I don’t think it’s gotten that vacuous, at least as SIAI uses it. (They tend to use it pretty narrowly to refer to the intelligence explosion point, at least the people there whom I’ve talked to. The Summit is a bit broader, but I suppose that’s to be expected, what with Kurzweil’s involvement and the need to fill two days with semi-technical and non-technical discussion of intelligence-related technology, science, and philosophy.) You say that it can be replaced with “the future” without any loss, but your example doesn’t really bear that out. If I stumbled upon that passage not knowing it’s origin, I’d be pretty confused by how it keeps talking about “the future” as though some point about increasing intelligence had already been established as fundamental. (Indeed, the first sentence of that essay defines the Singularity as “the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence”, thereby establishing a promise to use it consistently to mean that, and you can’t change that to “the future” without being very very confusing to anyone who has heard the word “future” before.)
It may be possible to do a less-lossy Singularity → Future substitution on writings by people who’ve read “The Singularity Is Near” and then decided to be futurists too, but even Kurzweil himself doesn’t use the word so generally.
You are right, it was an exaggeration to say you can swap Singularity with Future everywhere. But it’s an exaggeration born out of a truth. Many things said about The Singularity are simply things we could say about the future. They are true today but will be true again in 2045 or 2095 or any year.
This comes back to the root post and the perfectly smooth nature of the exponential. While smoothness implies there is nothing special brewing in 30 years, it also implies 30 years from now things will look remarkably like today. We will be staring at an upcoming billion-fold improvement in computer capacity and marveling over how it will change everything. Which it will.
Kruzweil says The Singularity is just “an event which is hard to see beyond”. I submit every 30 year chunk of time is “hard to see beyond”. It’s long enough time that things will change dramatically. That has always been true and always will be.
I don’t think it’s gotten that vacuous, at least as SIAI uses it. (They tend to use it pretty narrowly to refer to the intelligence explosion point, at least the people there whom I’ve talked to. The Summit is a bit broader, but I suppose that’s to be expected, what with Kurzweil’s involvement and the need to fill two days with semi-technical and non-technical discussion of intelligence-related technology, science, and philosophy.) You say that it can be replaced with “the future” without any loss, but your example doesn’t really bear that out. If I stumbled upon that passage not knowing it’s origin, I’d be pretty confused by how it keeps talking about “the future” as though some point about increasing intelligence had already been established as fundamental. (Indeed, the first sentence of that essay defines the Singularity as “the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence”, thereby establishing a promise to use it consistently to mean that, and you can’t change that to “the future” without being very very confusing to anyone who has heard the word “future” before.)
It may be possible to do a less-lossy Singularity → Future substitution on writings by people who’ve read “The Singularity Is Near” and then decided to be futurists too, but even Kurzweil himself doesn’t use the word so generally.
You are right, it was an exaggeration to say you can swap Singularity with Future everywhere. But it’s an exaggeration born out of a truth. Many things said about The Singularity are simply things we could say about the future. They are true today but will be true again in 2045 or 2095 or any year.
This comes back to the root post and the perfectly smooth nature of the exponential. While smoothness implies there is nothing special brewing in 30 years, it also implies 30 years from now things will look remarkably like today. We will be staring at an upcoming billion-fold improvement in computer capacity and marveling over how it will change everything. Which it will.
Kruzweil says The Singularity is just “an event which is hard to see beyond”. I submit every 30 year chunk of time is “hard to see beyond”. It’s long enough time that things will change dramatically. That has always been true and always will be.