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by chobeat 1748 days ago
For sure there are eschatological traits, it's discussed quite commonly in the literature on the topic. We are exiting the linear, flat time of our parents and entering again in a cyclical time and we need ruptures: Collapse is one, Singularity is another but there are more on the horizon (like escape to space and so on).
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While I listen when, e.g. Stross compared the Singularity to an Atheist take on Christian theology, I don’t think our parents lived in anything like a linear time:

My dad was born in ‘39; the first fission bomb was ‘45; first transistor was demonstrated in ‘47; first fusion bomb ‘51; NTSC TV color standard was ‘53; first artificial satellite was ‘58; the laser and the pill in ‘60; measles vaccine in ‘63; the 60s was civil rights, anti-war, free love, gay rights and second-wave feminism in the west, decolonisation in Africa, the green revolution, and the majority of the space race; 8-track, compact cassette, PDP-8, BASIC were all ‘64; first ATM and first human-to-human heart transplant was ‘67; the Mother of All Demos was ‘68.

Then the 70s happened and made the 60s seem languid — the mainframes became home computers, the women became national leaders, space became more relevant, DNA sequencing first invented and then used to fully sequence a virus, first test tube baby and first genetically modified human insulin from E. coli, X-ray tomography and MRIs invented, smallpox eliminated first from the Americas and then worldwide, public key encryption, cochlear implants successfully implanted, first demo of an audio CD, polio eliminated in the USA, …

And the 80s surpassed the 70s like the 70s surpassed the 60s.

So much has changed so fast; these days you can only even keep track of how much has changed because of the crowdsourced efforts of other people.

My grandfather near the end of his life had a rant about WhatsApp. "I grew up sending telegrams to my friends and family, learned to listen to the radio, started watching television, called neighbors on my home telephone, got my first mobile phone, and now you want me to do this WhatsApp thing? What's the point?" The sheer amount of change his generation saw was staggering.