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After rediscovering Darlingside‘s “Singularity”, I began to wonder about the many meanings of the term. Our class defined singularity as the “transition to post humanity”, but what lies ahead after humanity can be very different futures. A technological singularity describes a point when technology, particularly artificial intelligence, becomes so advanced that humans are unable to control it. At this point, AI may take over society, thus, ending the era of human dominance. However, the end of human kind depends on the benevolence of the AI; we may fall under the care of these machines– such as in Ilya Varshavsky’s Perpetual Motion (1965)– or we may perish if they mean us harm.
In Darlingside’s “Singularity”, singularity seems to refer to the latter version of the future where humankind perishes in some sort of an apocalypse. However, in “Singularity” there is more imagery of natural catastrophes than an apocalypse caused by technology. Perhaps, they are insinuating that human activity and our technological advancements may lead to irreversible changes in climate and natural disasters, which will lead to our extinction rather than a robot uprising. This also makes me wonder if the “singularity” is confined to a technological one or if anything that leads to the “transition to post humanity” can be considered the “singularity”.
However, the term “singularity” may also describe when matter is packed so tightly into a single point that the rules of physics breaks down, such as when the universe was compressed into a single point or a singularity before the Big Bang.
When I was searching the web, I also stumbled upon a poem (which was written by a poet who once visited my high school) that was titled Singularity. In Marie Howe’s Singularity (2019) she marries our class’s definition of the term and the astrophysics use of it. In the poem, which she dedicates to Stephen Hawking, she seems to pine for a return to the singularity before the Big Bang. In doing so, she also hints at her discontent at the state of humankind. In response, she romanticizes the end of humanity. This is similar to how in Darlingside‘s “Singularity”, the narrator idealizes the apocalypse and calls for the the destruction of human civilization in order to return to an older state of nature.
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Marie Howe’s Singularity (2019) is listed below:
Singularity
Marie Howe
(after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No
them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home
The “singularity” concept is a strange one, indeed. Check out Ray Kurzweil’s thoughts on it. And thank you for sharing the Howe poem– I love it!