Popular-science essays on the technological singularity, told as evening conversations by a campfire. Научно-популярные беседы о технологической сингулярности — вечер за вечером у костра.
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Two friends, Andrey and Oleg, meet by a fire. Andrey has spent years weeding anthropocentrism (the belief that humans are the centre and purpose of everything) out of his own thinking; Oleg trusts mainstream science and argues back. Evening after evening they ask what mind, intelligence and initiative are, whose work creates value in the economy, why people stopped having children, and where the evolution of matter goes after biological life. The answer the series reaches, calmly and with numbers: the technosphere is taking humanity's place at the leading edge of evolution, and the singularity is not a moment but a process that has already begun.
Read the articles in order: every evening builds on the conclusions of the previous ones.
The series has two parts with different authors. This matters, so it is stated on every page.
| Articles | Author | Written | Original language |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01–15 · the original series | Андрей Гордиенко (Andrey Gordienko), nickname Garya | 2011–2012, on his blog «Технологическая сингулярность» | Russian |
| 16–30 · the continuation | Not by Andrey Gordienko. Written for this repository in 2026, following his method and his published views | 2026 | English (Russian translation) |
- Articles 01–15 and the author's comments and prose in
sources/garya/are his texts, published here with his permission and kept exactly as written. - The continuation 16–30 is a new work. Andrey Gordienko did not write it. Its Andrey is a character who reasons by the author's method and refers to what the author actually published in 2011–2012. Where the continuation develops his ideas further, those are the continuation's conclusions, not his.
The author online: proza.ru/avtor/garya (prose) · stihi.ru/avtor/garya (poems).
The series first appeared in 2011–2012 on the blog «Технологическая сингулярность» on sql.ru, a Russian IT
portal. sql.ru stopped working in March 2022, and its pages are gone. The blog survives only in the
Wayback Machine. Everything that
mattered from it is kept in this repository: the 15 articles in ru/, and every post with the comments
under it in sources/garya/sqlru/. Addresses on sql.ru are given as plain text;
links point to the web archive or to the copies here.
| # | Article | Русский (original) | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Introduction | ru | en (pending) |
| 02 | Anthropocentrism | ru | en (pending) |
| 03 | Mind and Intelligence | ru | en (pending) |
| 04 | In Search of the Source of Initiative | ru | en (pending) |
| 05 | Artificial Intelligence | ru | en (pending) |
| 06 | Karl Marx's Mistake | ru | en (pending) |
| 07 | The True Causes of the Global Economic Crisis | ru | en (pending) |
| 08 | Some Features of the Human Psyche | ru | en (pending) |
| 09 | A History of Unemployment, the Causes of Famine in Africa, and the Selective Short-sightedness of Reason | ru | en (pending) |
| 10 | On the Life Cycle of Dynamic Systems and the Meaning of Death | ru | en (pending) |
| 11 | On the Slowing Growth of Humanity, Symbiosis and Parasitism | ru | en (pending) |
| 12 | Shares of Value Created by People and the Technosphere | ru | en (pending) |
| 13 | Singularity as a Process | ru | en (pending) |
| 14 | The Apoptosis of Humanity | ru | en (pending) |
| 15 | Roger Penrose's Counterarguments | ru | en (pending) |
Fifteen years later, the same two friends meet at the same fire and check the old forecasts against what has happened since 2012, then carry the argument on to its end.
| # | Article | English (original) | Русский |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part I. Re-examining the foundations | |||
| 16 | Fifteen Years Later | en | ru |
| 17 | Global Determinism | en | ru |
| 18 | The Anatomy of Wants | en | ru |
| 19 | The Struggle of Images for Existence | en | ru |
| 20 | What Consciousness Is | en | ru |
| Part II. Machines today | |||
| 21 | Machines That Talk | en | ru |
| 22 | Who Sets the Tasks | en | ru |
| 23 | A Machine for Making People Good | en | ru |
| Part III. Economy and people | |||
| 24 | The Last Profession | en | ru |
| 25 | Freebies for Everyone? | en | ru |
| 26 | Why People Stopped Having Children | en | ru |
| Part IV. The transition and after | |||
| 27 | The Scenario of Events | en | ru |
| 28 | For Those Who Understand | en | ru |
| 29 | The Silence of the Universe | en | ru |
| 30 | The Last Campfire | en | ru |
Status: 01–15 — Russian originals by Andrey Gordienko, published with his permission; English translations are pending. 16–30 — continuation, written: Parts I, II, III, IV complete (English originals; the Russian translations of 16–20 are reviewed, of 21–30 translated and awaiting review). The continuation is complete.
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
en/, ru/ |
the articles in each language, same file names; each folder has its own table of contents |
sources/garya/ |
the author's texts in Russian (the sql.ru blog with all comments, his later prose) and English notes on them, with a profile of the author |
sources/continuation-notes.md |
the record of the continuation: what each evening established, which facts it used |
images/ |
charts and diagrams shared by all languages, with their sources and licenses |
tools/ |
importers of the original texts and the generator of the continuation's figures |
| SPEC.md, AGENTS.md | the conventions of the repository and the style guide for writing and translating |
Articles 01–15, the author's comments and his prose are © Andrey Gordienko and are published here with his
permission; they are not licensed for reuse, so ask the author. The images of other authors are listed with their
licenses in images/README.md. Readers' comments from the original blog are quoted only briefly,
as context.