South Africa, Jan. 8 -- In the Terminator movies, "singularity" was the date when machines overtook us and became sentient, but I recently discovered an alternate definition of singularity. In his book, "Scale", Geoffrey West describes "finite time singularity" where you have open-ended growth driven by current economic and technological systems. But in a system with finite resources (such as planet earth) the only way to prevent the day when we reach the limits of our resources and face collapse is through innovation, which in turn, may ultimately allow us to escape our resource constraint and "reset the date" of those limits again.

Each time we reset the clock through innovation, the time until we need to reset it gets shorter, hence t...