Singularity Watch: Are we there yet?

Tyler Cowen, 6 January 2020, Prediction difficulty seems to be rising:

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

My main prediction for 2020, if it can be called a prediction, is trend exhaustion: For the first time in a long while, several important trends have come to an end.

What do I mean by that? Trends ebb and flow, of course, but at any given moment many of them embody one of two distinct states: momentum, or reversion to the mean. The first is a continuation of past progress, either upward or downward. The second is a movement back toward “normal,” however that may be defined.

The relevant list of exhausted trends includes the U.S. labor market, Chinese economic growth, the growth of populist parties, and numerous others. And:

One implication is that the coming year may hold an especially large number of surprises. Alternatively, rational people (and readers of Philip Tetlock, who has studied the difficulty of forecasting the future) might discard their hubris and not be very surprised at all.

Does that imply that, in Tyler’s estimation, we’re poised at a singularity? Recall John von Neumann’s remark:

“The interests of humanity may change, the present curiosities in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind in the future.” One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

–Stanislaw Ulam, from a tribute to John von Neumann

That is to say, as long as we are living in what we might call an ordinary regime of history, there is some predictability to the future. Some, but by no means complete. But once we pass from ordinary history to, shall we call it, phase-change history, all bets are off. Is that where we are now? Are we living the singularity? Is Trump an avatar of singularity, the remixmaster of history?

See also, Predicting history, June 7, 2019.