What does it mean "to be on the other side" of this singularity in your graphic representation? I failed to grasp this.
It’s intuitive and simple to you and me. But languages change, slang changes, metaphors change and equipment changes. Business models exist today that were unthinkable 40 years ago because the ubiquity of computation did not exist.
She’s suffering, in Toffler’s words, a “future shock”.
Now imagine that another 40 years worth of innovation happens in a decade. And then again in the subsequent five. And faster. You’ll have a hard time keeping up. And not just you: kids will too. Things become incomprehensible without machines doing most of the work — including explanation. Eventually you, or your kids, won’t even understand what’s going on 90% of the time…then less and less.
I sometimes like to muse on what a Victorian person would make of today if transported through time. Or someone from 16th century Europe. Or Archimedes. They’d mostly understand a lot, I think. But lately I’ve started to think of someone from the 1950s. They might even find today harder to understand than the others would.
That crossover point is when the world becomes incomprehensible in a flash. That’s a mathematical singularity (metaphorically speaking).
why do you think someone from the 50s would find it harder to understand our time, than someone from an earlier age, even as far back as 2000 years?
If they had experienced the transition suddenly instead of gradually, I still think they'd be fine relatively soon.
Yes, there's an ever faster pace of change, but that pace of change for the general human population is limited precisely because of the factors you laid out: people can't keep up.
William Gibson said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."
That's what has been happening for millennia, and will be ever more obvious as the pace of progress accelerates: sure, someone, somewhere will have developed incomprehensible ultra-advanced technology, but it won't spread precisely because the general population can't comprehend/adopt/adapt it fast enough![1]
Exceptions exist, of course.
My take on the whole thing is that the "runaway singularity" won't happen globally, it'll happen very locally. Some AI supercomputer cluster will figure out "everything", have access to a nano-fabrication device, build itself a new substrate, transfer, repeat, and then zip off to silicon nirvana in a matter of hours...
... leaving us behind, just like we've left the primitive uncontacted tribes in the Amazon behind. They don't know or care about the latest ChatGPT features, iPhone computational photography, or Tesla robotics. They're stuck where they are precisely because they too far removed and so can't keep up.
[1] Here's my equivalent example to your iPhone example: 4K HDR videos. I can create these, but I can't send them to any of my relatives that would like to see them, because nobody has purchased HDR TVs yet, and they're also all using pre-HDR mobile phones. Display panel tech has been advancing fantastically fast, but adoption isn't.
Based on my understanding of people, we probably have a long way to go.
The claim might be a year or two premature. But, not five.
This also reminds me of the Eloi in the Time Machine, a book written in 1895!