Above and behind Nichols appeared a holographic projection of a two-axis graph with an exponential curve sloping up to the right. Along the horizontal axis, markers for each of twenty-one centuries appeared.

“Technological progress is never linear. It is exponential. That fact wasn’t apparent for most of human history, because humans were living on the flat part of the curve. But because human knowledge builds upon itself, the rate of change is always accelerating. The twentieth century saw as much change as had occurred in the previous five centuries combined. The first two decades of this century saw as much change as the entire twentieth century. At this point we are experiencing that amount of change in a single year. Within fifty years human knowledge will be advancing along a slope approaching vertical.”

Cleary glanced around the large room. No one stirred.

Nichols continued. “We can’t place too much blame on our intellectual forebears for not anticipating the Singularity. Our accomplishment results from the convergence of revolutions in three fields that were unknown as late as 1950: biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

“The average person in the year 2000 had no idea that the foundation for this event had already been laid. The entire human genome had been decoded. Primitive artificial intelligence was already in use, as were early neural implants. We had already taken the first step in building an artificial brain: the construction of artificial neural clusters that could work in tandem with biological clusters.”

Nichols was speaking faster now. Cleary knew he loved recounting the path of AI development.

“By 2020 we had fully mapped animal brains and modeled extensive regions of the human brain. Millions were using neural implants for hearing and sight loss. First-stage virtual reality was commonplace in the military and in industry.

“Moore’s Law was still operating: computing power was doubling every eighteen months. By 2030 a standard personal computer equaled the processing power of the human brain. We didn’t have the software to emulate the brain yet, but in pure processing power we had arrived.

“By 2035 advanced speech recognition software terminated computers as separate objects. Keyboards went the way of manual typewriters. Full-immersion virtual reality had been achieved, with visual and auditory input channeled directly to sensory neurons. The old Internet was replaced by the worldwide Grid, a thousandfold improvement in cyberspace.

“By 2045 the first molecular assemblers made nanotechnology a commercial reality. Nanites enabled us to map the human brain through internal scanning at the neuron and synapse level. This catapulted our efforts to reverse-engineer the brain and develop a functional software simulation.

“The Nuclear Depression slowed progress considerably, of course. But the exponential curve continued on its unrelenting path. By 2060 nanotechnology had exploded: molecular assemblers were commonplace, producing industrial and consumer products from base materials. Neural implants to enhance brain speed, analytic ability, and creativity meant that human intelligence, even for ordinary citizens, approached what once would have been labeled genius.”