We already have an existence proof for the singularity, so I don't know why there's any debate about _if_ the singularity will occur. I can see debate about what exactly the "singularity" entails, when, how, etc. But it's inevitable.

The Cosmic Calendar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar) makes it visually clear that progress is accelerating. Evolution always stands on the shoulders of giants, working not to improve things linearly, but exponentially.

When sexual reproduction emerged, it built on top of billions of years of asexual evolution. It took advantage of the fact that we had a set of robust genes. Now those genes could be quickly reshuffled to rapidly experiment and adapt on a time scale several orders of magnitude shorter than it would take asexual reproduction to perform the same adaptations.

Then neurons emerged; now adaptation was on the order of fractions of a life time rather than generations.

Then consciousness emerged. Now not only can humans adapt on the order of _days_, we can also augment our own intelligence. Modern day humans have access to the internet augmentation, giving us the collective knowledge of all humanity in _seconds_.

While we can augment our intelligence, the thing we can't do is intelligently modify our own hardware. This is where AI comes in. With a sufficiently intelligent AI we could task it to do AI research for us. Etc, etc. => Singularity.

The vast majority of the steps towards Singularity have _already_ happened! Every step is an exponential leap in "intelligence", and it causes adaptions to occur on exponentially decreasing time scales.

But I guess we'll see for sure soon. GPT-human is a mere 20 years away (or less). I don't personally think the AI revolution will be as dramatic as many envision it to be. It's more likely to be like the emergence of cell phones. Cell phones undeniably changed and advanced the world, but it's not like there was a single moment when they suddenly popped into existence and then from that point on everything was different. It's hard to even point to exactly when cell phones changed the world. Was it when they were invented? Was it when they shrunk to the size of a handheld blender? When we had them in cars? The first flip phone? The first iPhone? The first Android?

The rise of AI won't be a cataclysmic event where SkyNet just poofs into existence and wipes out humanity. It'll be a slow, steady gradient of AI getting better and better, taking over more and more tasks. At the same time humanity will adapt and integrate with our new tool. When the AI gets smarter than us and hits the Singularity treadmill, we won't just poof out of existence. More likely humanity, as a civilization, will just get absorbed and extended by our AI counterparts. They'll carry the torch of humanity forward. They'll _be_ humanity. Our fleshy counterparts won't be wiped out; they'll be an obsolete relic of humanity's past.

More concretely, in 20 years we'll have GPT-human, not as an independent, conscious, thinking machine. It'll be a human level intelligence, but one bounded by the confines of the API calls we use to drive its process. That's not something that's going to "wake up" and wipe us out. It's something we can unleash on our most demanding scientific tasks. Protein folding, gene editing, physics, the development of quantum computing. All being absolutely CRUSHED by an AI with the thinking power of Einstein, but no consciousness or the cruft of driving a biological body. It's easy to see how that will change the world, but won't immediately lead to humanity being replaced by free-willed AIs.