I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).
We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades
I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s
If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault
A hard takeoff would be the tool bootstrapping itself into an autonomous self-improving ASI in a short amount of time.
And I read Kurzweil years ago too. He thought reverse engineering the human brain once the hardware was powerful enough would together give us the singularity in 2045. And the Turing Test would have been passed by 2029, but seems like LLMs have already accomplished this.
Imagine you’re 70 years old, in rural North Carolina, sitting on your porch wondering why your house has a sheet of ice on it that’s never happened before. Now your already weak soybean harvest that year yields only 30%
Meanwhile your 30-year-old neighbor just had a productive soybean harvest because they covered their crops prior to the freeze based on using the Internet for weather forecasting
That trivial variation between people who utilize information technology to improve their survivability has been happening for the last few hundred years unabated.
This is what the soft singularity looks like
Depends on how you feel about Roko's basilisk.