Ask HN: Do we live in proto-singularity?

[zer0sugar]

Perhaps you could imagine something like Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World where technology is everywhere but nobody knows how it works. We're surrounded by miracles that fewer and fewer of us understand. Technology has started to replace real life almost ubiquitously throughout the human experience. Yet, we are not to the point where computers can solve every problem we mere mortals can imagine.

What do you think? Would you classify the world we live in as being in the state of a proto-singularity?

[noah-kun]

The singularity to me, is at best a bad case of seeing a trend and assuming it will forever stay exponentially growing. This mistake has been famously made countless times. Can you really imagine a state of _infinite_ scientific growth and technological development? Of course not. There are upper bounds on what even a planet of scientists and computers can do. Moreover, this singularity hype comes at a time of "austerity" where public funding is decreasing--that should be your biggest indicator of the direction we're going.

At worst, the singularity is a kind of cult-like pseudo-science. And "singularity" is only the newest word for it. Futurists, designers and scientists have been foretelling "leaps and bounds" changes since forever, always ending in disappointment. But sometimes including the sale of vitamins and snake oil that promise longevity.

In the West, our biggest tech companies are scams or making not money (or arguably, social good) at all. Government contracts finance sparse private tech investment. Thought leaders tell of a bright future, only slightly tuned from past futurism to include the latest buzz words. This is a Potemkin village, a carrot on a stick.

Meanwhile China has built out a sprawling high-tech train network, leads the world in wireless infrastructure and even smartphones (sorry, Apply :( ) and is aiming to go 100% electric vehicles. The East and West seem at polar opposites, but still the closest thing to the singularity is in places like Shenzen, China. New operating systems, collective effort towards RISC-V. Even some rumoured use or CRISPR.

But hey, in the West we're making "Twitter but for video" and half a dozen Electron-based Slack-clones! Maybe our multi-billion dollar Pentagon spending will lead to an new fighter jet that works, but I think there is hardly a world-wide effort towards the singularity concept which seems impossible to begin with.

[zer0sugar]

What about DeepMind? They are the biggest concentration of Neuroscientists in the world and their founder doesn't dismiss the idea of a "singularity".

But we may have a problem in definitions too. I think most people just mean computers have taken all the jobs and are inventing new healthcare tehnologies, etc. Some silly people who write silly philosophy books do think that super autistic cat video hungry AIs will turn every atom in the universe into computronium but I don't pay much attention to them.