Singularity

“Many futurists are concerned with what are termed singularities, periods of such rapid and profound change due to technology that the state of the world is forever altered. ...these phase transitions happen so quickly that they can forever alter humanity's relationship with its surroundings. The quintessential singularity that futurists dwell on is that of the potential creation of superhuman machine intelligence.”

“Strive not for singularity in dress;But be in mind a little out of style.”

“You, who know better than any one the motley world of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of exceptions and of singularities.”

“Throughout history, the circumpunct has been all things to all people — it is the sun god Ra, alchemical gold, the all-seeing eye, the singularity point before the Big Bang...”

“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.”

“Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in raindrops.”

“Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.”

“The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.”

“There seems to be a Chronology Protection Agency that makes the world safe for historians by preventing travel into the past. What seems to happen is that the effects of the uncertainty principle would cause there to be a large amount of radiation if one traveled into the past.”

“Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object [religion]. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, & the consequences of error may be too serious.”

“If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed.”

“We agree with Vinge's suggestion for naming events that are "capable of rupturing the fabric of human history" (or leading to profound societal changes) as a "singularity". This is a useful terminology especially since a mathematically rigorous singularity seems impossible for technological and related societal change. ...a wide variety of methods have been used and almost all point to singularities in the present century, particularly in the middle of the century.”

“It is hard to understand how this infinitely dense singularity can evaporate into nothing. For matter inside the black hole leak out into the universe requires that it travel faster than the speed of light.”

“Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn't work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness?That singularity is language...”

“Each word is a singularity, or is connected with a singularity, in our way of understanding existence.”

“On the night of the exodus, the people met God, had a rendezvous with Him, and made His acquaintance for the first time. On Yom Kippur night, man gets very close to his Father in heaven, again meets Him, talks to Him, cries before and implores Him. The grandeur and singularity of these two nights lie in the God-man confrontation.”

“My grand mother, who was very religious, and to whom I was much attached — my master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised – and if I was, I would never be of any service to any one – as a slave.”

“Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity — a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied — and the world will pass beyond our understanding.”

“I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is...”

“The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon.”

“With Mie's view of matter there is contrasted another, according to which matter is a limiting singularity of the field, but charges and masses are force-fluxes in the field. This entails a new and more cautious attitude towards the whole problem of matter.”

“The true human being … is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities.”