[ExI] singularity terminology proposal: was RE: what if... the singularity isn't near?

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Thursday, 6 November, 2025 5:22 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: spike at rainier66.com
Subject: Re: [ExI] what if... the singularity isn't near?

 

 

On Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 9:33 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

> But what if… the Singularity is a coupla decades off still, and Kurzweil was mostly right, but off a little

 

>…If the Singularity happens a few years after Kurzweil's prediction then we will have a few more years to prepare for the most significant event since the Cambrian Explosion…John K Clark

 

 

I propose some terminology to clarify if a debate has a common basis or preliminary assumptions.

 

Suppose the Singularity is an event which is unambiguous in that there is little or no debate afterwards if it happened.  Afterwards we can identify a date on which the Singularity event happened, to at least a particular week.  We are before that now, so we can think of Ideas Futures structures in which we place bets on a time span for a future event, such as the discovery of the next Mersenne Prime, analogous to the future event that I predicted thrice and made a cool imaginary fortune on play money Ideas Futures, or the current political betting on when the phony US government shutdown will end:

 

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/8316/When-will-Trump-sign-a-bill-to-end-the-shutdown-(Part-two)

 

Suppose we play a prediction game with the Singularity, for a reason.  If we have a debate between a person who firmly believes the Singularity is two or three years off, of course he will have a different perspective from one who thinks it is about 15 years off.  

 

Side note: I also propose returning the pronouns he and him to genderless, restoring she and her to specifically female, and if we ever need a specifically masculine gender (when was the last time you needed that grammatical construct?  (never?  (same here))) then the pronouns become hemale and hismale and maleman.  Extension: terms such as guy and man also revert to genderless.  Reason: after all this time, a quarter of a century at least, we never found a good way around the linguistic clumsiness we introduce with genderless pronouns.  That he-or-she and the whole they/them business, forget it.  To hell with all that, let he and him be genderless again, introduce new pronouns when we need a specifically male pronoun, which is never in that quarter century we have been committing comically absurd and unnecessary violence to language, trying to solve a non-problem.  Make androgyny genderless again.  

 

Imagine someone who would bet the Singularity will happen in the next four years, starting now.  Let us call him S-alpha.  One who would bet in the next eight years but more than four, let us call that guy an S-beta, and so on, with every four year interval getting a new Greek letter.  If a man believes there is some reason the Singularity will never come, let us call her S-negative.  My late mother is a guy who I would call S-negative.  That man never did embrace the whole notion of Singularity, even though she knew some things about it.

 

In that system, everyone with any opinion on the matter is either S-negative or S-positives (singularitarians) with those who never heard of the concept are S-zero (this is the position of most of humanity.)

 

For nearly all S-positives, many common societal considerations really matter little or nothing.  We heard a lot about global warming in the past few years, but one of the big advocates and money sources Bill Gates, recently opined that it isn’t as big a problem as he once believed, and perhaps Europe should not have dismantled its industrial base to prevent it.  Being S-positive, I have not worried about global warming or climate change ever, for I have long realized we have way bigger and far more immediate problems than that, which need a solution before the Singularity.  S-positives generally don’t get too tangled up in problems that take centuries to hurt us.

 

The long-running debate over the US federal government’s debt will naturally look different from differing Singularity points of view: the S-delta (me) will worry about that, but the S-alpha will not.

 

If we think it necessary, we can break it down further.  One who thinks the Singularity will happen in two years from now can be a subcategory S-alpha2.  It is OK to shift positions.  If one is currently an S-beta3, a year from now he is not required to become S-beta2.  He can even take up S-beta4 two years from now.  As in religion, conversion to alternative schools of thought is not only allowed, it is expected if one is thinking and listening.

 

There are further ways to break down Singularity schools of thought, such as AI transforming societies before the Singularity for instance, which brings in another dimension of AI as a weapon, which nation gets AI first, and so on.  The Singularity is more analogous to the back yard nuclear device which nukes the entire planet, which makes it irrelevant which countries have nuclear weapons: it nukes everybody alike.  The Singularity is a software version of a lake filled with tritium water.

 

I volunteer to be the resident poster child for S-deltaism.  John, you are the most prominent local S-alpha.

 

This idea has likely already been explored, but I don’t know about it.  Do guide me to the standard practice.  Has anyone here ideas for alternatives or other additions, varying schools of thought on Singularity terminology?

 

spike 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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