Which refers, in physics, to a point where the physical description of events you happen to be using simply doesn’t work anymore. Maybe you end up dividing by zero at x=1, or you end up with infinite mass. Its an evocative word, though, and like all evocative words, it gets adopted by everyone coming and going to describe some phenomenon that the user in question thinks it might refer to.
It finds a good usage in technological sociology, where it describes a point at which things change so much we can’t predict what the world will be like after the change. It is a barrier we can’t see past, and such a radical change that all our current ways of looking at the world will be useless. This kind of technological/sociological singularity comes on (we are given to believe) suddenly, and many people predict we are approaching one now.
Certainly the pace of technology is rapid (does it hit infinity if we extrapolate a few years into the future?) and changes to the way we see the world are correspondingly quick to propogate. When do we say we’ve had a singularity, though? Where do we draw that line? Surely where we are now and where we were 200 years ago constitutes a divide that none of the founding fathers could have seen across. Did we undergo some singularity between then and now? When?
It is funny to read a notion that says that technology is going to drastically change the face of our society in ways that we can’t fathom… (But when has that not been the case) At the same time that I read articles predicting environmental and energy fallout. Maybe I was raised with too many mad max movie viewings, but I always envisioned that doomsday scenario as a hump to get over if we put our money in the next few years into developing clean energy dependence.
Maybe I am wrong and there is more energy with which to invent and some new invention is going to catapult us over this predicted abyss, the bone throwing scene in 2001 comes to mind. And maybe in ten years time it will be common to see broken ipods on the shelves in goodwill.