I think part of your complaint with the terms arises from your apparent view that the Singularity event will be slow enough (relatively) that people will be able to keep up with it as it occurs.

This isn't necessarily going to be the case, particularly if the Singularity ends up being driven by some form of rapidly self-improving process. In such a "hard takeoff" scenario the term Singularity comes very close to matching its mathematical roots, and indeed in such a case you will be able to look back from the future and say "yep, there was the period of 75.8 hours in 2018 when things changed".

I think also that Vinge was speaking of a specific event when he coined the term. He was speaking of the moment when a greater-than-human intelligence is created one way or another. So again we are speaking of an actual specific moment in history after which things are irrevocably different.

So in my opinion you may be grasping here for a new term that will not actually apply to what could end up occuring in the future. You're looking for a term to represent some sort of "slow Singularity" which may or may not occur, but which I think is something different than what Vinge and others may be imagining when they use the term Singularity.

I like "technological phase change".

For one thing, I don't think scientific change can run off to infinity. The speed of light and the maximum quantum information storage kind of limits the ability for information to be stored and transmitted (at rates way higher than we're currently doing, but still).

A phase change is when matter changes it's form- ice melts into water, water evaporates into steam. The rules of how ice behave, for example, follow nice, predictable patterns- right up to the point where the ice melts and turns into water. At that point new rules of how the matter behaves- rules which can not be extrapolated from the rules of how ice behaves. Note that the phase change is not, does not have to be, instanteous. Portions of the ice can be melted into water (following the new rules), while other portions remain stubbornly ice.

What we're approaching is a technological phase change- a switching over to the new rules.

Brian

Well, let's see. We could call it `the Curtain' or `the Wall'. But that doesn't convey the acceleration of change. I don't know, heck, it's so hard. How about... the Spike?

Damien Broderick
www.thespike.us

Epidemiologists use the term 'tipping point' (which is also the title of a fine book about the subject) to describe the moment when a trend goes from being unknown to being ubiquitous. Tipping points are marked by being incredibly fast acting, sometimes occuring in periods of a day or two, unexpected, and precipitated by small changes.

Its a pattern that describes everything from disease spreading to suicide rates, and in most cases, the tipping point is only obvious after it happened. After studying major disease outbreaks, epidemiologists can usually point to one event, or one small group of people that tipped a controlled infection into an epidemic. However, until the epidemic happens, one can't predict which small event is going to cause it to tip.

Societal change isn't always gradual, usually it builds slowly for a while, and then changes all at once, and it seems like the thing you are trying to name is the moment at which things begin to change all at once, the short rise time of the function. I'd go ahead and call that time the 'tipping point', when things were primed and ready (unbeknownst to most), and a small trigger event causes it all to change almost instantaneously.

True singularities probably don't really exist in a social context (and maybe not even in a physical context), since there is always a large amount of mental momentum, and time delay as communication spreads. But changes can be awfully abrupt, seeming instant when compared to years of staticity.

How about "International Talk Like a Pirate Day"? Oh, wait, that's already taken.

The point of anthesis.

If The Singularity is as close as some people say, you don't have much time left to think up and spread a new term, and the current term is pretty well established. As an Esperantist, I appreciate the difficulty of tilting at linguistic windmills. ;)

In this sentence, I disagree with the first assertion, and find the second irrelevant:
"So the term is wrong for those who understand the mathematical meaning and meaningless to those who don't."

In mathematics, "singularity" has connotations of not merely "undefined" but "goes to infinity":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity
with the classic singularity being division by x as x goes to zero.

That it is meaningless to people who don't understand 1/x is not very important, as 1) they probably don't care about the subject, 2) they can learn the meaning, and 3) they just need a pronouncable label that hasn't yet been taken.

I rather like the connotations of the capitalized word preceded by the definite article: not a singularity, but The Singularity.

But denying the existence of an alternate solution is easy, boring, and non-creative, so let me take a stab at it. How about The Emergence? That suggests something about the nature of what is about to happen, though by the rules we are not supposed to be able to predict it. However, perhaps there are some underlying rules that govern all these phase changes. I like Robert Wright's proposal in Nonzero:
http://www.nonzero.org

The problem isn't the term or the miss use of a term rather it's a misunderstanding of an abstract. One person alluded to the fact that there was an assumption that people would be able to recognize it as it passed and yet an another tried to redefine that moment again. Where the problem truly lies is in the idea that in that defining moment there exists something that didn't exist before and the possibility that there might evolve yet something else. From an literal point of view it's impossible to view and abstract no matter what other name you assign to it. The other side of it is that same abstract can be considered and defined from a completely separate perspective for a completely different reason and indeed still be the same abstract. That is an intersection not an event horizon or singularity. Perhaps defining moment would be a better term.