The singularity is here. Or was.

PZ Myers says Raymond Kurzweil, proponent of an idea called the Singularity, is a first-rate bullshit artist.

When I used the idea in a lame attempt at generating suspense earlier this month, I hadn't really looked closely at what he was saying. Apparently, the claim is the time between new "events," whatever that means, in human progress will soon become 0. Myers explains how this odd conclusion was reached:

Because not only is the chart an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion, but what it actually represents is the proximity of the familiar. We are much more aware of innovations in our current time and environment, and the farther back we look, the blurrier the distinctions get. We may think it's a grand step forward to have these fancy cell phones that don't tie you to a cord coming from the wall, but there was also a time when people thought it was radical to be using this new bow & arrow thingie, instead of the good ol' atlatl. We just lump that prior event into a "flinging pointy things" category and don't think much of it. When Kurzweil reifies biases that way, he gets garbage, like this graph, out.

So the 0 time between new events is baloney, not that it's too meaningful in the first place. If an event is only a new gee-gaw along the lines of a cell phone, a new one every second would feel less a revolution that a coup of technology out of control.

Still, I think a case can be made for faster advance. Information technology allows new discoveries to be broadcast around the globe instantaneously so anyone in the world can begin work on a new discovery based on the first one. A larger, more educated population means more people working in scientific and technological advancement. More efficient means of production allow more people to be free to work on such advances. Many advances, such as the computer, are also excellent tools for developing new ones, such as in simulations of a new product or molecule.

Let's take one area: scientific advancement. Since the time of Copernicus, we've gone from knowing next to nothing about the physical laws of the universe to quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. And this may be just the "proximity of the familiar," but it seems more of this came in the later half of this period, with understanding of magnetism only comming in the later 18th century, and atomic theory at the dawn of the 19th. Before that, it was really only understanding basic astronomy followed by Newton's mechanics in the late 17th century. Then again, have we slowed to a crawl since the time of Einstein? Attempts at finding a theory of everything seem to have proceeded rather slowly. Or is this an illusion created by how distant the advances are from everyday life?