Singularity counter-counter-arguments
This post is not a typo nor talking about the EVE test server but a comment in the conversation with Kaarbaak about the Singularity in EVE. Read those posts first, especially Kaarbaak’s, or this one won’t make any sense.
Clearly, other factors besides just technology come into play. And of course we don’t really understand how the AIs work in EVE because we don’t have anything like them IRL and we don’t have enough prime fiction on them. If a sentient drone can modify and upgrade itself, however, that should lead to some sort of progress, even if it’s geometric and not exponential. (The models here break down quickly due to everything coming from pure speculation.)
Brainpower and human intelligence have major, fundamental differences from today’s CPU power, agreed. But this whole conversation takes place in the context of a fictional universe where fully sentient AI already exists. That changes everything. And when we combine self-aware intelligence with the ability and resources to modify and upgrade itself at will, both in the case of neural implants and sentient drones / artificial intelligences, then we’d almost certainly see strange and new results. Going back to the original point, I suspect that the real answer is that we can’t really imagine it and neither would CCP, and whatever we could imagine wouldn’t make a very fun game. Even if we could, it wouldn’t be this game.
Any discussion of applying the Copernican Principle to time as well as space has to take into account what we know scientifically about the Big Bang but probably goes far afield from the discussion here and, in any case, doesn’t relate too much to a fictional universe where somebody gets to invent truth.
Finally, one should consider atheism as a conclusion, not an a priori assumption, at least in terms of what other people believe. Despite the religious but derogatory “Rapture of the Nerds” name that some have thrown around regarding the Singularity, it’s not actually that. And many of us put a lot of time and thought into balancing our faith with our observations about the world around us and the conclusions we can draw from the scientific method. I view religion and science as orthogonal, not contradictory.