Considering that four of Percy Bysshe Shelley's five children died in infancy, considering that Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever before her daughter was two weeks old ... I think for the early nineteenth century, the defeat of disease would have been an incredibly radical transformation.


In any event, those are the trappings of the Singularity. I'm talking about the idea: the idea that mankind is perfectible through the use of reason.