What lies on the other side of the event horizon?
The point at which light can no longer escape the gravitational pull of a black hole is a synonym for the unknowable.
The Singularity has been used to describe the concept in the development of AI where we simply cannot predict reliably any further, because any future will bear so little resemblance to the past that it will be impossible to extrapolate forward.
It seems clear to me we are living in this point right now.
I was chatting with my barber the other week.
He’s young, early-20s, cool, and funny. He lives with his parents, plays 7-a-side football (soccer) with his friends, smokes cigarettes and works out.
We were talking about AI, and he said something that stuck with me.
“I feel like I’m past it already, things are moving so fast. Usually I’m the one who’s on top of tech stuff”.
“Things are moving too fast”: the stock line of some grumpy middle-aged character in a film or TV show of the last 30 years when shown the internet, iPods, ‘the cloud’, social media, or crypto, is now being spoken by someone who probably wouldn’t legally be served alcohol in the US.
We are facing a death.
Death is another way of saying ‘a change beyond which we cannot predict’.
This Easter weekend, I celebrated with my family by cooking lamb for them all.
Easter is a festival of death, and rebirth.
I had forgotten that Jesus stuck around for 40 days after the resurrection, before ascending.
Why?
To show that death is not an end, but a beginning.
We can’t know for sure what awaits beyond the veil.
But we can face a new dawn, hand-in-hand, singing.
I’ll be chatting live today at 12.30pm BST with
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Will AI make developers irrelevant?