The Singularity is a hypothetical moment in the not-so-distant future when machine intelligence will supplant human intelligence as the dominant force in the world. There is a growing movement of scientists, authors, and advocates who believe the Singularity is not just possible, but inevitable. There is maybe no more eloquent or influential argument for the Singularity than futurist Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil predicts a utopian future of advanced human/machine hybrid intelligence and radically extended life by the year 2045. This thesis applies Kenneth Burke’s system of dramatism, specifically the pentad, to The Singularity is Near as well as a sample of technology articles from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to examine Kurzweil’s motives and the way Singularity discourse “chains out” through other media. I will also draw on movement theory to examine the discourse of Singularity advocates to determine if Singularity discourse qualifies as a rhetorical movement. / Department of Telecommunications

Constructing and understanding arguments is often difficult but key to both philosophyand other parts of the everyday life. Some methods to ease this task has been developed.One of the methods developed within informal reasoning is argument diagramming, amethod to structure and visualize arguments. This essay takes a complicated argumentabout the fate of the universe, put forward by futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book TheSingularity is Near, as well as some critique published against said argument, as a casestudy for the application of argument diagramming on unstructured arguments fromoutside the field of philosophy. To arrive at a diagram that can be easily grasped andread but still contains all information of the original argument, this essay developsa method of splitting sub-diagrams off of a main diagram. Analysing the resultingdiagrams shows that the plausibility of Kurzweil’s argument is heavily dependent on afew, critical premises at the lower levels of the diagram.