I have just checked 'Singularity', the Vingean concept, for the first time in some months on Google News. There is a flurry of articles, reviews and explanations: perhaps inspired by the next iteration of the Singularity University. In the time elapsed, the concept appears to have achieved a new level of scrutiny and debate. Perhaps I am wrong, but there are a number of writings to analyse.
Even the games are beginning to spin their rhetoric on the turn of a coin. Listen to the trailer for the new game: Deus Ex: Human Revolution. There is a clear statement that the game is not science fiction (by which they seem to mean science fantasy). The emphasis is on a gritty and realistic extrapolation of current trends to a near future where augmented cyborgs enter a kulturkampf with the unenhanced.
What the game's advertising symbolises is how embedded such concepts like enhancement have become in the ordinary discourse of certain media, such as computer gaming. Indeed, the concept is taken for granted, and used as speculation, in opposition to science fiction. The designers think this probably will happen, rather than may happen.
This twist can indicate that the world we live in now resembles a science fiction novel. Not a new insight, but when the science fiction visions of two decades ago become the extrapolative speculations of today, we know that we are living through a fundamental and accelerating period of change.
