Tomorrow is another day

Recorded history is defined by the idea of progress. People have regarded themselves as modern at least from the time of Plato, and wave after wave of civilisation saw themselves as progressive. Progress is denoted by an arrow, and is incarnated in the great leader’s pointing finger (Babasaheb Ambedkar, Chairman Mao, General Patton; who knows why, but Narendra Modi points with both forefingers in a V), aiming the flock in the general direction of the singularity. Whether your favoured prophet was a political thinker (Karl Marx, say), a scientist (Charles Darwin) or a reformer (Vivekananda), or even the saints and warlords of the millennial faiths (they are termed so because they look forward a thousand years), the general idea was to progress in an orderly fashion towards a better and clearly visible future. Today, for the first time, progress stands defined by a hairpin bend. When it threatens to take us back to the past, the idea of progress collapses and the future begins to look like a fogged-up Bermuda triangle.

Alvin Toffler frightened generations in the 20th century with the idea of future shock — progress so rapid that it disorients. But the rapidity of change does not seem to be doing things to the inner ear in the 21st century. Rather, the sudden change of direction is disorienting. What we are experiencing is car sickness taken to dizzying heights.

Hairpin bends can be pretty scary. In the US, the age of globalisation has hatched an electorate which fears the world and is dying to close off the borders. Multicultural Britain, which achieved prosperity by running a global empire, has turned isolationist and voted for Brexit. India has a democratically elected government which advocates surgical strikes and strong medicine for both neighbours and citizens. A backlash to the ongoing immigrant influx threatens to turn the progressive nations of Europe rightwards. All of these reversals reject the political goal of the past centuries — a borderless and increasingly homogenised world.

The hairpin singularity has manifested itself in politics in the most important democracies, but it has not deigned to appear in the domain of science and technology, where it was expected to appear first. The technological singularity is a prettied-up version of an old faithful of science fiction — the robot or cyborg which acquires superhuman brains and brawn, replicates freely and shrugs off human control, until someone dramatically powers it down and saves the world. In the singularity version of the story, humanity does not merit saving because the world has turned post-human. This has interesting consequences — death is optional, ageing is a curable disorder, and the distinction between human and machine unclear. What would this do to the family? To inheritance?

How could the insurance industry possibly survive it? A mashup of molecular electronics, nanobots, quantum computing, cybernetics and genetic engineering, with a little help from some technologies which are already here (the 3D printer) or those whose advent is imminent (the Internet of Things), the singularity will be recognised after the event. Until then, it will be just one more complexity which our generation tries to painfully figure out, and fails. It must fail because the degree of unpredictability is immense. The best-known mathematical singularity is division by zero. Formally, that’s the function f(x) = 1/x, when x = 0. At that point, f(x) can assume any value from negative infinity to positive infinity. It is futile to compute. Buggy computer programs try to do that and freeze up, and division by zero remains undefined.

But, in politics and society, and even in world affairs, the graphical depiction of a singularity is singularly unprogressive. A diplomat has just been assassinated by a policeman in Istanbul in revenge for Aleppo. It’s the sort of thing which used to trigger continent-wide conflicts a hundred years ago. Contemporary history has suddenly turned into one big hairpin bend and, for now, the millennial futures eagerly awaited by faith, progressive politics and science fiction do not appear to have a future.