Why the singularity may never arrive

Technology doesn't work that way. Technology feeds technology. Therefore, the curve will not look like the Malthus curve.

Kurzweil doesn't claim it'll actually go forever. That's a strawman. He simply observes that technology feeding technology is a different shape.

Technology feeding technology would probably look more like a exponential curve that hits a very sudden wall at the limit point, whatever it may be, rather than a gradual falloff.

If self-replicating technology is possible, then $1000 for that much computer power would actually be a ripoff.

(I'm not claiming that such a thing is possible, per se. But then again, we are such seeds ourselves, or rather, seeds that grow one human's worth of computing power, so it's hard to argue that this is physically impossible. People who doubt this is possible need to explain why we're going to run out of progress before we figure out enough about biology to trick some existing organism into doing something like this for us. We don't even have to build the things ourselves...)

Arguing about whether the singularity is possible is a waste of time. Truth is that according to the original definition, it's pretty much inevitable, according to the physics we already know and the engineering that we can almost already do. The real argument people are trying to have is over the final limits of technology, and an awful lot of people argue for limits that are far, far too low, with very feasible paths for passing the limits plainly in view even today.

I think that the hole is probably "We have virtually inexhaustible amounts of X and THIS MEANS MAGIC HAPPENS."

There are many resources for humans which were, in certain times and places, very, very finite. Let me give you a trivial example: drinking water that wouldn't kill you. The history of humanity up until quite recently was the history of drinking water.

However, most areas of major Western nations hit, effectively, the Drinking Water Singularity a long time ago: you can get what are (relative to historical needs and prices) infinite amounts for nothing. (Seriously: think of how much human labor it costs to draw one bucket of water from the well located several miles from your village. Mentally got an idea for how much? OK, now how much labor does it take a McDonalds employee to afford one bucket worth of tap water? What, maybe a quarter of a second, if that?)

The change from cholera outbreaks to no cholera outbreaks, which happened way the heck back on that curve, had PROFOUND consequences for civilization. The change from "I could fill up a swimming pool for a trivial amount of money" to "I could fill up TEN swimming pools for a trivial amount of money" had negligible consequences for civilization. All that water wealth, nothing of major consequence to spend it on.

(I know, I'm overlooking the fact that certain areas like the American Southwest are actually facing water crunchiness again, and large portions of the human population still fail to have their basic needs met. Ignore that for the purpose of simplification -- and incidentally, "You can have all the water you can drink but you can't water your lawn in the daytime" is still singularity-esque relative to "Send a woman to walk a mile to bring back a bucket of water".)

That is how I see the technology singularity coming about: what if I gave you all the CPU cycles you could want for nothing and you found, after a certain point, you had nothing of major consequence to spend them on? What are you going to do, calculate a new Mersenne Prime every second for eternity and call it the singularity?

[Edit: I originally said typhus, not cholera. Typhus is not caused by water quality issues. Sorry, it has been a long time since I played Oregon Trail.]