I wish this pseudo-technical, new-age, flim-flam of an idea would die already. Seriously, does anyone with a real technical background that is not directly making money off of seminars, books and articles selling this believe this stuff?
Maybe movies with transhuman/posthuman themes, but the singularity implies things about the rate of technological progress - certainly there wasn't much rapid progress in Terminator after the machines nuked the earth (except, maybe, in the production of new terminator robots, but even that wasn't fast, really).
I doubt we'll ever see a movie truly depict the singularity in any way other than a glimpse and will be akin to virtually any sci-fi movie in any setting. We might get there with a great TV series, but that's doubtful.
IMO a singularity TV series would have to take the story progression of Taken in the generation skipping, but instead of giant leaps, it would be a leap of decades, years and then months as technology advances up to the '2030' mark.
For movies we'll be stuck with a BS intro that pails in comparison to the introduction of each Fallout game but will inevitably be describing similar events.
Why not?
Let's say we can build a machine smarter than a single person, that’s a long way from building something smarter than humanity so there is not a quick kick off to infinity. Now let's suggest we build a billion of the things and they are all smarter than the average person. Nothing says you can get anything close to a linear feedback between the intelligence designing an AI and how smart the AI is so there would not necessarily be a feedback loop to keep making more intelligent systems. etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law
Aside from that, the difference between one human and all of us is only 2^32 - so if you can place the intelligence of one human on a chip, you'll be able to do the same thing with all of humanity 64 years later. And that's ignoring things like reduced costs per chip / using multiple chips for the same price.
Economics drives an increase in computation per unit cost not processor speed. How the increase in accomplished is irrelevant.
The current peak in processor speed may also be temporary as you can see with a quick google search. http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1...