Ask HN: Are paradigm shifting breakthroughs rarer or is it a bias in my eyes?
&gt; However exponential tech that takes us to something like &#x27;singularity&#x27; does not seem to come up any more.<p>I don’t know who else was saying this, but the story of exponential growth leading to a singularity is&#x2F;was the schtick of Ray Kurzweil, and it’s a narrative that was never true.<p>Kurzweil was one of the people trying to sell the idea that we will eventually unlock human immortality through technical progress. Along the way he made many dubious and false claims. One of them, for example, a key component of his story, is that human longevity has increased by many years in the last 200 years of human history. He does this by showing a graph of life expectancy that starts at a low point when disease and war was rampant, and by omitting data points immediately after world war 1, then “fitting” a completely misleading curve to the cherry picked data. The life expectancy plot at the very bottom of this page is complete bunk: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kurzweilai.net&#x2F;the-law-of-accelerating-returns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kurzweilai.net&#x2F;the-law-of-accelerating-returns</a>