The singularity, as I understand it, is the point when artificial intelligence emerges.

How does a steampunk setting manifest this?

Turing, meet Babbage.

Start with a Difference Engine.  The only way to bring it closer to the singularity within the confines of steam power and kinetic mechanisms is just to keep making the thing bigger.

Well, isn't that the plot of The Difference Engine? The novel that started the genre.

Is it? I haven't read that in ages.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;464803The singularity, as I understand it, is the point when artificial intelligence emerges.

How does a steampunk setting manifest this?

The singularity is the result of a very weird reading of history and very weak math. But what it is is the point at which "progress" is advancing so fast that it is "effectively" a vertical line. Progress isn't actually a numeric quantity and doesn't actually make lines (vertical or otherwise) under any circumstances, so the Singularity as described will not and cannot happen.

But a much weaker singularity claim is imaginable and plausible at any level of technical development. The idea is that science is progressing so quickly that people living in the time period are unable to make coherent predictions about what the near future will look like. And really that just requires a new science to be developed that has immediate implications in every walk of life.

So you could have the invention of the Pressure Sphere from Steam Boy. Suddenly it becomes practical to put a power source in anything. So tomorrow you could suddenly have Star Trek style powered doors popping up everywhere. Or the entire textile industry could be fired the day after that as powered looms replace all weavers. That would be a weak singularity from the point of view of the people living in that society.

-Frank

I don't know how it starts, but it ends when Sherlock Holmes exposes it as just a clever ruse - the machine isn't "thinking" at all it is all a trick.

The point Moriarity exposes Sherlock Holmes who was in fact an android all along.

It is true I am an android, my good fellow, but you yourself have been an hologram this entire time.

Singularity is absolutely a possibility, if you create artificial intelligence that is itself capable of learning and processing at a level far beyond the human (and, hopefully, we then integrate ourselves into that intelligence).  What it basically means outside of the jargon is "not being human anymore".

What would really be impossible, of course, is really understanding what that looks like; most of those who think about it end up envisioning something very much "human", which would ultimately looks as or more ridiculous to a post-singularity society as the late 19th/early 20th century science-fiction predictions about the future ("Archdukes will control the world via DIRIGIBLES!!") look to us now.

All that said, I don't think that there's any way to do a "steampunk singularity", but don't let that stop you. Do what everything else "steampunk" really is anyways, ridiculous quasi-victorian drag with some goggles added on.

I swear to god that's a term I fucking despise...

RPGPundit

And one, like most things, you haven't a fucking clue about.

What you are referring to is the subculture that dresses up in a certain style of clothing.

Is this meant to be a fairly hard science alternate history, or is this an alternate cosmology such as Space: 1889?  If we can permit vital spirits and homonculi, we could come up with something less like Artificial Intelligence and more like Enslaved Natural Intelligence, which could also be fun.

Quote from: RPGPundit;465113Singularity is absolutely a possibility, if you create artificial intelligence that is itself capable of learning and processing at a level far beyond the human (and, hopefully, we then integrate ourselves into that intelligence).  What it basically means outside of the jargon is "not being human anymore".

Define "human".

I'm of the opinion that we had our first singularity along those lines the day one of our ancestors picked up a rock, and realised he could use it to bash things harder; he became more than just the sum of a batch of genetic soup. Every single tool we've developed is just a more elaborate, more specialised, type of rock, and geek masturbation about "the singularity! the future!" is a waste of time and effort that could be used to actually make today better.

It seems to me you could get some interesting steampunk singularity effects with the existence of steam/clockwork machines which are able to create duplicates of themselves in addition to doing something useful.  Or, machines which can design and build machines that can do nearly any work.

Of course, the earliest such machines would probably start displacing lower class workers, so you're likely to have a bit of an uprising as all the work goes away.  Games thrive on conflict, so that's fine.

Quote from: LadybirdI'm of the opinion that we had our first singularity along those lines the day one of our ancestors picked up a rock, and realised he could use it to bash things harder; he became more than just the sum of a batch of genetic soup. Every single tool we've developed is just a more elaborate, more specialised, type of rock, and geek masturbation about "the singularity! the future!" is a waste of time and effort that could be used to actually make today better.

Yeah, pretty much. Take out all the stupid "Geek Rapture" stuff and all you're left with is the idea that if technology moves fast enough, you won't recognize the place. And that could work for Steam Punk just fine.

-Frank

There was a novel about this called Whitechapel Gods.

Unfortunately, it's a crappy novel.

You know, I'm just starting to read a little about the Victorian Age, something I don't know anything about. Next week I'm going to try to run a Steam Punk game of Pathfinder based on basically nothing more than my Castle Falkenstine Fairies book, whatever I can learn about Victorian Europe on wikipedia in two sittings, and all of the over the top images of steam punk I can find on google images.