Not the first criticism of the Singularity, and certainly not the last. I found this on reddit, just curious what the response will be here:

"I am taking up a subject at university, called Information Systems Management, and my teacher is a Futurologist! He refrains from even teaching the subject just to talk about technology and how it will solve all of our problems and make us uber-humans in just a decade or two. He has a PhD in A.I. and has already talked to us about nanotechnology getting rid of all diseases, A.I. merging with us, smart cities that are controlled by A.I. like the Fujisawa project, and a 20 minute interview to Ray Kurzweil about how the singularity will make us all immortal by 2045.

Now, I get triggered as fuck whenever my teacher opens his mouth, because not only does he sell these claims with no other basis than "technology is growing exponentially", but he also implies that all of our problems can and will be solved by it, empowering us to keep fucking up things along the way. But I prefer to stay in silence, because most idiots at my class are beyond saving anyway and I don't get off on confronting others, but that is beside the point.

I wanted to make a case for why the singularity is beyond the limits of this current industrial civilization, and I will base my assessment on these pillars:

-Declining Energy Returns: We are living in a world where the return for oil is what, a tenth of what it used to be last century? Not to mention that even this lower-quality oil is facing depletion, at least from profitable sources. Renewables are at an extremely early stage as to even hope they run an industrial, exponentially growing civilization like ours at this point, and there are some physical laws that limit the amount of energy that can be actually absorbed from the sun, along with what can be efficiently stored at batteries, not to mention intermittency issues, transport costs, etc. One would think that more complex civilizations require more and more energy, especially at exponential growth rates, but the only argument that futurists spew out is some free market bullshit about solar, or like my teacher did, only expect the idea will come true because humans are awesome and technolgy is increasing at exponential rates. These guys think applied science and technology exist in a vacuum, which brings me to the next point.

-Economic feasibility: I know it is easy to talk about the wonders of tech and the bright future ahead of us, when one lives in the developed world, and is part of a priviliged socio-economical class, being as such isolated from 99% of the misery of this planet. There are people today that cannot afford clean water. In fact, most people that are below the top 20% of the population in terms of income probably won't be able to afford many of the new technological developments more than they do today. In fact, if the wealth gap keeps increasing, only the top 1% would be able to turn into cyborgs or upload their minds into robots or whatever it is that these guys preach. I think the argument of a post-scarcity era is a lot less compelling once you realize it will only benefit a portion of the populations of developed countries.

-Political resistance and corruption: Electric cars have been a thing ever since the 20th century, and who know what technologies have been hidden and lobbied against by the big corporations that rule this capitalist system. Yet the only hope for the singularity is that is somehow profitable for the stockholders. Look at planned obsolescence. We could have products that are 100 times more durable, that are more efficient, that are safer, that pollute less, but then where would profits go? Who is to tell you that they won't do the same in the future? In fact, a big premise of smart cities is that they will reduce crime by constant suirvellance; In fujisawa every lightpost triggered a motion camera and houses had centralized information centers that could be easily turned into Orwellian control devices, which sounds terrifying to me. We will have to wait and see how the middle class and below react to automation taking many jobs, and how the UBI experiment is carried out, if at all.

-Time constraints: Finally, people hope for the Singularity to reach us by 2045. That would imply that we need around 30 years of constant technological development, disregarding social decline, resource depletion, global warming, crop failuers, droughts, etc. If civilization collapses before 2045, which I think is very likely, then that won't come around and save us, and as far as I know, there is no other hope from futurologists other than a major breakthrough in technology at this point. Plus, like the video "Are humans smarter than bacteria?" very clearly states, humans need time to figure out the problems we face, then we need some more time to design some solution, then we need even more time to debate, lobby and finally implement some form of the original solution, and hope no other problems arise from it, because as we know technology is highly unpredictable and many times it creates more problems than it solves. Until we do all that, on a global scale, without destroying civil liberties, I think we will all be facing severe environmental problems, and developing countries may very well have fallen apart long before that.

What do you think? Am I missing something? What is the main force that will stop us reaching the Singularity in time? "