It was my impression that he was the first articulator of the singularity concept. Other than fashion, why do you think it's outdated?
I consider Rainbow's End to be a pretty good picture of what it might be like to live through the singularity.
Especially evocative: the kid at the end chipping a skill his (grandfather?) worked for a career to accumulate, using it for a weekend, and then discarding it.
Yeah, this covers it for me. Maybe outdated isn't wrong so much as nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise and what if - there's no road map, there's no solid technological basis for reaching a singularity, imo there's not much theory to it outside speculation and some fairly specious projections.
See my reply to the other child of this comment, but basically I don't see a solid roadmap anymore from here to there - sure there's a a lot of progress and advances but taken as a whole, the singularity idea doesn't account for anything but technological advances as plotted on a curve. There are a ton of economic, social, and squishy human factors that aren't really taken into consideration. It's a fascinating idea, but I don't find it very realistic or practical, much like A.I., or self-driving cars, or casual human space travel.
If you had asked me 10-15 years ago, I would still be pretty sure it could happen, but the last decade or so of real-world technological advance has convinced me otherwise.
I consider Rainbow's End to be a pretty good picture of what it might be like to live through the singularity.
Especially evocative: the kid at the end chipping a skill his (grandfather?) worked for a career to accumulate, using it for a weekend, and then discarding it.