Samenvatting

In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leaves humans behind. Against the techno-utopian Singularity gospel, the grumpy futurists sketched dystopian visions such as the “Songularity” where ubiquitous auto-tune software will not only
manipulate all music, but also every spoken voice. Many of those alternative singularities have become true in the meantime, such as the “Re-Bootularity” where all “future movies will either be a re-boot, OR re-boot of a reboot, re-boot with a twist, prequel or sequel of an existing movie,” or the “Droneularity” where drones encroach everything from “Pakistan, to the U.S./Mexico border, and soon, your local 7/11 parking lot”.
The fifty alternative singularities sketched in the document are all potentially surmised by one of them: the “Crapularity”, if one broadly understands Crapularity as everything that is about to go wrong in the “Singularity”.