Forum:The Bone Clocks or Singularity

So I recently finished The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell and I really enjoyed it as entertainment, and I've also read his other work Cloud Atlas so I was already primed to give him an halo of credibility (they don't let just anyone write 2 books!). But at the end of the book, without giving too much away, mankind is doomed to regress into a "endarkenment" with society breaking down and restricted geographically due to energy shortages.

I have also read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (back in '06), and after reading that (being a freshman in college) I immediately accepted this as mankind's inevitable future, going to so far as to tell everyone and anyone I met about it, and why they should be excited. I bought into all of it, hook line and sinker, and only in the past few years have come to question a LOT of what he predicts (mostly after reading his book "Live Long Enough to Live Forever" which probably helped pay for his kitchen remodel, for all its practical value).

I know the truth doesn't lie directly in the center of anything, but I'm having difficulty managing my expectations by holding these two ideas in my head.

The idea that we're progressing towards incredible powers of prediction and computational power is so nice because it means the current state of a tech obsessed society will remain in place. But I think this is just something young people expect, and that as you get older you realize that things are not as neat and orderly and a lot of what we have is because someone WANTED it to exist, and not something that we should just expect to be around forever, or even improve.

The idea that we're living on borrowed time though touches to a lot of what I learned growing up in a Baptist household, of course the expectation was "at the end of this time things will be so much better" which is not the case in this situation. Plus my brain is primed with words like "peak oil" and "global warming", and the intro to the movie "Interstellar", and maybe that's just what Mr. Mitchell is tapping into, and I shouldn't think that society will break down simply because we don't have a viable alternative energy right now.

I know that Bone Clocks is a work of fiction, and that TSIN is a product Mr. Kurzweil is selling, and that beyond these two outcomes are plenty of other possibilities, and that regardless of these outcomes, I'll still have to worry about staying alive, and providing and caring for those I love, and all the "normal" things that make us human. But I do feel like the Singularity would make doing these things easier, whereas worrying about who I'll be farming for (and how to avoid rape gangs) does not, so I just want some rational advice as to for which I should plan.

Edit: reading the RW page for the Singularity helps me come to grips with a lot of this, also, I noticed I should be using proper formatting, I can try to add markup linking to the RW pages that I'm discussing. Oktegon (talk) 02:06, 13 February 2015 (UTC)