Zeno’s paradox

Or, the bullshit singularity.

For more than half a century, commercial nuclear fusion power has been thirty years away.

Today there is a new prediction: artificial general intelligence is two years away. It was two years away last year, it’s two years away this year and it will be two years away next year.

This is the bullshit singularity: hyperbolic predictions of an imagined future technological revolution have ever shorter timescales, asymptotically approaching but never quite reaching zero. The revolution refuses to arrive: all that changes is the speed at which the bullshitters whirl their arms and the pitch of their voices.