Technological singularities only exist in hindsight.

by Zach
(Raleigh, NC, US)

When a technological singularity is recognized it will have been found by using 20/20 hindsight.

If you look at how technology has progressed then you can not find some abrupt change that was recognized as occurring at a particular time by the folks involved.

And further you can not find some abrupt change that was correctly predicted.

Instead you find that only in looking back and assigning past events to an historical timeline that we see clearly how change from one thing to another occurs.

Every single big advance: From the domestication of fire, animals, and plants (agriculture) to writing, mathematics even to the invention of the integrated circuit and the Internet fits this way of tracking progress.

Following this reasoning the next technological singularity may have already happened and now we only await its retrospective creation by future historians.

An even more accurate statement is that when looking at our history, we see many technological singularities.

To say that technological singularities are occurring closer and closer to one another in time is just to realize how our increased ability to communicate ideas more quickly among ourselves is working.

When you look back at previous predictions of how the future will shape up you find the actual future is always more anticlimactic than was predicted to be.

It is not the case that there is some sort of apocalyptic event looming in our near future associated with the advance of technology.