened.  Why?  Agriculture advances, logistical advances, economic advances.  Simple ideas tend to leave out the complicated world in which we actually live.

Finally, will the end come?  Yep.  It will.  There are astrophysical forces at play in the solar system that will finish off life on earth and after that earth itself will be absorbed as our chief ally, Sol, expands into a red giant.  Will humanity have figured out how to live among the stars by then?  My guess?  Yes.

My sense is that we muddle along more often than anything else.  And the singularity will be a curiosity of our era.  Remember 2012?