Having just read von Neumann’s obituary by Stanislaw Ulam he talks about the idea of a singularity. Something we cannot see beyond. Something where everything converges to an infinitesimally small point in time and space and we have no idea what lays on the other side of it.
There’s a lot of singularities that have happened throughout human history.
Concept of the afterlife.
Speech and the verbal transmission of ideas.
The written word.
Cities as places of relative safety.
Libraries as data warehouses.
The modern concept of childhood.
Telecommunications (information transmission) especially computer-to-computer perhaps in some global, planet spanning, packet-switched network that would allow all microcomputers to instantaneously communicate with each other.
Cheap microcomputers that leads to ever decreasing costs and ever increasing performance that will eventually lead us to strong AI that rivals near-human like intelligence somewhere around 2050 (hope I am alive.)
The very essence of a singularity is that we cannot see what lays on the other side of the singularity.
The changes that the singularity will bring are so profound and so utterly revolutionary to society that until we pass through the singularity we cannot understand what the world, what society and what our lives will look like.
I think there will be at least a half-dozen more singularities in my lifetime – changes so profound that we cannot even conjecture what the world will be like.
And we won’t even realise it is happening to us. It will only be when we look back will we realise the quiet revolution we have wrought.