Although at least there's some display of self-skepticism:
"Kurzweil (2005) plots exponential speedups in sequences of historic paradigm shifts identified by various historians, to back up the hypothesis that "the singularity is near." His historians are all contemporary though, presumably being subject to a similar bias. People of past ages might have held quite different views. For example, possibly some historians of the year 1525 felt inclined to predict a convergence of history around 1540, deriving this date from an exponential speedup of recent breakthroughs such as Western bookprint (around 1444), the re-discovery of America (48 years later), the Reformation (again 24 years later - see the pattern?), and other events they deemed important although today they are mostly forgotten."
Which is a little rare, if you know the curious character of Jürgen Schmidhuber :)
Well, in a way, they're right. You could consider the printing press, or the aeroplane, or electricity, or the telegraph, to be a mini-"singularity" event since it drastically changed the world in ways unpredictable beforehand. "Singularity" doesn't necessarily equate to "rapture of the nerds where AI gods make everything awesome (and/or kill us all)", it just means "point where things get weird and we can't predict what will happen next."
Well that's IMO devoiding the word of original meaning then. You're referring to a revolution, which is a well established term, not a bona fide 'Singularity', which comes from mathematics as a point where the speed of change properly diverges -- as would be the case if we had a geometric time series of events with constant improvements.
This usage of the term really originated in the context of rampant intelligence growth (through a supposed explosive self-improvement), see the wikipedia article:
for the singularity term to mean something it has to involve the mechanism of a starting point from which on change ever increasingly accelerates. The singularity can't 'slow down' so to speak. That's simply a 'paradigm change' or a significant disruption of which we had lots.
As the name suggests if the 'singularity' exists there's only going to be a single one.
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/history.html
Although at least there's some display of self-skepticism:
"Kurzweil (2005) plots exponential speedups in sequences of historic paradigm shifts identified by various historians, to back up the hypothesis that "the singularity is near." His historians are all contemporary though, presumably being subject to a similar bias. People of past ages might have held quite different views. For example, possibly some historians of the year 1525 felt inclined to predict a convergence of history around 1540, deriving this date from an exponential speedup of recent breakthroughs such as Western bookprint (around 1444), the re-discovery of America (48 years later), the Reformation (again 24 years later - see the pattern?), and other events they deemed important although today they are mostly forgotten."
Which is a little rare, if you know the curious character of Jürgen Schmidhuber :)