Inaugural Post

For the past year, I’ve been reading about, writing about and talking to everyone I know about the pre and post singularity. I am optimistic that we can navigate singularity challenges successfully, but I believe we now face extraordinary dangers, and if we fail to address them, the outcome will likely be tragic.

Unfortunately, very few people are aware of the dangers and their importance. Only a very small group of people is aware of the singularity. Only a fraction of those people seriously consider it a plausible scenario for our medium term future instead of merely science fiction, or a realm of crackpot speculation. And of that fraction, many are naively optimistic, waving away dangers, even cataclysmic ones, with little analysis.

Simultaneously, we have an opportunity, for the first time in our history, to re-imagine what it means to be human and to build a future unconstrained by limitations that have dogged us, our communities and our organizations throughout history.

My goal is to contribute to the mainstreaming of pre and post singularity concerns and discussion as well as to contribute to the ideas themselves. The challenges we face are as big as they come, as are the opportunities. We need many people thinking about these issues. No one has all the answers (or perhaps at this stage, any of the answers).

I alone have a book’s worth of thoughts and notes, and knowing where to begin writing on this blog is a bit of a puzzle. There are so many different audiences, and reaching them each requires filling in different bits of context. To begin with, I’m just going to start writing about the topics I’m investigating right now. Later on, I intend to go back and fill in some of the holes.

This topic is of such great importance, that I feel reluctant to publish anything that is not perfect. This blog is my attempt to overcome that and adopt a philosophy of publishing “early and often”, in an effort to prevent the perfect being the enemy of the good, or the good being the enemy of the better than nothing. I don’t pretend that I have it all figured out, and I plan to change my mind freely as I learn more.

With that in mind I’ll move on to my first topic … shortly.