[ExI] Fwd: The Age of Wonders and Terrors

[Ben Zaiboc]

Hm.
I'll save my enthusiasm for when people stop dying of the things they always used to die of (diseases, accidents, old age, other people...). Then we'll know for sure that the singularity is here.

All the things that the article mentions are specifically about AI and what it can do. There are, as yet, no major impacts on our lives. A major impact is not something like being able to find out how to use your electric toothbrush properly without spending half-an-hour online chasing after manuals and going through them for the feature you want to know about, or getting your Amazon parcel within hours of ordering, instead of days. A major impact is something like not dying of a cancer that would have been terminal six months ago, or the cost of electricity being reduced to zero.

It's a bit silly to say 'the singularity has already started', because we're talking about a curve. There are no starting points, unless you go right back to when we started to bang rocks together. There's just a continuous curve that gets steeper and steeper. You can arbitrarily pick a point and pretend that there's where the curve began to get /significantly/ steeper, but that's pretty meaningless. You could pick the start of the industrial revolution or the release of ChatGPG v.28, or any other point, the curve will be flatter behind it and steeper after it, no matter what you pick.

It might be less meaningless to pick an arbitrary point where there are definitely things happening that fall into the category of "major impact on most people's lives", when the rest of the world starts to reflect the advances that AI is making. When there are people who don't need to empty their dishwashers and clip their toenails any more. As of now (september 2026), there are no such people yet, anywhere in the world.

Anyway, 'the singularity' is just a name. There are many different ways of defining it, and looking at it.

How much technological progress are we making in one year, now, in 2026? Is it possible to quantify? Perhaps that would be a more meaningful thing to focus on: The average amount of progress, globally (not just in the west!), in one year, based on a standard year in the past, for instance 2000. How many year 2000s worth of tech. progress did we get in 2026?

A separate issue, of course, is how the entire world benefits, or is otherwise impacted, by this progress.

-- 
Ben