If you’ve been reading current science fiction, and particularly if you’ve been reading the discussion around current science fiction, you’ve probably heard of the concept of the Singularity.

If you haven’t, briefly, it’s the idea that technological development is an exponential curve, which means that technological change will keep getting faster and faster until it vertically spikes. This is the Singularity, since beyond this point whatever exists afterwards will probably be incomprehensible to those of us who live on this side of the spike.