Ways the singularity could fail to happen

[ciphergoth]

Dashing off a quick post with some half-formed thoughts just to see what people think. When I refer to the singularity here, I mean it in the intelligence explosion sense. I'm trying to categorize the different ways the singularity could fail to happen, here are the categories I've come up with so far:

• Human minds might be fundamentally different to other physical things, and not subject to thinking about like an engineer
• The idea of one mind being greatly more efficient than another might not be meaningful
• Human minds might be within a few orders of magnitude of the most efficient minds possible in principle in our Universe
• ... as above in our corner of the Universe
• ... as above given the height of our physical knowledge
• ... as above given the limitations of the height of our manufacturing ability
• ... as above given the limitations of the height of our design ability
• We might not continue to study the problem, or the relevant fields necessary
• We might hit an existential risk before reaching the heights of our potential
• We might have the ability to build superintelligent minds, but choose not to do so
• We might build superintelligent minds and it not make a great difference to the world

What have I missed out?

EDITED TO ADD 15:20: just added "The idea of one mind being greatly more efficient than another might not be meaningful", which is a popular one.

Comments

[zwol]

rysmiel has thrown out the possibility that enhancing intelligence might become harder rather than easier as your starting point becomes more intelligent -- so, weakly superhuman AI or augmented humans will eventually happen, but we won't get the recursive intellectual runaway that describes the classical singularity. I think this is a special case of your "as above given the limitations of the height of our design ability", but I think it's a valuable special case to consider.

Other possible special cases of "we won't be able to figure out how to design a strongly superhuman AI anytime soon", that I personally find compelling, include:

• We might be far more ignorant of the actual mechanism of human intelligence than futurists would like to think. (This one has substantial empirical evidence in its favor: human-equivalent AI has been estimated to be 20+ years in the future by actual researchers in the field since the 1960s, and is still so today.)
  
• Human intelligence might be close to a local maximum; strongly superhuman intelligence might require a totally different architecture, which we will have great difficulty conceiving, let alone designing.
  
• It might turn out that NP ⊈ P and enhancing intelligence much beyond human capabilities is equivalent to an NP-hard problem (so a strongly superhuman AI cannot operate in real time).