I don't think the hole for the singularity argument is necessarily that technological progress, measured by CPU speed or accessible memory or bandwidth or whatever, will necessarily slow.
I think that the hole is probably "We have virtually inexhaustible amounts of X and THIS MEANS MAGIC HAPPENS."
There are many resources for humans which were, in certain times and places, very, very finite. Let me give you a trivial example: drinking water that wouldn't kill you. The history of humanity up until quite recently was the history of drinking water.
However, most areas of major Western nations hit, effectively, the Drinking Water Singularity a long time ago: you can get what are (relative to historical needs and prices) infinite amounts for nothing. (Seriously: think of how much human labor it costs to draw one bucket of water from the well located several miles from your village. Mentally got an idea for how much? OK, now how much labor does it take a McDonalds employee to afford one bucket worth of tap water? What, maybe a quarter of a second, if that?)
The change from cholera outbreaks to no cholera outbreaks, which happened way the heck back on that curve, had PROFOUND consequences for civilization. The change from "I could fill up a swimming pool for a trivial amount of money" to "I could fill up TEN swimming pools for a trivial amount of money" had negligible consequences for civilization. All that water wealth, nothing of major consequence to spend it on.
(I know, I'm overlooking the fact that certain areas like the American Southwest are actually facing water crunchiness again, and large portions of the human population still fail to have their basic needs met. Ignore that for the purpose of simplification -- and incidentally, "You can have all the water you can drink but you can't water your lawn in the daytime" is still singularity-esque relative to "Send a woman to walk a mile to bring back a bucket of water".)
That is how I see the technology singularity coming about: what if I gave you all the CPU cycles you could want for nothing and you found, after a certain point, you had nothing of major consequence to spend them on? What are you going to do, calculate a new Mersenne Prime every second for eternity and call it the singularity?
[Edit: I originally said typhus, not cholera. Typhus is not caused by water quality issues. Sorry, it has been a long time since I played Oregon Trail.]
There are currently problems that is pushing the envelope of computational power, i.e., MD simulation (see D.E Shaw Research), engineering simulation on jet engines (see Pratt & Whitney) - even state of art of Infiniband clusters and custom-designed chips cannot simulate more than 10 seconds of molecular interactions or the complete fluid dynamics of a jet engine under a reasonable time-frame.
You are however right in the sense that AI can't be achieved by tossing more CPU power. Almost all of the media hype on the Deep Blue Chess Playing or hedge fund black boxes are all narrow AI, that is, programs that look "smart" because human beings have painstakingly poured so many techniques into a specific and narrow problem-space. We have yet to come up with a artificial general intelligence (AGI). For those who are interested in AGI, check out: http://www.agi-09.org/ and http://journal.agi-network.org/ .
This defines the phrase "a good argument until you think about it."
I mean, you really can't think up a good use for enough computing power to compute a Mersenne prime every few seconds?
Let me give it a shot:
Discretize a space about the size of a big protein plus a ribosome plus a few hundred nucleotides. Run the time-dependent Schrödinger Equation. It might be necessary to approximate, say with ion cores and valence electrons. The fact that, on some level, biochemistry "works" suggests that the problem is tractable. Enumerate space of final states, pruning the boring or repetitious cases as needed. Congratulations, you've just solved Protein Folding. Have fun scanning your new Database of All Possible Proteins for drug applications, or as the prerequisite for simulating a full-sized human body down to the protein level.
And let's not even start talking about building abstract neural networks the size of human brains...
I do agree that a lot of talk about the singuarity is irrational hype -- rapture for the geeks, and all that -- but unless I've missed your point somewhere, this strikes me as only slightly less irrational hype-aversion.
I think that the hole is probably "We have virtually inexhaustible amounts of X and THIS MEANS MAGIC HAPPENS."
There are many resources for humans which were, in certain times and places, very, very finite. Let me give you a trivial example: drinking water that wouldn't kill you. The history of humanity up until quite recently was the history of drinking water.
However, most areas of major Western nations hit, effectively, the Drinking Water Singularity a long time ago: you can get what are (relative to historical needs and prices) infinite amounts for nothing. (Seriously: think of how much human labor it costs to draw one bucket of water from the well located several miles from your village. Mentally got an idea for how much? OK, now how much labor does it take a McDonalds employee to afford one bucket worth of tap water? What, maybe a quarter of a second, if that?)
The change from cholera outbreaks to no cholera outbreaks, which happened way the heck back on that curve, had PROFOUND consequences for civilization. The change from "I could fill up a swimming pool for a trivial amount of money" to "I could fill up TEN swimming pools for a trivial amount of money" had negligible consequences for civilization. All that water wealth, nothing of major consequence to spend it on.
(I know, I'm overlooking the fact that certain areas like the American Southwest are actually facing water crunchiness again, and large portions of the human population still fail to have their basic needs met. Ignore that for the purpose of simplification -- and incidentally, "You can have all the water you can drink but you can't water your lawn in the daytime" is still singularity-esque relative to "Send a woman to walk a mile to bring back a bucket of water".)
That is how I see the technology singularity coming about: what if I gave you all the CPU cycles you could want for nothing and you found, after a certain point, you had nothing of major consequence to spend them on? What are you going to do, calculate a new Mersenne Prime every second for eternity and call it the singularity?
[Edit: I originally said typhus, not cholera. Typhus is not caused by water quality issues. Sorry, it has been a long time since I played Oregon Trail.]