The Singularity Has Become a Marketing Gimmick

George Lucas famously made his fortune not as a film director, but as the owner of the merchandising rights to Star Wars. It turns out, even the huge profits of box office films can’t compare to the money you can make from the sale of action figures, t-shirts, shot glasses, posters, etc. This lesson isn’t unique to the film industry. Find a cultural phenomenon and you’ll find a George Lucas equivalent raking in the profits from clever merchandising or marketing gimmicks. Case in point: the recent crowd of sales people and marketers clamoring after their little slice of the singularity.

The singularity literally promises to unlock trillions of dollars of economic activity and even deliver world domination to some lucky AI company or nation state. But that moment could be a long way off, or it could never happen at all. Most optimistically, to take Ray Kurzweil’s recent estimate, the singularity could happen by 2045. Less ambitious estimates extend out into the 500-year-to-never range. And yet, that hasn’t stopped anyone — Kurzweil included — from profiting off the singularity today.

In this respect, the singularity is less like the Star Wars franchise and more like Christianity — less nostalgic fan club, more forward-looking belief system. Jaron Lanier pointed this out back in 2011, noting that the singularity is a religion “just for…