What an amazing song. I smell a hip-hop remix in the near future.

The American conversation right now suffers from an odd pathology–our tendency to leave the fundamental changes to our Constitution made after the Civil War out of discussions of our nation’s most important document. At the Supreme Court last week, the justices endlessly debated what the Second Amendment meant in 1789. But, as Charles Lane wrote recently, the 14th Amendment, which was not even mentioned by the justices, is the essential bridge between the 2nd Amendment’s militias and the modern day invocation of the right to self-defense that was at the heart of the case before the Supreme Court. The same day, in his majestic speech on race, Barack Obama left the Reconstruction Amendments out of his recitation of the history of race and the Constitution.

The lede for the article is at the end is incorrect: Obama didn’t get it “wrong” so much as he perhaps watered down his speech for most people to understand. But the rest of the article is very, very good.

It makes the point Yale Law uber-prof Akhil Reed Amar champions: that the Constitution should be viewed as originally a pro-slavery document created in the time of local militia distrust of imperial standing armies. The slavocratic theme of the “first” Constitution culminated in the brutal Civil War. As a result of Union Army’s victory, Lincoln and others reforged the Constitution with the Reconstruction Amendments, changing the spirit of the Constitution from distrust of big government to distrust of the states. After all, it was the Southern states who rebelled, and it was their local militias–once the heroes of the first Constitution–that wound up betraying the Union. Modern understanding of the Constitution, our “second/Lincoln” Constitution, should be seen in this light.

Great as it was in many ways, our 1787 Constitution produced over 70 years of sectional conflict that was ultimately resolved in one of history’s bloodiest wars. That Civil War, and the Union victory in that war, is what paved the way for the Constitution we celebrate today. With the 13th Amendment, a document that bent toward slavery became stridently anti-slavery. The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal citizenship, civil rights, and due process for all Americans and gave Congress vast new power to enforce these mandates. The 15th Amendment and subsequent measures extending the franchise to women and young Americans made the right to vote a fundamental constitutional value.

Kurzweil’s notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.”

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. “Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter.