When I say societal changes, I refer to the large societal level structures that enable society to function. If the supply chain for food stuffs stops working, how long do you think you could survive after the shelves at your local supermarket goes empty. That sort of thing.

If changes occur in days or weeks and not on decadal or centuries timescale, parts of your society could stop functioning before the tech that permit some workers to walkaway reaches everyone. That's why fast societal level changes destabilize society and endangers its ability to support its populational. It's almost always bad, the only sorts of thing that causes fast societal level changes are usually actual revolutions/wars. Industrial revolution wasn't quick, that played out over the course of almost a century. Collapse all those changes down to a week or 2 and you might be closer to the mark.

That's also why there can't be a Ubi before AI replaces most job, the desperate low way wage workers could just walkaway resulting in civilizational collapse.

>I think that society will change at whatever rate is necessary,

Society isn't a monolithic thing, it's a bunch of individuals doing their own thing. It's structured in such a way where there are only a few degrees of freedom that allows one to survive easily. Basically, get a job, earn money, buy food and shelter. Increase those degrees of freedom with tech that allow survival independent of society, most people would walk away. Tech never spreads uniformly and instantaneously. You need society to survive until you reach a state where you no longer do, transitioning from one state to the next is fraught with peril.

>this says nothing of the rate that social progress will move

The Technological Singularity has everything to do with that rate of change on human society, else no one would really care. The Singularity isn't a future point where companies are simply selling new fancy consumer products faster and faster, this event won't be in the control of baseline humans.

>is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization

> "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue"—John von Neumann

>The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate.