I'm happy to live and let live, but I wanted to piint out that NdGT used the phrase "cutural moment", which is not normally interpreted as a literal instant but rather a period of timw with common cultural features. Like, say, exponential technological advances.

Just a question: have you studied art history? And do you know many working artists? Not just painters or fine artists, but illustrators, animators, concept artists, storyboarders, etc?

Are you talking about the dance and parkour routines? I meant the navigation they use for industrial use, which is not at all like this.

Just curious, why, if you believe this, are you in r/singularity? I don't expect everyone to be a believer, but it's interesting to me why folks show up with an inherent disbelief of even the possibility.

Note the use of "period" in this definition.

An example from The Singularity is Near:

> What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives...

Just to be clear, this is not the definition I am using. The definition I am using is the point at which humanity can no longer "keep up" with the pace of technological change. That is a fuzzy concept, and as such not a point-like moment in time.

I'd hoped that much was obvious from the initial post, since I talked explicitly about the inability of institutions to keep pace.

I don't agree that a technological singularity is definitionally a single point-like moment in time. Certainly that's not the sense I've gotten over the years from reading various discussions about it.

That's not my understanding from numerous sources. Kurzweil discusses the idea of a singularity in the same sense as the aphorism that "The future is already here, just not evenly distributed".

Traverse earth as in move through natural terrain? What is your perspective on things like the Boston Dynamics robots, which only accept high-level navigation controls?

That's not even necessarily true for physical singularities. There are many physicists who believe that the only places where singularities might occur (ie at the centre of black holes) have instead a "smeared" or "ring-like" construct rather than a point-like thing.

I would argue that if we have ceased to be able to keep up with and understand the changes happening in our world - and if we cannot plan for them, we do not understand them - then we are definitionally within a technological singularity.

I'm not sure why you think that's true, but it certainly isn't true from the point of view of a Kurweillian singularity, which is defined by the relative rates of progress versus human capacity to keep up.

This is an interesting perspective and deeply at odds with everything I am hearing from the working artists in my network.

I'm not confident even one of these survives the next couple of decades.

Certainly all trades are at risk as we see more general-purpose service robots appear.

Nurse, teacher, and masseuse all seem to be about human interaction...but if you have systems that can largely replace these with a combination of virtual and machine technology, along with virtual experiences (games are already used for pain relief), it's not clear any of them are necessary in a few decades.

Judge is tricky, but moreso because the legal system is so badly broken already. I am not sure an equitable system needs human judges.

Don't you think teaching via a chatGPT- like system is a possibility?

I know for certain automated machine maintenance is doable, because it's already being done.

Doctors, ditto - diagnosis via expert systems, physical procedures via the same equipment that we use for remote surgery.

I don't know what "administration" means here, but it's hard to imagine that most of the folks in bureaucracies couldn't be replaced right now, particularly if direct-democratic institutions cone to the fore.

Even caregivers may largely fall by the wayside as robotic and virtual systems and brain-machine interfaces improve.

You're right, the term does have a definition, and that's not it. A technological singularity is defined by the pace of progress outstripping the human ability to keep up.

Hence, if our institutions cannot keep up already, they are definitionally in or beyond a singularity.