Vernor Vinge

I wouldn't say that founding companies satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, the relevance there is that companies are superhuman and sociopathic, therefore the dream of superintelligences to be empathic, cooperative, and aligned with human interests doesn't seem likely.

> The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.

In 2008 the IEEE magazine Spectrum did a series on the Singularity and one article [0] says "Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting." Another article had this "Who's Who"[1] cheat-sheet of famous Singularity discussers for and against; one of the columns is "Kind of Singularity", and there's more than one kind. Kevin Kelly has "singularities are pervasive changes in the state of the world that are often recognizable only in retrospect. As a result, the singularity is always near". Bill Joy was a more general "computer science, biotech and nanotechnology event horizon". Marvin Minsky had mind uploading as well as machine intelligence.

Vernor Vinge named 'The Singularity' in 1983 and popularised the ida, and here are talk slides from him in 2005 after he had twenty years of thinking about it[2]:

Why call this transition the "Technological Singularity"?

By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Math
A place where some regularity property is lost
Not necessarily a place where anything becomes infinite
By analogy with the…

Apologies in advance for the passionate critique, but I just can't help but attack what I see as a faux-intellectual, misleading piece. It starts with a notoriously-biased pop-science book that assumes its conclusions before any investigations begin ("AI is bad" hidden behind a thin veneer of "oh but not good AI"), and just goes downhill from there. It's honestly shocking that the brief discussion of that book is intended in a laudatory manner:

A big part of the problem, the authors maintain, is confusion about the meaning of artificial intelligence itself, a confusion that sustains and originates in the present AI commercial boom. This is just blatantly untrue to anyone who bothered to learn the names skipped with a brief "once apon a time, there was symbolic AI" -- from Turing to Minsky, Neumann to Pearl, Shannon to McCarthy, on and on and on. This incredible article from "Quote Investigator" lays out the situation well going all the way back to 1971: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/ Personally, my favorite phrasing of this sentiment is the one preferred by Hofstadter: "AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet."

Narayanan and Kapoor are particularly worried about the conflation of generative AI, which produces content through probabilistic response to human input, and predictive AI, which is purported to accurately forecast outcomes in the world, whether those be the success of a job candidate or the likelihood of a civil war. While products employing…

I've started to think of LLMs as not so much AI as collective intelligence. An LLM aggregates a huge amount of human-generated information and thinking into one convenient semi-intelligent entity, without doing much really original thinking of its own (so far).

But this alone is potentially profound. Better ways to be collectively smarter could itself accelerate change. Vernor Vinge's famous essay "The Coming Technological Singularity" wasn't just about AI; he also suggested collective intelligence as a way the singularity could happen.

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means. It's just that communication is improving and the number of people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top, let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything now. VV clearly adds these two other paths:

o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect. https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

Yes, a combination of fusion, superconductivity, and AGI would indeed be transformative. It's hard to anticipate what the results would look like.

Good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
then follow it up with a bit of 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html and https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

(oh, huh, I just noticed that There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom starts with a reference to the discovery of superconduction)

That didn't quite match my memory of Vinge, so fwiw I just checked the two earliest publications I know of:

> Such trend-curves... extrapolated 30 or 40 years they are so high and steep that even the most naive futurist discounts their accuracy.

(That's the closest therein to a specific prediction date, from 1983: https://imgur.com/a/HrUxGts)

> let me more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.

From 1993: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html