Well, using the Internet as an example. There were some pretty good predictions about something like the Internet. But for someone in 1980, say, to write a story set in 2020 and come up with all of the consequences of the Internet would have been impossible. I don't think anyone predicted Wikipedia or Facebook or 4chan or the impact those would have on our daily life. At least they didn't predict the combined impact of all three and various other services besides. Heck, even we don't yet know what all the consequences will be, since there are probably lots of ways of using the 'Net that still remain to be invented.
However, what they could do is to write a sci-fi story about the consequences they can imagine. Maybe they predicted online shopping, and e-mail and working remotely, or maybe they based their story on this eighties' study. In any case, their story would have been consistent with what the science of 1980 knew.
If we apply both criteria 1 and 2, this would not have been hard sci-fi, as it couldn't have predicted all the consequences of the Internet. If we apply only criterion 1, then it would have been hard sci-fi.
Likewise with the Singularity. We have no way of predicting all the things that a superintelligence might do. But we can come up with things that the superintelligent could plausibly do, that's consistent with science as we know it. If someone writes a story where a superintelligence escapes into the Internet by hacking a million computers and running as a distributed intelligence, and then launces a brilliant social engineering scheme targeting all of humanity after it has read all the psych, sociology and marketing papers ever published - well, that contradicts no science that we know of. So going only by the first criterion, that's hard sci-fi.
I don't think I really have your concept of a surface level discrete "consequence". One intuition is telling me I'm thinking to much like reality, I'm not really sure how that'd work but it probably has something to do with how the simulations authors have in their heads are different from reality. I'm not really in the best condition right now maybe I'll get it later.
So, the usual bet is that the GAI, both F and UF will be created at around that time at the latest. I'd like to set a novel, a thriller, right at that critical moment where everything could be lost or won, and humanity is in the balance. But human societies and the way they interact with each other will have changed a lot by then. So, well, I haven't read throughly enough here to understand how far we are anticipating what will happen. Not just the friendliness of AI development, but our own impact in the world, and how it will react when it finds out about us and our goals, and takes them seriously.
So I was wondering if you'd help me out here with some brainstorming. I'm looking for some seminal ideas for how the world will look like by then. We don't need to be 100% precise, although keeping the pieces of the setting vague by avoiding Burdensome Details is a way of avoiding glaring mistakes, and gives a Lord Of The Rings, Ruins In The Distance feel of false depth. Don't hesitate to suggest seemingly weird but actually reasonable ideas: the future I want to build is a Weirdtopia. The point is to frighten, wonder, and suck the reader in.
Let's see, for a start: cryogenics and cybernetics are a solved problem, and people's heads are being resurrected and put on mechanical bodies by default (they could ask for recreated biological bodies, but usually after the first tantrums... they don't ^_^). The audience can be given someone to identify with through a Temporal Fish Out Of Water, one of the resurrected Human Popsicles. The funny part is that, even though that person happens to be a transhumanist AND a singularitarian, they hadn't surpassed the Shock Level (I think that's what Yudkowsky called it when you were enthused with an idea because you don't think of it as normal yet?), and they are only marginally less freaked out by the world they find themselves into than the normal sci-fi fan readers (or even the mainstream ones, if this ends up so good as to have any).