What if the singularity lies beyond a plateau we cannot cross?

These aren't very convincing arguments; why don't aircraft factories of the 1930s or the ocean-going steamship dockyards of the 1830s count under "massive upfront investment and large and complex" and therefore predict progress stopping ages ago?

Asimov's story The Last Question ends with the Multivac machine having collected all the data in the universe and still not answering the question "how can entropy be reversed?", so it spends an immeasurable amount of time processing the data in all possible ways. The article argues that we might not get to "the singularity" because progress will stop, but even if we can't make better transistors, we can make more of them, and we can spend longer processing data with them. If what we're missing in an AGI is architectural it might only need insight and distributed computing, not future computers.

> "We built our optimism during a rare century when progress got cheaper as it got faster. That era may be over."

This effect of progress building on progress goes back a hundred years before that, and a hundred years before that. The first practical steam engine was weak, inefficient, and coal-hungry in the early 1700s and what made it 'practical' is that it pumped water out of coal mines. Coalmine owners could get more coal by buying a steam engine; the engine made its fuel cheaper and easier and more coal to sell. Probably this pattern goes back a lot before that because everything builds on everything, but this was a key industrial revolution turning point a long time before the article's claim. The era may be another two hundred years away from being over.

> "There are still areas of promise for step-function improvements: fusion, quantum computing, high-temperature superconductors. But scientific progress is not guaranteed to continue."

Opening with the recursively improving AGI and then having a section of "areas of promise for step-function improvements" and not mentioning any chance of an AGI breakthrough? Neuralink style cyborg interfaces, biological, genetic, health, anti-ageing, new materials or meta-materials, nanotechnology, distributed computing, vibe coding, no possible areas for step changes in any of those?

> "But the burden of proof lies with those claims. Based on what we know today, a plateau is inevitable. Within that plateau, we can only speculate:"

Based on what we know today there isn't "a" plateau, there are many, and they give way to newer things. Steam power plateaued, propellor aircraft plateaued, sailboat speed and size plateaued, cog and gear computer speed plateaued, then electro-mechanical computer speed, then valve computer speed, then discrete logic speed, then integrated circuit speed, then single core, then what, CPUs, then GPUs, then TPUs...

> "Are therapies for broad set of complex autoimmune diseases ahead of the plateau? Probably."

How many autoimmune diseases have been cured, ever? Where does this "Probably" come from - the burden of proof very much lies with that probably.

> "Will we have Earth-based space elevators before the plateau? Probably not."

We don't have a rope strong enough to hang 36km or a way to make one or a way to lift that much mass into geostationary orbit in one go. But if we could make a cable thicker in space, thinner at the ground, launch it in pieces and join it together, we might not be that far away from plausible space elevator. Like if Musk got a bee in his bonnet and opened his wallet wide, I wouldn't bet against SpaceX having a basic one by 2040. Or 2035. I probably would bet against 2028.

Explain to me how the, "Technological Singularity" isn't just Christian eschatology for dorks? As a Neon Genesis Evangelion fan this really gets me going but that's kind of why I ask.

I tend to dislike the term AGI/ASI, since it's become a marketing label more than a coherent concept (which everyone will define differently)

In this case I use "singularity", by which I mean it more abstractly: a hypothetical point where technological progress begins to accelerate recursively, with heavily reduced human intervention.

My point isn't theological or utopian, just that the physical limits of computation, energy, and scale make that kind of runaway acceleration far less likely IMO than many assume.

Re building a bigger colliders - it occurs to me that it would be difficult to find somewhere to put a 10,000 km collider, but that is roughly the circumference of the moon (which is already a vacuum, so no need for a pressure vessel), or build it in free space if that is not big enough.

The paradigms are in initial conditions. This end state of binary/arbitrary/symbol/stat units are largely irrelevant. They're mindless proxies. They bear no relationship to the initial conditions. They're imagination-emasculated, they show no feel for the reality of real information signaling, merely an acquiescence to leadership expedience in anything arbitrary (like tokens).

Try to see the binary as an impassable ceiling that turns us into craven, greedy, status junkie apes. Mediocrity gone wild. That's the binary, and it's seeped already into language, which is symbolic arbitrariness. We don't know how to confront this because we've never confronted it collectively. There was never a front page image on Time Magazine that stated: Are we arbitrary?

Yet we are, we're the poster child for the extinct and doesn't know it sentient.

Each stage of our steady drive to emasculate signaling in favor of adding value displays this openly. Each stage of taking action and expression and rendering them as symbol, then binary, then as counted token, into pretend intelligence showcases a lunatic drive to double down on folk science using logic as a beard in defiance of scientific reason.