Even after I explained the exact usage I was invoking, the attractive nuisance of all the science fiction that has gotten attached to the term still prevented you and Quarrelsome from reading my post as written.
I really wish the term hadn't been mangled so much. Though the originator of the term bears a non-trivial amount of the responsibility for it, having written some rather good science fiction on the topic himself. The original meaning from the paper is quite useful and nothing has stepped up to replace it.
All the singularity means as I explicitly used it here is you entirely lose the ability to predict the future. It is relative to who is using it... we are all well past the Caveman Singularity, where no (metaphorical) caveman could possibly predict anything about our world. If we stabilize where we are now I feel like I have at least a grasp on the next ten years. If we continue at this pace I don't. That doesn't mean I believe AI will inevitably do this or that... it means I can't predict anymore, which is really the exact opposite. AI doesn't have to get to "superintelligence" to wreck up predictions.
>the originator of the term ... rather good science fiction
I guess you are thinking of Vernor Vinge but the term first came up with John von Neumann in the 1950s:
>...on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which 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
The most interesting factor of the dynamic around things like near singularity is the things that I feel are coupled to it
Basically the ability to reason about first and second order effects
IE, before the cellphone was invented you could have predicted the it, things like star trek envisaged a world of portable communication
What impact the cellphone had was predictable to some people, on the one hand increased convenience of communication as well as the end of making a call and wondering who was going to pick up, which was a definite consideration pre-mobile when you called a place and not a person, now we just assume that when we call someone we'll get them and not their family
The second order effects were less obvious, ease of access to someone meant being always accessible, so now everyone could be contacted whenever someone wanted them, it changed the dynamics of life for many, not to mention the effects of different technologies combining, the personal computer and the mobile phone becoming one in the form of the smartphone gave everyone a computer in their pocket, let alone adding the internet into the mix
Each of these changes were completely unpredictable to the people pre-cellphone, once again, compare modern day trek and the originals
I still vividly remember the moment one of the characters in discovery asked the computer to give her a mirror, the same behaviour of countless people now using the fact that their selfie camera functionally gives them a portable mirror in the form of their phone, that was unpredictable
So that's one form of being unable to predict the future
But there's another interesting dynamic I think, which is each direction of technical development is accelerating, which means that we may soon hit the point that only a subject matter expert will be able to predict or perhaps even be aware of what happens in any particular field, so we may get a period where before we can't predict the future, we may have some strange middle ground where we're constantly surprised by the developments we see around ourselves and when we look into it find this new discovery has been around months or years
I certainly have experienced that once or twice, however I'm wondering if that may become the new normal
I really wish the term hadn't been mangled so much. Though the originator of the term bears a non-trivial amount of the responsibility for it, having written some rather good science fiction on the topic himself. The original meaning from the paper is quite useful and nothing has stepped up to replace it.
All the singularity means as I explicitly used it here is you entirely lose the ability to predict the future. It is relative to who is using it... we are all well past the Caveman Singularity, where no (metaphorical) caveman could possibly predict anything about our world. If we stabilize where we are now I feel like I have at least a grasp on the next ten years. If we continue at this pace I don't. That doesn't mean I believe AI will inevitably do this or that... it means I can't predict anymore, which is really the exact opposite. AI doesn't have to get to "superintelligence" to wreck up predictions.