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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

I think of it like time dilation, such as near a black hole(see what I did there, tying the two singularities together).

From the perspective of one experiencing time-dilation nothing appears unusual, everything appears normal, it only from the outside perspective that things are strange.

As far as I can tell the singularity happened in the late 1700's. For thousands of years the collective economic growth of the world was effectively a straight shallow line, it grew, but slowly and linearly, then in the late 1700's something changed, it went exponential and everybody was along for the ride, and from the perspective of being caught up in this exponential growth it appears flat, normal even. but you look at history and wonder why every advance was so slow. and you look ahead and say the singularity is almost there. But we will never actually reach it. by the time we get there it is the new normal.

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Humanity has been rapidly advancing throughout recorded history. We just gloss over advancements in outdated technology. Who cares about when exactly the stirrup was invented when we have cars. Medieval armor was vastly better than what was available in the Roman Empire, but it didn’t just suddenly jump to better there was a host of minor innovations.

The amazing complexity in rigging seen in the age of sail is built on a long line of innovation, but engines rendered it largely irrelevant etc. As such ~1700 isn’t some clear tipping point, just the horizon before which innovation seems less relevant.

> As such ~1700 isn’t some clear tipping point, just the horizon before which innovation seems less relevant.

GP wrote "late 1700's". He's probably referring to the industrial revolution.

I’m aware, but that was a spike in industry in the English speaking world not innovation. Instead they started to innovate on things we care about today. It was largely associated with Englands colonial exploits rather than some new way of thinking. Many of the technologies and infrastructure associated with the industrial revolution don’t line up particularly neatly. The English system of locks for example started to take off roughly 100 years earlier.

So sure if your taking a test someone will slap a specific date range on the Industrial Revolution, but that’s not particularly meaningful here.

I think the classic definition of the singularity though (per Kurzweil's book) is precisely when the curve actually doesn't look flat on human comprehensible timescales any more.

I.e. One day there are significant overnight changes. Then the very next day hourly changes, soon thereafter every minute, second, millisecond, etc.

It's like how talking about the "hockey stick curve" in an exponential growth line is nonsensical. It's everywhere and the curve angles you see depend entirely on what scale you view it from.

Same thing could be said about the period ~10,000BC (give or take a few thousand years).

Glacial economic growth for hundreds of thousands of years beforehand and then "something changed".

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