How Scared Should I Be of the Singularity? VICE United States

Time for "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear. The singularity is a hypothesis from computer scientist and novelist Vernor Vinge, who said in 1993 that technology is about to cause a shift as dramatic as the emergence of life on Earth, and that afterward "the human era will be ended." By this he meant that, for better or worse, computers will be running shit. Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, think that when the singularity hits, it's going to be fucking awesome. Ever-improving machines will start repairing our cells from the inside, thinking for us whenever we don't want to think, and generally making everything better.