What are you reading right now?

The exponential progress they describe will affect an exponentially decreasing portion of humanity. That is, everyone will benefit from the singularity, but its onset will occur individually for each person. For some, the singularity will never come. Not everyone, it turns out, will want to fly to Alpha Centauri, upload their consciousness into virtual reality, or transform their body to live underwater and in lava flows.

— Amazing! But what is this related to? Surely, immortality, travel to other planets at near-light speed, and other things haven't interested the residents of this city?

— Frank, you're asking the wrong question again. Of course, some of the population was interested, and part of it left Varanasi, but most simply didn't understand how the world had changed. Imagine that in 2020, an ordinary city teenager tries to explain to his grandmother, whom he visited in the village, that he won't go to the river by bicycle because his firewood app crashed, and now he won't be able to catch a satellite. Or how he asks why his grandmother doesn't use the Google Loon stratospheric airship system, and how her refrigerator replenishes its food supply if she can't place an order or send coordinates of her hut to Amazon drones. The old woman will be, at the very least, somewhat surprised. And this is despite the fact that she is separated from this teenager by no more than half a century of technological progress, and with the onset of the singularity, people will be separated by chasms of thousands, albeit subjective, years!