so the singularity by far is something after which we cannot predict how things are, but we're going to look at roughly similar cases for that?

The comparisons people generally make are to agriculture and industrialization.

I'm also an insider in this in the sense that I've been a professional software engineer for 16 years

Okay. Part of my academic background is physics, including nanoscale physics- but if anything, being half-educated about it makes me reluctant to speculate.

For example, there's a technology under development which would use nanotubes and van der Waals forces (if I remember correctly) to do binary memory on a scale that's a massive jump from what we have now- I think the claim was they could store a petabyte in the volume of a dime. If that works, that'll be huge- you could significantly change computer architecture with the ability to store abundant memory on the same chip as the CPU, for example. But I'm reluctant to bet that it'll work until it works.