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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Well, in a way, they're right. You could consider the printing press, or the aeroplane, or electricity, or the telegraph, to be a mini-"singularity" event since it drastically changed the world in ways unpredictable beforehand. "Singularity" doesn't necessarily equate to "rapture of the nerds where AI gods make everything awesome (and/or kill us all)", it just means "point where things get weird and we can't predict what will happen next."

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Well that's IMO devoiding the word of original meaning then. You're referring to a revolution, which is a well established term, not a bona fide 'Singularity', which comes from mathematics as a point where the speed of change properly diverges -- as would be the case if we had a geometric time series of events with constant improvements.

This usage of the term really originated in the context of rampant intelligence growth (through a supposed explosive self-improvement), see the wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

for the singularity term to mean something it has to involve the mechanism of a starting point from which on change ever increasingly accelerates. The singularity can't 'slow down' so to speak. That's simply a 'paradigm change' or a significant disruption of which we had lots.

As the name suggests if the 'singularity' exists there's only going to be a single one.

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