Consider my 86 yo mother: extremely intelligent and competent, a physician. She struggled conceptually with her iPhone because she was used to reading the manual for a device and learning all its behavior and affordances. Even though she has a laptop she runs the same set of programs on it. But the phone is protean and she struggles with its shapeshifting.

It’s intuitive and simple to you and me. But languages change, slang changes, metaphors change and equipment changes. Business models exist today that were unthinkable 40 years ago because the ubiquity of computation did not exist.

She’s suffering, in Toffler’s words, a “future shock”.

Now imagine that another 40 years worth of innovation happens in a decade. And then again in the subsequent five. And faster. You’ll have a hard time keeping up. And not just you: kids will too. Things become incomprehensible without machines doing most of the work — including explanation. Eventually you, or your kids, won’t even understand what’s going on 90% of the time…then less and less.

I sometimes like to muse on what a Victorian person would make of today if transported through time. Or someone from 16th century Europe. Or Archimedes. They’d mostly understand a lot, I think. But lately I’ve started to think of someone from the 1950s. They might even find today harder to understand than the others would.

That crossover point is when the world becomes incomprehensible in a flash. That’s a mathematical singularity (metaphorically speaking).