"We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday."
I think in the future people will be perplexed by how sci-fi during this period was absolutely obsessed by the so-called singularity. Its a current fad, accepted by many, but not backed up by anything substantial like a lot of fads from the past. Its a little embarrassing to read some sharp thinkers from the 1970s who fell into cheap counter-culture concepts like astrological signs or shammy Indian gurus or shoddy California-style Buddhism, that often has little or nothing to do with the Buddhavacana source materials.<p>It really surprises me that we think there's a realistic path to the singularity and that we obsessed about it.  Human-like AI is a dead field, or at least dead as far we can tell.  We're not even sure how to build it because conceptually we don't even have a grasp on consciousness or cognition.<p>Then there's the false assumption that we can get to this level before doing things like, say, solving all mental health issues and that it can magically be scaled to super-human speeds.  For all we know cognition happens at a certain speed and any attempts past that are troublesome. Look at how easily we suffer from mania and other issues when our natural limiters go haywire.<p>Singularity prediction is almost a cargo cult. Its weird that so many take it seriously.