From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 23:41:44 MST
At 04:18 PM 3/31/02 +1000, Dwayne wrote:
>Damien Broderick wrote:
>
>> [actually I call it "the Spike" and have done so since 1997 but hey]
>Other than wanting to coin a neologism, why don't you use "the singularity"
>like everyone else?
Well, I do, of course, but back in 1996 I figured that
1) short words are more easily remembered and repeated than long ones (one
syllable beats five)
2) `singularity' is unfamiliar and conveys nothing directly except to
math/physics nerds
3) `spike' is graphically direct, although it still needs some explaining
This line of thought has the disadvantage that it might seem disrespectful
of Dr Vinge, which I regret, and of the several Singularitarians such as
Eliezer who have been discussing the topic since the mid-1990s and earlier;
also that it mightn't even be true: we know that people call the machines
they heat their pizzas and coffee in `microwave ovens' rather than `radar
ovens' (which Heinlein and others expected in the 1940s), and type on `word
processors' rather than `screens' or `mills' or `texters'.
I don't care. It's not an ego issue. My shot seems to have fallen short, if
only because its small impact so far has been restricted mostly to
Australia, and Kurzweil's book will crush my neologism in one fat blow.
That's okay. I can still feel satisfied about `virtual reality'. Yeah, that
was me too. Yeah, nobody knows. Too bad, so sad.
Damien Broderick
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