Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

And this was another comment in the same thread, that followed right after. I only include it because it, in a silly way, references a technology I've just been assuming for my Ghost Targets future.

131 comments, and no one has picked up on PZ's cow singularity and its implications.

The thing is, I can easily imagine a cow singularity within my lifetime (assuming I adopt a healthier lifestyle and medical care improves at the same rate). I expect that within a hundred years, it will be entirely possible to slice a piece of tender beef filet off of a substrate of connective tissues on a conveyor belt. That really doesn't seem too terribly far-fetched. From a human perspective, that situation represents the cow singularity.

But from a cow's perspective, such a situation is trivial, and has nothing to do with being a cow. It's likely a cow wouldn't notice that people were slicing filets off of a cow cell culture, nor would the cow recognize any kinship with the flesh thus obtained.

In the event all the beef we needed were obtained from cow cell cultures, I suspect cows would go back to being big, shaggy, forest-dwelling ungulates, and would forget about us, to the degree the environment allows.

If, in some fantastic world that violates everything we know about history, Kurzweil's human singularity were to occur, I doubt that it would include us, or that we would recognize it as anything to do with humanity. If the singularity occurs, the primary beneficiaries will be them, and we will revert to being savannah-dwelling bipedal social primates, same as always.