Singularity t-shirt

From our friends at Imaginary Foundation comes this hyperdelic vision of the singularity, on a t-shirt. Science fiction, science fact, or just another religion? You decide. Singularity t-shirt

• [Anonymous]

  Needs more cowbell or unicorns. Can’t decide which.

• [ottocrat]

  That is truly horrific. So bad it’s nearly good. Three Wolf Moon shirt good.

• [phlavor]

  “Science fiction, science fact, or just another religion?” A day will come when all three of those things are realized to be the same. I actually drew that shirt with my mind at a Phish show last Saturday.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    “A day will come when all three of those things are realized to be the same.”

    I hope not.

• [Phlip]

  Technological progress will follow as S curve, like this:

  ____
  ___/

  We are a little more than halfway up that ramp. But the time will come when a billion dollars of research into new science & technology will not produce a billion dollars worth of consumer gadgets.

  No warp drive, matter transporters, nano-tech youth pills, or realistic AI are coming, for a very long time, and when things like them come, SciFi will not recognize them.

  We will not cliff over and instantly deify every iGod owner on the planet. The Singularity is just a very old religious theme, dressed as science.

  • [friendpuppy]

    I used to think AI was a long way off but I checked out some of the chatbots entered into this year’s Loebner prize–a couple of them actually scared me with their improvement over previous years’ abilities. http://loebner.net/Prizef/2010_Contest/Loebner_Prize_Rules_2010.html

    • [Phlip]

      I once built a Markov chain chatterer, for a programming job, and fed it Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

      The best line I got from it was: “We are dead, but with temporary vigor.”

  • [David Pescovitz]

    “The Singularity is just a very old religious theme, dressed as science.”

    I tend to agree.

  • [2k]

    when you say a long time, what scale are you using?
    It seems that most if not all of the things you mention have already got prototypes built or at least, designed.

    As for time travel, I can only assume that by the very nature of your comment you are disproving that little gem will never come to fruition: you must have travelled here from 5 years ago to comment!

    *Warning, this comment intentionally left internally inconsistent*

• [Anonymous]

  Or perhaps merely marketing material for a ‘meh’ game by Activision|Blizzard studio, Raven Software.

• [bibulb]

  I want this shirt with one caption :

  “What the hell was in the punch?”

• [bibulb]

  (Alternately :

  “Christ, what an asshole.”)

• [Anonymous]

  Well we are on the verge of optical computing, cloud computing, and a hodge podge of other technologies on the horizon coming to fruition. AI is the one missing link in the chain that has kept the other so called sci-fi golden age ideas in check. Hell, there hasn’t been many real groundbreaking changes in science in ages, just further refinements. We are at a watershed in history, so aside from the religious implications, a world where there are 10 billion souls in many years from now who are stuck in a evolutionary stop gap as we round the drain of ever dwindling resources isn’t an appetizing alternate scenario.

• [efergus3]

  Ohhhhhhhh nooooooo, Electric Kool-Aid again?

• [technogeek]

  Can I get a Multiplicity T-shirt?

  Poor man’s markov chain: “Dissociated Press”, a toy built into the Emacs editor. Output a few characters, search for another point where the past few characters occurred, output a few more characters from there, lather, rinse, repeat. Or, a few words, if you prefer and if the source document is long enough to make it worthwhile.

  I’ve reimplemented that several times as a stand-alone toy, when I was bored and looking for an excuse to play with another programming language. I haven’t seen a version implemented as a web proxy yet, but that doesn’t seem particularly hard to do… or someone could rattle off a version that runs in the browser.

  Getting back to the subject for a moment: Remember that the Singularity originated as a Plot Device. It may have graduated to becoming philosophy, but remember that philosophy is what scientists do when they have absolutely no facts to work with — push the ideas around and see if anything falls out of them which might some day be testable.

• [Trotsky]

  2012: Novelty T-shirts become sentient.

  2013: T-shirts wear you.

  2014: John Connor leads the resistance against Threadless.

  2015: A lone T-shirt is sent back to 2010.

  2010: The battle begins tonight… In your closet.