The North Sage said that he had learned through meditation that each person was connected to the cosmos. The South Sage said that his people had developed powerful tools that could penetrate the heart of the invisible. The North Sage insisted that all knowledge would come from within. The South Sage asked how that could be possible, and claimed that one could only truly learn from observing nature.

Neither was stupid enough to insist that the other was wrong. The South Sage understood that if he had been born in the North, he would have learned all that the North Sage had. And the North Sage could imagine forgetting everything he knew; he saw that only with a beginner’s mind would he ever be able to  comprehend the wisdom of the South.

They stayed many days at this crossroads, on the mountain top. Each day they sat in the shade of an enormous old tree which was neither the native Willow of the North nor the sweeping Banyan of the South. They talked all day, then each returned to their own camp at nightfall.  The North Sage watched the stars and meditated. He sought not understanding but clarity. The South Sage wrote by moonlight in a huge old book. He wrote not what he had learned, but questions he had discovered.

After many months, it came to this.

“You,” said the South Sage, “you believe that all answers come from within. In your life you have found this method a far more reliable guide than mere tabulation of nature. But you cannot convince me that this method is better, because all your proofs come from where I cannot see them.”

“And you, my friend,” said the North Sage, “everything you have learned shows you that reason and study can unravel any mystery. But reason alone cannot show me that reason is all-encompassing, and so I must look elsewhere for deeper truths.”

“We cannot ever convince the other of our truths,” nodded the South Sage, “because we each ask for a type of proof that the other does not believe in.”

“What shall we do?” moaned the North Sage. “How can we resolve this dilemma? How can we learn from each-other? Must we stay at this crossroads forever?”

“No,” said the South Sage. “We are free to leave. We may each return to our homes. Or, you may continue walking South, and I may continue walking North.”

“Alternatively,” said the North Sage, “we could each walk in any direction we pleased, and hope to discover new lands to the East and West.”

“That is a good idea,” said the South Sage. “We will never know all the places in between, but it would help us both to understand the boundaries of the map. Do you think we will ever meet again, my wise friend?”

The North Sage blinked. “Of course,” he said, “for neither of us can escape this world.”

There are four official languages in Singapore: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. This reflects the four major peoples who came to populate the city-state: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and colonial British. Every citizen of Singapore is issued a piece of government ID (the National Registration Identity Card) which has one of these races printed on it.

Does this discourage people from having mixed-race children?

Singapore twists the Asian brain.  Just about every other Asian country is uni-cultural, at least according to the mainstream narrative. The Japanese people live in Japan and speak Japanese. The Vietnamese live in Vietnam and speak Vietanamese. The Thai people live in Thailand and speak Thai. Etc. This makes identity really easy — except if you live in Singapore, and there’s no Singaporean race, no Singaporean language, no ancient and venerable Singaporean hertitage. Blood and place and language and culture used to be inextricable, but we can no longer use any of these things to define one another. Fortunately, it says what you are right there on the card. I don’t think this is a particularly good idea.

On the surface of it, in a black and white world, it’s always this easy. (Oh, for simpler, purer times!) It’s especially helpful to have someone whom you’re not. I’m a Hindu, you’re a Muslim. I’m Kurd, you’re Turk. Indian vs. Pakistani, which is ridiculous because, as one Indian put it to me, “we are the same stock!” But they’re different! They’re Pakistani!

And yes, race. The thing about skin color, nose size, eye slant is that it makes this all obvious. But we don’t need obvious. In fact we make obvious when it’s lacking. The key to us versus them is that you have to be able to tell at a glance whose side they’re on. Hence different color uniforms for each team, but also scarification, clothing, jewelry… we laugh at the primitive Africans for their tribal scars, but the Latino in the sharp suit pulls out his iPhone and casts suspicious glances at the Latino in the cap and baggy pants. Something makes us clump together, gravitate towards standard behaviors. No one really wants to run as an independent.

Granted, the Hutus and the Tutsis do look different, at least sterotypically. But after centuries of intermixing, there can’t be such a thing as a pure race. That young boy, naked in the abstract, could be either. He doesn’t definitively have Hutu or Tutsi features. How then did the Hutus know who to kill, in Rawnda in 1994? In practice it wasn’t a problem. So powerful was identity that everyone simply knew who was who. There were Hutu families and Tutsi families, and not much in between. Small villages share common knowledge, and every day the message is reinforced. He lived in the Tutsi part of town. He sat with the other Tutsis at school. It’s not something you can disown.

Sometimes I think the best thing about big cities is the obfuscation they offer. In the big city, my Mongolian friend does not have to be Mongolian when she doesn’t want to. Of course, this horrifies her mother.

Because it’s also about tradition. You are a ___ because your father was a ___. You come from an ancient and proud line. Sure, other castes might look the same, but are they really? Blood matters. You can see it in horses. Never trust a Capulet. Predestination: who you are was written before you were born. It’s good to have clearly labeled places, categories that amputate differences. You can spell it out with letters, said the Brahmin to the Dalit.

I am of the strong opinion that printing race or religion on identity cards holds humanity back. And if you think that’s radical, technology is going to make it worse. Just wait until changing skin color, eye color, height and countenace is as easy as lipstick.

For what makes Futurology (capitalization mine) really, actually different than a belief that something momentous will happen in 2012, when the Mayan calendar wraps around? Not a lot, as far as I can tell. And now it turns out that two religious scholars have concluded exactly the same thing, in a 2008 paper in the Journal of Contemporary Religion:

Futurology-as-religion has charismatic leaders, authoritative texts, mystique, and a fairly complete vision of salvation. Futurology is, in effect, a new religious movement (NRM).

Let’s break this down a little further. How will we recognize when the “singularity” occurs? Some accounts speak of a period of “unprecedented technological progress” or an exponential growth in computing power, but we’ve been seeing that for 50 years. Or it is described as a point beyond which change is so rapid that prediction is impossible, but prediction more than a few years into the future is impossible anyway, if for no other reason than the butterfly effect. It’s not that I dispute the core argument that technology will continue to alter humanity in nearly unrecognizable ways. In fact, I find many of the future technologies discussed by the Singularists to be quite plausible, including nanotechnology, better AI, and greatly extended human life — there’s lots of serious research going on in all these fields. And I also suspect that we will continue to live through a period of accelerating technological capability, because it is the nature of technology to build upon itself. But why must there necessarily exist some special point? And why must all of these technological transformation necessarily be, well, good?

Even quantitative exponential growth in computing power (or other measurable human capacities) doesn’t imply a singularity. Exponential growth accelerates endlessly, but not infinitely fast; it has no special points or infinite asymptotes.

The only claim that seems at all concrete, the only thing that might give a definite date to the singularity, is the moment when a machine becomes smarter than a human. Such a machine, it is claimed, could improve on itself in a recursive and accelerating fashion, rapidly exploding up to incomprehensible intelligence levels and coming to rule the universe. Surely, this would change history in Godlike ways.

Except that nobody knows what machine intelligence is. Or how we’d recognize one if we met it. The word “intelligence” suggests that one day the computer would wake up and talk to us (presumably, through IM) but this is mere metaphor. (Kurzweil et al. also speak of replacing neurons with hardware or software to produce a synthetic human brain, but that would be a re-implemented human intelligence.) The phrase “machine consciousness” is even less useful, because we can’t even define the word “consciousness” for humans.

Nobody knows what the words use to describe the singularity actually mean.

If no one can specify criteria for noticing when this singularity has actually occurred, I argue that it doesn’t exist even in a theoretical, conceptual sense. In a practical sense it’s therefore no better than Nostradamus, or 2012, or tea leaves. What’s left in the concept is merely belief: belief that somehow, somewhen, something big and important is going to happen. The End of The World (as we know it.) The Ascent to Paradise. Living forever in the consciousness of the machine. Apocalypse. Salvation.

All hail the prophet Kurzweil.