That someone would claim to "debunk" the entire Singularity concept without showing any indication that they've ever read anything written on the topic by Eliez

That someone would claim to "debunk" the entire Singularity concept without showing any indication that they've ever read anything written on the topic by Eliezer Yudkowsky is laughable (in particular, Szabo doesn't appear to really grok the difference between the time scales of exponential growth in Moore's law and the exponential growth we envision when we talk about an intelligence FOOM). Yes, if what you mean by "Singularity" is "that thing that Kurzweil says will save us all, and it will happen by 2029 because Exponential Curves Are Awesome And Go On Forever", then sure, it's a religious and borderline psychotic idea. The rest of us realize that exponentials don't last forever, that strong AI is a hard problem, that brain-scans won't solve the whole problem even if we did have the tech to do them, which we won't for quite a while, that the ML algos we have today is not strong enough, that even defining a metric to optimize against is extremely difficult, etc. We got it - we live in the real world, AI is really tough, and we haven't solved it yet. Further, we're mostly worried about the prospect of AI, rather than naively hopeful for some geek rapture, because self-improving AI is likely to turn out quite badly for us unless we're exceptionally careful. "Faith" only enters into this when deciding whether you believe the probability that we can build self-improving AI any time soon is significant or not, and I'd argue that it's not so much faith as slightly-educated guessing (predicting the probability of a tech breakthrough is an extremely difficult thing to do, so sure, there are high margins of uncertainty). You may disagree as to whether that probability is 1% over the next 20 years or 1% over the next 100, but we're hardly talking about the odds of virgin-birth here, so I find it completely unfair to call the whole idea "religious"...frankly, either of those probabilities is, IMO, worth worrying about, given the stakes. And you're flat out delusional if you don't admit a 1% chance of strong AI within 100 years. I was going to more specifically tackle the other claims in this post, but ultimately, it's not worth it. When it comes down to it, Szabo assumes that the main thing that would make strong AI "easy" (or at least relatively easy), the existence of a general algorithm for reasoning, doesn't exist. If you take that as gospel, then sure, it's going to be pretty difficult to construct AI. I can even see why he'd think that, having used genetic programming and other ML techniques and finding little success (IMO we haven't pushed the genetic programming paradigm anywhere near far enough, but that's a story for another day). Plenty of people see things differently, and think that a general purpose intelligence algorithm is within our grasp; I'd argue that there's some loose evidence that human cognition largely owes itself to exactly such an algorithm, though in our case it's probably a bit more complex than we'll be able to come up with from scratch.