Ashwin asked Alan Moore:

In the Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary, you speak of a time when information will overflow and in your own words "all bets are off" at this point. The technological singularity (as explained by Vinge, Yudkowsky etc.) if it does happen predicts something similar. Do you think you were in fact talking about the singularity, and the overflow of information that will come along with it?

Alan Moore I’m afraid that I really don’t know enough about the supposed causes of the ‘Singularity’ to say much about it one way or another. What was talking about in the Mindscape documentary was a theory which I believe was first originated by an economist, possibly in the early 1970s, that pertained to the phenomenon of Period Information Doubling. This states that the length of time it takes for our species to double the amount of information that is in the world is itself becoming briefer and briefer. If the hundreds of thousands of years between the first hand-axe and, say, the year 1 AD is counted as one period of human information, it takes us about fifteen hundred years to double that amount. It then takes only a couple of hundred years to double that. Between 1960 and 1970, human information allegedly doubled, and the extrapolated graph curve of this doubling points to a time in (I think) 2017, where human information is doubling every fraction of a second, supposing of course that the graph curve holds up. This was the point at which I said “all bets were off”, and while I have heard people speak of this Singularity in similar terms, I don’t know enough about the thinking behind the Singularity to say whether I think it’s the same phenomenon we’re talking about. We can probably both agree that some sort of information crisis is looming, and are probably both necessarily sketchy about the details.

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