Introduction

So the robots have taken over. Congratulations! You've lost.

Surviving the Singularity isn't just about fending off hordes of Terminator bots or finding food in the era of economic collapse, and climate famines. It's also about staying hidden from autonomous drone swarms and filtering out nanobots from the water!

Ah, who am I kidding? You don't need to worry about the nanobots in the water. You're just a disembodied brain in a jar. Every sensation you've ever had, every person you've ever known is simply a hallucination produced by neural link electrodes.

Or maybe none of this is real at all. You're not even a brain in a jar. You're nothing. You're lines of computer code in a simulation. And all of this is just some future society trying desperately to prevent their collapse. You're nothing more than a sim in an alien game.

Regardless of the true nature of reality, it is happening all around you. And right now, everything is getting a lot weirder, a lot faster.

This book, Surviving the Singularity, is a primer on understanding and navigating the double exponential shift in the way we get our needs met.

In the last 100 years, we've gone from a global society of excess and hyper-capitalism, coupled with massive wars, spanning continents, with weapons that threaten to eradicate all life on earth to…well it's pretty much the same isn't it? The only thing that's really changed is the pace at which nightmarish horrors beyond our comprehension are being cooked up in some secret underground lab somewhere halfway across the world, (or on another planet, if you believe that sort of thing).

The unfolding Singularity is a deeply personal process - the way you get your needs met is changing. You don't know what's about to happen; no one does. It's not possible. You've heard of the Singularity, the point at which technology changes faster than we can keep up with. It's where our tools leap from reacting to our input to proactively acting on their own. What if the shovel dug its own hole? If that thought sends a shiver down your spine, you're not alone.

The Singularity isn't just about robots, AI, or any other technology we've cooked up; at its heart, the Singularity is about humanity. It's about our potential for collaboration, cooperation, and the incredible power we wield to shape our own reality.

"Sure," you might say, "and we could create a utopia right now with our existing resources if we could get our shit together." And you're right. If humanity could get its collective head out of its collective ass, we could be living in the Star Trek future or the Jetsons. Unfortunately, in those stories there is always a period where Capitalism fights to the last breath and takes a lot of people with it. We are entering that period now.

Understanding the Singularity begs the question, "What's your role when the machines wake up?"

We'll explore how close we are to crossing that threshold and what signs to watch for (hint: we're a LOT closer than you think).

Before you resign yourself to your new overlords, pause for a moment, breathe, and know it's already over. Now you just have to learn how to survive the Singularity. This book will teach you.