technological singularity

The day will come when computer power surpasses that of brain power. Then we will shed our beastly costumes to become pure data.

In this ecstasy of data I will stick my one inside your zero and we will ejaculate our conjugated data.

More appropriate to this moment will be the preceding stages of development leading up to it. I suggest that your imagination conjure up a time when all basic tasks and responsibilities are in the hands (servo-motors) of robots. In such an instance who owns labor? The simple answer is the owners of the robots. In such a leap we've returned to the antebellum United States South.

What does such a return look like?

The social conditions necessitated by a plutocracy controlling a large population of laborers makes the relevance and presence of humans marginal to the needs of money. To decouple people's worth from their labor-value is to cast them into a sea of their own fate. Witness a referendum in Switzerland called the "Swiss Basic Income." The reasoning behind it is to secure a living income for the country's inhabitants in anticipation of a robotics revolution that will leave them, and the majority of the planet, unemployed.

More importantly, their politics will be muted.

Considering the major political uprisings of the twentieth century, we can easily see their erasure with the introduction of robots. Where people once were coerced to become the expression of labor, state power, and the military, robots will assume that role. I can only imagine that it will be an incomplete role taking. Robots lack the dynamics of balancing the needs of the personal and those of production. In its stead are limits on the robot's ability, be it physical/technological or a function of its maintenance cycle. That is a 'real' condition of the robot, something that did not exist almost in total when people did the job. Like robots people have physical limits and "maintenance cycles" as well. The diurnal rhythm of humanity and its caloric requirements in the face of arduous labor provide a template for limitation. As well, they provide the impetus for resistance, its moral contours, and the verve behind the message. The labor of individuals is markedly different from the labor of robots built in form of people but in the motives of an ideology. An entity which utilizes labor will first encounter this outcry of interpersonal resistance. That will not be the case with robotics.

The world will lose more than just one form of oppression. It will silence the poetry and politics of a once-oppressed people. Without being placed into a strenuous circumstance, people will, and should, change. As such we are defined by our immediate circumstances, to decouple us from one circumstance that framed our existence is to change our account of our existence. Much like the transformation of a nation's citizens from being champions of their vital needs to being servants to capital--which can purchase their vital needs--the decoupling of humanity from repetitive, physical labor will change the character of its people and by extension their relationship to the state, that is, their politics.

The technological singularity is a test-tube concept, an asocial theory that reasons inductively from the logic of machines. It allows the servomechanisms of our future to furnish the broad brush strokes of that history. It's a lazy way to think, from the effects in our immediate situation to their horizon. But the technological singularity is the orgasm of nerds in solitude with machines, and so our collective futures, via robotics, are caught up in this singular, solitary, selfish vision.