| As science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The gap between today and tomorrow is closing at a staggering rate, while the future continues to become more and more surreal. A perfect example comes from the work of inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, who often talks about a point sometime in the next 50 years when our rate of technological progress begins to approach the infinite—an event he calls "the Singularity." This essentially represents the event horizon of our own technological evolution, beyond which we simply cannot imagine. Is there actually something to the concept of the Singularity, or is it just a sort of mythical Rapture for tech geeks? What are the implications of such exponential advancement of technology to human consciousness? As data becomes more and more free, and therefore more and more ubiquitous, how can the Integral vision help us navigate the "global brain" currently under construction? |
