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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events to a specific point in the future that will lead to some very religious sounding results:

* Eternal life

* A powerful entity or entities who will fix whatever is wrong

- An end to poverty

- An end to disease

* Personal Freedom

This is entirely a faith based belief that can not be proven or disproven. It is by no means certain that you can extrapolate to a singularity in our future. Nor is it certain that you can assume it will have the claimed effects. While the term singularity in math and physics has a well defined term with clear non-religious meanings. "The Singularity" is entirely a faith based religious belief.

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I'm not sure where you get that version of The Singularity? Wikipedia has the most popular version of the technological singularity is AI making better AI leading to an intelligence explosion which may or may not happen but is not especially faith based or religious. (I think we'll have AI making better AI but more of a gradual ramp up than an explosion).

> The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events

That's exactly backwards; a singularity is a point past which you can't extrapolate, because trying to do so leads to absurdities (e.g. infinite densities, time as a spacial dimension, one egg costing more than the GDP of Europe, etc.) "The Singularity" was called specifically that because it was the point at which historical projections would become absurd, and thus we could not meaningfully forecast past it (like an event horizon).

Some people ran with that and decided that it was a forecast that specific absurdities would certainly happen, but that's mostly just a reading comprehension issue.

I think the idea is that you can extrapolate that a singularity will occur and when it’s likely to happen. It’s what happens next that you can’t predict.

The singularity in this context refers to the point beyond which predictions will fail because we cannot possibly foresee the consequences of certain technological changes.

There's nothing historical about it; it came about as a result of a few different science writers looking into the future and wondering how we keep up in an accelerating technological context.

I actually agree that it's become something else, but the origin of the term was what I was correcting, and its origin isn't something woo-woo, it's firmly based in scientific speculation.

Even in its original context, it's still a bunch of woo-woo. The core idea, that creating a technology that can improve technology will lead to exponential technological advancement that can be modeled as a mathematical singularity, is very hand-wavy and silly on its face.

It's been very easy to observe acceleration in progress over time, and there's a natural question that emerges: Will we reach a point where people can't keep up?

Nothing hand-wavy or silly there. And the discussion of the topic as it was formed in the second half of the 20th century was pretty carefully couched in terms of what-ifs and conservative projection.

Unfortunately as someone of the christian faith I have first hand experience that you can not control someone else's use of language. Whether that is the meaning it was originally intended to convey or not that is the meaning that it conveys now. The best you can do here is to say: "That does not represent my own personal definition despite the zeitgeist coopting it to mean something else".

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