I'm a bit of a sci-fi geek. Specifically, I like cyberpunk and a bunch of stuff that came after it, stuff that deals with the gritty underbelly of high-tech society. More often than not, there will be a hard-boiled detective/hacker/hooker/deliverator for a main character. Invariably, he will play by his own rules and no one else's. It is a safe bet that he has nothing to live for but revenge. This is all irrelevant, though. I dig sci-fi because, if it's done well, it's a really effective way to point out how retarded we're being in the present. Racism seems pretty stupid when black folks are represented as a race of blue dudes from Alpha Centauri who must unite with humanity against the amorphous, gibbering hordes encroaching on their territory (the amorphous, gibbering hordes, of course, represents homosexuality). The problem with it, of course, is that things never turn out the way writers think they will (with a few notable exceptions. HG Welles predicted World War I at the turn of the 20th century, f'rexample. But that's the exception).

We were promised a glorious future, with moon colonies and rocket cars and all that happy shit, and a lot of people are pissed that not only are we still stuck on Earth, but Earth is still a filthy place and we have no significant presense on it besides on the small percentage of it that's dry. Where the fuck are my oceanic cities? I want to live in a colony of artists, philosophers and scientists deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, free to pursue my dreams without the hindrance of petty morality. After all, am I not entitled to the sweat off my own brow? No! says Dr. Jones. It belongs in a museum!

But the people who're pissed about our lack of awesome future either don't read the news or they're illiterate, and in either case they're also probably communists. Every goddamned day something incredibly cool is invented and no one thinks to say "holy shit. This is the future they were talking about in the 50s." For fuck's sake, for the past few years the Army has been testing a helicopter-mounted motherfucking laser cannon. The Navy has a working battleship-scale railgun prototype that's way too impractical to see use anytime soon, but still. A  fuckin' railgun.

A bunch of researchers are working on a subcutaneous LCD implant that runs off of the glucose in your bloodstream. Get one of those put under five or six layers of skin on your wrist and you'll never have to worry about losing your watch again. Or rather, if you've lost your watch you have much bigger problems than not knowing what time it is.

Or how about that monkey brain-controlled robot arm from a couple months ago? The one where scientists cut open a monkey's head, shoved some wires into his brain, and hooked said wires up to a goddamned robotic arm. In three weeks, the monkey learned everything the scientists trained him to do with the arm, at which point he started using it for shit that the scientists hadn't even thought of.

Or the guy who, after losing a couple of his fingers, let his biochemist brother try out some shit he'd been working on, in an attempt to grow them back. So he sprinked some powder on the finger-stumps, and in a matter of months, they motherfucking grew back, nail and all.

Or the prosthetics that DARPA's been working on. Specifically, the ones that have pressure nerves built in. Which is to say, you can feel things through your prosthetic limb.

In ten years, we're going to have the option of growing back hacked-off bodyparts, reptile-style.

Five years after that, prosthetic limbs will be just as good as the real thing.

Five after that and people are going to start lopping off their arms to be replaced by superior mechanical ones.

Sometime in there, computer monitors will be outmoded. Everyone will have a video input jack implanted into their skull, piping video directly to the vision center of their brain.

Next comes ocular implants. You'll be able to get a time readout on the bottom right corner of your vision, say. Press a button buried in the fake muscle at the base of your bionic thumb and your eyes'll take a picture of whatever you're looking at at the time, which is saved to your USB 2.0-compatible big toe. For an extra $500, you can get a custom heads-up display that puts a box around whatever you're looking at and flashes "TARGET LOCKED" in menacing red letters.

Twenty years ago, no one had any idea that any of this stuff was remotely possible, in the same way that before a couple of yokels invented a working airplane, everyone was absolutely certain that man would never fly. What bothers the fuck out of me is that this stuff is extremely awesome, and assholes are still finding a way to ruin it. The culprits in this case, as with a lot of things, is religious assholes. But it's not any mainstream religion, and they're not ruining it in the way you might think. I'm talking about people who believe in the Technological Singularity.

The Singularity, loosely defined, is the supposed future date when all the major sciences reach a simultaneous apex and everything suddenly becomes peachy. Agricultural technology is such that no one has to go without food. Computers allow people to put their brains on hard disk, entering a digital heaven or some shit. Basically, everything is peachy fucking keen, and we have Science! to thank for it.

If someone can explain to me how this is functionally different from the Rapture, I'd greatly appreciate it. Replace Science! with Jesus and all the worldly problems that Science! solves with the ones that Jesus solves, and they're exactly the same thing. People who believe in that shit are too rational and hip to believe in God, but still aren't comfortable enough to acknowledge that we're on our own. Things are never suddenly going to become significantly better, be it by the hand of God or our new AI overlords dictating our every move. This just isn't the way things work.

But the fact that it's irrational isn't what makes it wrong. The Singularity is never going to happen. I'm so sure of this that I'm going to bet my left nut on it (I feel this is a safe bet. If it turns out I'm wrong, hey, regeneration). I know this because I have a pretty basic understanding of the history of technology. Technology, simply defined, is basically our innate ability to build shit out of the materials around us to make life easier.

The thing is, every major invention humanity's been responsible for has solved the problem it set out to solve, yes, but it also created another (or in some cases, a shit ton of other) problem(s), for which we have to invent more shit in the hopes of solving. This is what makes us an extremely awesome species. The moment we stop building shit, all of the stuff we destabilized with our previous contrivances is going to catch up on us, and we die. We're sharks. We have to keep moving forward; we have no choice. If we don't, we stop breathing and the Earth swallows us up and it's like we were never there.

So the Singularity people have made a few logical mistakes with their religifying of science. The first is that advancement is ever going to stop. The second is that it will ever be able to stop. The third is that we'll eventually be able to solve all our problems, that there's ever been or there ever will be a Golden Age for anything. Any supposed historic golden age is just the period of relative prosperity that directly follows a major catastrophe, like a plague or a huge war. This happens almost every time something monumentally bad happens. There will always be unforseen consequences following any invention we can come up with.

The classic example of this is the horseshit problem. In late 19th century Europe, there was a pretty big population boom going on. People were worried about how all the new people were going to be able to get around; there was no way there'd be enough horses for everyone, and even if there was, that'd be a ridiculous amount of horseshit. It'd cover every surface of every city all the time. It would be a completely unmanageable problem.

Of course, some enterprising bastard invented the motorcar not much later, and suddenly the horseshit problem wasn't an issue anymore. Once automobiles really caught on, people started to wonder how they ever could've used horses as their main form of transportation. The way to world worked changed dramatically for the better, because cars were far cheaper to run than the cost it took to keep a stable of horses alive. Suddenly you didn't have to worry about feeding and vets and shit, just fill up a tank with a certain flammable liquid and take the machine to a mechanic every once in awhile. Years down the line cars have caused quite a few problems, which we're going to make ridiculous leaps technologically trying to fix. This is how Science! works. It's covering up the fuckups of our ancestors.

On the other hand, the Singularity people are an honest-to-god, straight-out-of-any-sci-fi-novel machine cult, and that's kind of cool.

Basically what I'm saying is, sign me the fuck up for bionic eyes, but you won't see me worshipping at the Church of Tesla.