The Singularity concept has been around a long time, under a lot of different names and guises. I suppose it can be traced back to an origin of sorts with Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", and of course, science fiction and Hollywood have dealt fictionally with the idea for decades, proving once again that art is way ahead of science, and the rest of the liberal arts still haven't got a clue.

The basic idea is the old superstition that there are some things "Man was never meant to know" or "Man should not play God". Today, technoweenies, cybergeeks, and the Silicon Valley Sunday supplemnent crowd have come up with a variety of clever variations of the theme, both positive and negative. The Singularity idea is one, so is something called Fugue, the moment when technology takes off on its own with thinking machines seizing control of civilization, leaving Man behind as, at best, a powerless anachronism, or at worst, extinct. The idea is that as technology becomes more complex and more essential to our survival, eventually it will be forced to take over. Machines will be needed to make machines, and humanity will neither be smart enough to design them, physically capable of building them, or fast enough to operate them in real time. As machines become smarter, faster, and smaller, they will simply be beyond our command and will have to rely on other machines to administer them. The world system will be out of human hands. I think we're already there.

A little reflection should convince you this is nothing new, it happened long ago. Even Paleolithic Man technologically affected his environment. He would over-hunt or slash-and-burn cultivate an area until it lost productivity and he was forced to move on. He modified landscapes by controlled burns or hunting of megafauna, or by selectively breeding species for his benefit, all without even realizing he was doing so. Later came irrigation and hydraulic projects, mass agriculture, animal husbandry on a vast scale, introduction or extinction of species and even entire habitats. We've been in the planetary (and social!) engineering game for millennia. But like most engineers, we are lousy scientists. We're great at manipulating things and getting our way, but we do so with little understanding of the long term effects and consequences.

And we are mistaken in believing all technologies involve tools. Civilization itself, with its organization, specialization of labor, settled communities, food storage, governments, record keeping, political hierarchies and so on has created a sociogeographic landscape we are addicted to and cannot survive without. By the time of the Romans, we already had legal systems, welfare programs, insurance companies, organized crime, mass entertainment, industries, world trade, international currencies, banking, city planning, public works, legislative lobbies, government bureaucracies and corporate crime, indeed, everything we have today except electricity and fossil fuels.

The main difference between Then and Now, is not the technology, it is the amount of geographic and social space affected. The Roman Empire collapsed, but millions still knew how to plow the soil, work metal, break horses; build houses, ships and wagons; weave cloth, throw pots, read and write, in short, all the technologies needed to rebuild civilization. I don't even know how to cook! And most of the world was still wilderness, or at least, parkland. The natural resources required were still plentiful and accessible.

Without modern technology, the world was indeed a brutish, dangerous place. But it was robust. It could absorb an enormous amount of damage and still operate at reduced efficiency, and it could recover from all-but-total catastrophe. In technological terms, it had no single point of failure, and without complex artificial connectivities, functional parts of it would always survive as seeds for future growth.

Today, the simplest things we need are increasingly beyond our understanding, and the sophisticated skills we do possess are useless because they are all dependent on or directed to a technology that either will not be there, or replaced by something totally different. I know how to read, write and figure, I can navigate a ship or program a computer, but I do not know how to make paper or ink, and without my spectacles, I am helpless.

In short, we are already hopelessly crippled without our technology and our civilization; and what we do know how to do is all meant to service our machines. We are their servants, not the other way round. The devices and systems we have devised, not to mention our own administrative infrastructures, now dictate to us the kind of world we have to build for their benefit. As recent events have so adequately demonstrated, we have next to no real understanding of the most important administrative infrastructure of all, the "economy".

We are slaves of our own tools, but they have no intelligence, and even the simplest and most fundamental obligations and responsiblities of a slavemaster are beyond them. Frankenstein's monster already rules the world, but he is blind and moronic, and unbelievably greedy and hungry. And we are totally dependent on his health. Fugue is already here, welcome to the Singularity.