| Well... no. I'm not talking about specifically what we will have in our pockets and driveways in ten years, twenty, or a hundred; basically I'm saying that we're entering a period that will be homogeneous in its overall conditions, so that we can speak of, say, the hunter-gatherer era of human history, the agricultural era, the industrial, and the technological maximum. Once we're at the maximum, one date looks pretty much like another in the same sense that a hunter-gatherer plucked from 12,000 B.C. could recognize an H/G society from 600 B.C. even though he didn't know the particular language or culture he'd been dropped into.
We're already using evolutionary algorithms to create new designs, so we're entering that era now. There's no firm dividing line, never will be. This is not the singularity.
Personal genie? No. Different paradigm of design/manufacturing? Yes.
Look at it this way; the whole idea of a "technology" is so wrapped up with our preconceptions about how an industrial society is put together that we're not even aware of the assumptions we make when we invoke the word. So "technological singularity" is a concept that's coherent only from within a certain framework. From the standpoint of that framework, yeah sure you inevitably get runaway arms races. There are enabling technologies being developed now (and I use the T-word in this case deliberately) that are potential enablers of a different process model that is not industrial anymore, and in which conditions like runaway arms races aren't important. You can have them; they're just not change drivers for the overall system anymore.
If you imagine that the world at the technological maximum works the way ours does, then what I'm saying will make no sense to you. But at least consider the idea that objections that come out of the current paradigm might sound like a 10th-century peasant having New York described to him and saying, "It'd never work. Where do they keep their sheep?"
Clearly a novel is in order to properly describe this stuff.
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