Here is an neat rabbit hole: https://orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45c68b98779ad

I think of it like time dilation, such as near a black hole(see what I did there, tying the two singularities together).

From the perspective of one experiencing time-dilation nothing appears unusual, everything appears normal, it only from the outside perspective that things are strange.

As far as I can tell the singularity happened in the late 1700's. For thousands of years the collective economic growth of the world was effectively a straight shallow line, it grew, but slowly and linearly, then in the late 1700's something changed, it went exponential and everybody was along for the ride, and from the perspective of being caught up in this exponential growth it appears flat, normal even. but you look at history and wonder why every advance was so slow. and you look ahead and say the singularity is almost there. But we will never actually reach it. by the time we get there it is the new normal.

I think the mistake here is that there is a certain rate of progress where humanity can no longer even collectively process the progress and it is equivalent to infinite progress. This point is the singularity and requires non-human driven progress. We may or may not reach that point but full automation is a requirement to reach it. We may hit a hard wall and devolve to an s-curve, hit a maximum linear progress rate, hit a progress rate bounded by population growth and human capability growth (a much slower exponential), or pass the 1/epsilon slope point where we throw up our hands (singularity). Or have a dark age where progress goes negative. Time will tell.

The etymology and physical metaphor of "The Singularity" are a bit confused here, and I think it muddles the overall point.

> the singularity is a term borrowed from physics to describe a cataclysmic threshold in a black hole

In his article which popularized the idea of The Singularity, Vinge quotes Ulam paraphrasing von Neumann, and states, "Von Neumann even uses the term singularity". As von Neumann surely knew, "singularity" was a term widely used in mathematics well before the idea of black holes (etymonline dates first use to 1893). Vinge does not say anything about black holes.

> an object is pulled into the center [of] gravity of a black hole [until] it passes a point beyond which nothing about it, including information, can escape. [...] This disruption on the way to infinity is called a singular event – a singularity.

The point at which "nothing" can escape a black hole is the event horizon, not the singularity. What exactly happens to information and what exactly happens when crossing the event horizon are subjects of debate (see "black hole information paradox" and "AMPS/firewall paradox"); however, it's probably fair to say that the most orthodox/consensus views are that information is conserved through black-hole evaporation and that nothing dramatic happens to an observer passing through the event horizon.

> the singularity became a black hole, an impenetrable veil hiding our future from us. Ray Kurzweil, a legendary inventor and computer scientist, seized on this metaphor

While I'm not prepared to go into my personal views in this comment, it's worth noting that the idea that "exponential curves look the same from every point" is not foreign to, e.g., the Kurzweilian view of The Singularity; nevertheless, fitting dramatic, industrial-revolution-sized progress into the fixed scale of a (contemporary) human lifetime would surely be a big deal. This idea, (whether you believe it will happen or not), is obscured by the spurious black hole metaphor.

The problem with the concept of "the singularity" it is has a hidden assumption that computation has no relationship to energy. Which, once unmasked, is a pretty outlandish claim.

There is a popular illusion that somehow technological progress is a pure function of human ingenuity, and that the more efficient we can make technology the faster we can make even better technological improvement. But history of technology has always been the history of energy usage.

Prior to the emergence of homo-sapiens, "humans" learned to cook food by releasing energy stored in wood. Cooking food is often considered a prerequisite for the development of the massive, energy consuming, brain of homo-sapiens.

After that it took hundreds of thousands of years for Earth's climate to become stable enough to make agriculture feasible. We see almost no technological progress until we start harvesting enormous amounts of solar energy through farming. Not long after this we see the development of mathematics and writing since humans now had surplus energy and they could spend some of it on other things.

You can follow this pattern though the development and extraction of coal, oil etc. You can look at the advancement of technology in the last 100 years alongside our use of fossil fuels and expansion of energy capabilities with renewables (which historically only been used to supplement, not replace non-renewables).

But technological progress has always been a function of energy, and more specifically, going back to cooking food, computational/cognitive ability similarly demands increasingly high energy consumption.

All evidence seems to suggest that we increasingly need more energy for incrementally smaller return on computation.

So for something like the singularity to happen, we would also need incredible changes in available energy (there's also a more nuanced argument that you also need smooth energy gradients but that's more discussion than necessary). Computation is not going to rapidly expand without also requiring tremendously large increases in energy.

Further it's entirely reasonable that there is some practical limit to just how "smart" a thing can be based on the energy requirements to get there. That is, you can't reasonably harvest enough energy to create intelligence on the level we imagine (the same way there is a limit to how tall a mountain can be on earth due to gravity).

Like most mystical thinking, ignoring what we know about thermodynamics tends to be a fundamental axiom.

I think this is accurate. However, this does not mean that the exponential isn't real, it just isn't sudden. We have been living through continuously accelerating technological and economic growth our whole lives, and things really do happen much faster now than they did in the past.

For example it took centuries for indoor plumbing to be widely adopted, and less than a decade for smartphones. It took hundreds of thousands of years to get the first billion people (~1800), but the eighth billion happened in eleven years (2011-2022).

Someone pointed out to me a few days ago that mine is the last generation who were able to lose touch and reconnect after long periods of time.

In the days of rotary & pay telephones the loss of communication was possible.

That is no longer the case.

A mistake in this critique is it assumes an exponential: a constant proportional rate of growth. It is true that, in some sense, an exponential always seems to be accelerating while infinity always remains equally far away.

But this is a bit of a straw man. Mathematical models of the technological singularity [1], along with the history of human economic growth [2], are super-exponential: the rate of growth is itself increasing over time, or at least has taken multiple discrete leaps [3] at the transitions to agriculture and industry, respectively. A true singularity/infinity can of course never be achieved for physical reasons (limited stuff within the cubically-expanding lightcone, plus inherent limits to technology itself), but the growth curve can look hyperbolic and traverse many orders of magnitude before those physical limits are encountered.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23928/w239...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wcEPEb2mnZ9mtGlkv8lEtScU...

[3] https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf

> the Kurzweilian version of singularity

Cynical take: Kurzweil's predictions follow a predictable pattern which suggests something about how and why they are being generated.

Namely, it's whatever increasingly-improbable new advances and discoveries are needed to ensure achieve practical immortality is achieved just in time for a particular human named Ray Kurzweil to escape the icy grip of death.

If singularity premise is correct, then i think it should must already had happened in our cluster of the universe. Since it hasn't yet, then there are 3 options. 1st: earth and earthlings are special, which is too egocentric notion to be taken seriously. 2nd: we are being observed for entertainment by high conciousness. That could explain a lot, though this removes agency and prevents us from reaching that moment on our own (but maybe the observers are curious to find that out). 3rd: the extinction and annihilation of so-called intelligence once it obliterates all the resources in vicinity. Of course there is option number 4, but ultimately the question, what is the point of that?

This isn't right, the inflection point happens when computers/software can self-improve at a level where humans can't keep up. It isn't just that progress is continuously exponential, it's that tech becomes a magic box that spits out advances while even the smartest humans can only pray to it, like a (hopefully benevolent) god.

vaguely related

https://bigthink.com/guest-thinkers/ray-kurzweil-the-six-epo...

I see parallels with AGI/takeoff. "It's just 2 years away" every year. KK agues that the process is continuous, but AI optimists argue the inflection will be abrupt , like a step-function.

A good reminder that every technological exponent is a sigmoid.

It is something that will or will not happen on an individual level.

You are fools to think you personally are a part of or will be present at the zenith of human ascendancy.

One, all, and the world will go on as though another day. Those who become or go beyond their “full self” will merely have a new level. Like a base conversion.

Besides, there are notes of singularities flitting in and out of your very minds. You get the the bottom of those and you will find whichever part is yours will come by your acquiring it for yourself.

The singularium will be your own place in the ascendency of Man, through technology or personal development. The self is the ultimate technology.