@tszzl
Post
Post 1 of 2
vinge describes 4 singularities, and we are obviously in the first where machines alone are achieving superintelligence through rapid increasingly self propelled iteration. we are also nearing his epistemic horizon moment where the future is getting extremely hard to foresee—all my friends keep talking about their “error bars”—and in the throes of loss of control kurzweil’s vision is even closer to what you call “capital cycle” of course, being grounded in flop counts and massive compute buildouts resulting in superintelligence at a certain threshold where machine flops pass biological flops however you do the soft accounting “The economy reorganizes itself around rapidly improving machine intelligence” it seems like you are invoking these primary texts as status objects while having no real disagreement with the broader tech culture’s understanding of the singularity
Post 2 of 2
@pfau I have read both of course and it seems like… we’re in the singularity
Explanation
What it says @tszzl argues that today’s AI boom already fits classic “singularity” thinking rather than representing some fundamentally different “capital cycle.” He invokes Vernor Vinge’s idea of several routes to superhuman intelligence—especially autonomous machine intelligence—and says we may already be entering the associated epistemic horizon, where forecasting becomes structurally unreliable as recursively improving intelligence accelerates. He also argues that Ray Kurzweil’s version is explicitly compute-driven: massive hardware buildout eventually pushes machine computation beyond biological computation, after which the economy reorganizes around rapidly improving machine intelligence.
Context This is a rebuttal to someone apparently distinguishing the current AI/compute investment cycle from the traditional “singularity” concept. The missing preceding argument matters: we only see @tszzl’s side. His accusation is that the other person cites Vinge and Kurzweil while substantively accepting the same thesis tech culture usually means by “the singularity.”
Why it matters The useful distinction is semantic versus substantive. If AI improvement becomes increasingly self-propelled, prediction error explodes, control weakens, and capital reallocates around machine intelligence, then calling it a “capital cycle” may describe the mechanism without actually rejecting the singularity thesis. The key empirical uncertainty is whether current systems really have crossed into self-sustaining recursive improvement; this post asserts that rather than demonstrating it.