The question of the singularity isn't whether it will happen, it's if it will happen as the big overhaul of civilization people predict. I mean the best example

The question of the singularity isn't whether it will happen, it's if it will happen as the big overhaul of civilization people predict. I mean the best example I can think of for the 'singularity phenomena' comes from Charles Stross' book Singularity Sky in which a super-advanced race comes along and basically asks everyone in an entire civilization "what do you dream of and we'll do it for you?" Revolutionaries ask for self-replicating weapons and use them, the governments policy is to pretend the super-advanced race isn't there and lets the planet get destroyed. Essentially the above is as predicted. However, what is likely to happen is that fundamentally no human being will notice a difference between now and post-singularity. It's like video games, people criticize the graphics today for being too fake or not realistic enough when if you look back even a couple of years the improvement is immense. If you look back to the NES the improvement is fucking unbelievable, just like looking back from post-singularity it will be fucking unbelievable but when you're in it you're still going to complain that computers aren't fast enough, that something in a video game doesn't seem realistic enough, etc. We might have humanoid robots in 20 years time, but it isn't going to be holy crap they magically appear. It'll be like in the movie iRobot, each new model is better than the last just like with PC's, but it still took them like 40 years from the founding of the company before the supercomputer that ran them decided to take over things.