Even after I explained the exact usage I was invoking, the attractive nuisance of all the science fiction that has gotten attached to the term still prevented you and Quarrelsome from reading my post as written.
I really wish the term hadn't been mangled so much. Though the originator of the term bears a non-trivial amount of the responsibility for it, having written some rather good science fiction on the topic himself. The original meaning from the paper is quite useful and nothing has stepped up to replace it.
All the singularity means as I explicitly used it here is you entirely lose the ability to predict the future. It is relative to who is using it... we are all well past the Caveman Singularity, where no (metaphorical) caveman could possibly predict anything about our world. If we stabilize where we are now I feel like I have at least a grasp on the next ten years. If we continue at this pace I don't. That doesn't mean I believe AI will inevitably do this or that... it means I can't predict anymore, which is really the exact opposite. AI doesn't have to get to "superintelligence" to wreck up predictions.
>the originator of the term ... rather good science fiction
I guess you are thinking of Vernor Vinge but the term first came up with John von Neumann in the 1950s:
>...on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue