Reading Karl Polanyi, I came across the most interesting sentence.
Bear in mind this was written in 1944, and describing the Industrial Revolution, not 2014 and describing the world of 'Move Fast and Break Things':

"Improvements, we have said , are, as a rule, bought at the price of social dislocation.If the rate of dislocation is too great, the community must succumb in the process. (...)
But nothing saved the common people of England from the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
A blind faith in spontaneous progress had taken hold of people's minds, and with the fanaticism of sectarians the most enlightened pressed forward for boundless and unregulated change in society.
The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description. Indeed, human society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action of this self destructive mechanism."

Emphasis mine.

Do not quench the spirit

"...When many of the best minds in machine learning have decided that the most existential threat to civilization is the rise of Skynet, we have had a major failure of group think. Many ML researchers are more concerned with trying to bring about The Singularity, than in solving real problems."

--Ben Recht

Well said, sir. Well said. Too bad that it was phrased during a testing of faith, as it were, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

 

I/O, I/O, Cthuhlu fthagn or xor xor and not nand xor...

"Did your Rex ever mention to you a hypothesis which used to be entertained in the days when quasi-intelligent machines, advanced computers and so forth were just beginning to make their impact on society? The hypothesis I refer to was this: that machines more complex than the human brain might be instructed to evolve still more complex examples of their kind, and thee in turn to evolve others until finally they transcended human ability to comprehend their workings?"  

---'The Rites of Ohe', John Brunner, 1963

From what did the Cult of Singularity spring? Certainly the basic concepts are a re-working of John of Patmos' bitter ravings, but at what point was the Lovecraftian nightmare of a logic-gate embodied deity invented?
 "...I/O,I/O, Cthuhlu fthagn or xor nor and not nand xor..."

Its been argued for years that a committee is only as smart as its dumbest member.
However, analysis of larger groups suggests that the IQ drops exponentially.
Extrapolating to the Internet, and hence the Singularity gives us:

the Internet seems to run on the 4 C's:
Code, Chatter, Carnality and Consumption.
Whats the actual information depth? Seems quite shallow at times, especially after you get out of the potholes of Academia and wander through the puddles of Forum Drivel (spelt Dribble, I suspect)
While the Singularity enthusiasts pursue their dream in tones that veer wildly between religious fervor (the Coming , man! Everything is gone to change!) and eroticism (the Cumming, man! Everything is gonna change!) I still find in very hard to determine exactly how this is going to come about.
Yes, CPU speeds continue to increase. Doesn't make my word processor any smarter.
Data storage continues to get cheaper. Files continue to proliferate. Data - as opposed to information - continues to pile up at a breathtaking rate.
But somehow, my computer isn't any smarter then it was. Quake 4 is glossier then Quake 1, but the experience hasn't changed. Google searches better than, say Webcrawler used to, but I still can't find info any better.
the Singularity is supposed to happen when we can't figure out how to find information, let alone aggregate it?
Search engines demonstrate RenegadeMime's First Problem of Intelligence: It ain't what info you can access, its what you can ignore. And without an ability to ignore, the Singularity is going to be about 40 % pornography, 20 % spam and 20 % academia.
Now picture an academic with a serious perverse bent and an obsessive-compulsion about the Nigerian $10-million dollar bank account. And then give it some fR** V1agra.
Lets take a subsection of the Net: the Mastercard validation and accounts network.
The network contains in excess of 360 terabytes of storage . Thats about the total information capacity of about 36 human brains.
The network can process over forty thousand transactions a second. It has a robust firewall and immune system. Its subsystems are watched by hundreds of clever humans, and thousands of lines of clever code. Do they detect the flickers of consciousness? The first dim rumbling dreams of awareness?
No ones seriously argues that that network is going to Singularity.
Why not?
Because is banal, and the Singularity is a romantic dream. Its much more romantic to argue Google becomes sentient - after all, its so smart, isn't it? It can answer our questions so swiftly!
Like with the eponymous BASIC program:
10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT "HELLO"A$
we are tricked by our willingness to ask stupid questions.
After a decade of the World Wide Web are we any smarter? Educated? Aware?
Not very.
And I will be the first to admit that sitting here adding this drivel to the storm of babble isn't making me any smarter either.