Tech Singualrity

People don't like the term technological singularity. It reminds them of what could have been, should have been... No. Seeing how we are divided now in the face of extinction, perhaps its best we didn't.

It begins with something so small, you need an electron microscope to see it. Nano-machines. Hordes of tiny robots that push and pull on molecules like a little girl playing cat's cradle. They rebuild things.

Cancer? Just inject a syringe full of gray sludge in one arm, and in two days, you piss all the malignant cells out - each wrapped in their own little carbon tube. Need a building that withstands earthquakes? Add some coal to the concrete foundation on Monday. On Saturday, the walls will be laced with a mesh made of pure diamond, strong enough to take a hit from a speeding truck without bending.

A factory the size of a photocopier could produce anything your heart desired, just give it the right materials.

There are those who fear this of course. The selfish ones see this as a means of undermining traditional economies, and indeed, the normal power structure. Who needs corporations and distribution systems, when the factory fits on the back of a truck? The Altruistic ones fear the consequences. How can machines that small tell what is alive from what is not - and avoid disassembling living people? A man made plague, or a blanket of robots that covers the entire world in their self replicating mass.

I'm told there were safeguards - the machines need to be refrigerated, and have a limited life span, and can't reproduce themselves, and a few others I forget. Still, we may be able to thank the alien invaders this didn't come to pass.

Many futurists saw these machines as a way to cheat death, as a way to plenty, to destroy disease on it own terms, to make everything beautiful. To live forever - the dream of almost every man.

But I'm sure none of them believed, that this continued animation would continue once they were dead...