Toward the topic: "Is the Technological Singularity Inevitable?"

Author's Commentary: "Singular"

If you’ve poked around a little on the site, you may have noticed that I have a sci-fi novel titled Last Horizon: Singularity. It’s in the book store if you’re so inclined 😊 So when this week’s topic came up, I had to resist the temptation to pull something out of the back pocket that was already written and related to the topic. That wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the project, and it wouldn’t have been very rewarding. The Last Horizon series was set after the singularity happened (at least as Kurzweil wrote about it). So, I thought it would be interesting to explore the idea of it not happening on schedule. It also happened that I have a forthcoming sci-fi novel where one of the premises is that the bots never quite figure out the whole creativity thing. I’ve had the thought that I needed to write the full autobiography of the character you’ll meet in this story. He’s an interesting cat—extraordinarily smart, extremely creative, and deeply introspective by temperament. I thought it would be interesting to structure an autobiography with the features of the narrator’s psychometric scores framing the stories. Every autobiography I’ve ever read conveys the subject’s history, but a full picture of a human is both the events they encounter + their unique constellation of personality traits. We all react to different situations in our own unique ways. The psychometric outline, I thought would be an interesting frame to a biographical narrative—an added layer of depth. Small spoiler, but I’d already framed an interlude from The Lifeboat this way, as a chapter in Julian’s autobiography. So this was an ideal time to write another chapter. I can’t promise I won’t take advantage of this project to write more chapters of Julian’s story when appropriate topics come up.

Hope you enjoy!

Rowe