>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

it's an interesting question: how much more productive would we all be if we were all as savvy/literate/productive with computers as some hypothetical comparator (I'm not sure programmers are the right comparison to make)?

for example, i am in operations and strategy, but have always wanted to be more technical because i could see the value for many many tasks. however, the learning curve was steep and so learning and doing other things drove better returns for me.

now, LLMs make learning basic concepts and executing simple tasks extremely easy, and i am realizing a higher level of productivity then previously; i used codex to do a test data migration and then evaluate the data quality. i could simply not have done this previously, but it is a meaningful change for me, that i can execute on this.

there is no maintenance burden: i don't have to keep the code alive. it simply sped up an otherwise manual and non repeated task.

i think that's what's so interesting and concerning about this technology: i think power and productivity will flow more broadly across the workforce. this will result in relative winners and losers, and some who will experience no real change at all.

similarly to the costs and benefits of mobile devices diffusing technology access; it changed some things, it created winners and losers and yet our daily lives are recognizable to someone from 50 or even more years ago.

> regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans,

AI isn't one thing though. Really its kind of a natural evolution of 'higher order life'. I think that something like a 'organization', (corps, governments, etc) once large enough is at least as alive as a tardigrade. And for the people who are its cells, it is as comprehensible as the tardigrade is to any of its individual cells. So why wouldn't organizations over all of human history eventually 'evolve' a better information processing system than humans making mouth sounds at each other? (writing was really the first step on this). Really if you look at the last 12,000 years of human society as actually being the first 12,000 years of the evolutionary history of 'organizations', it kinda makes a lot of sense. And so much of it was exploring the environment, trying replication strategies, etc. And we have a lot of different organizations now, like an evolutionary explosion, where life finds various niches to exploit.

/schitzoposting

The singularity does no such thing.

that's kind of optimistic. for example a misaligned super AI might engineer a virus that wipes out most of the 7 billion humans. that would put a damper on the adaptability of the human race...

An interesting thing in AI history. For human history, it’s epochal.