My guess is that we'll never cross a threshold over which people say "oh, crap, the Singularity just happened!". Instead, things will just keep advancing and we'll keep taking things for granted as they develop. I think a strong argument could be made that we're in the early phase of a "singularity"
now given some developments in the last few years. The breathtaking speed with which Google went from nothing to a $110 billion dollar dominant force in information, the
rapid spread and adoption of social networking, (in 2004 it was a niche thing where nerds and internet junkies communicated - now literally everyone in my circle of friends and family is on facebook and/or myspace and are using it in every day life), and the speed at which the Internet itself became what it is today(compare it to the slow and choppy spread of telephone, radio, etc.)
The same is also true of AI. People keep saying that we're making no progress in AI....which just drives me nuts because there has actually been
massive progress. Its just that people keep raising their standards and moving the goal further out. I mean - look objectively at how much voice recognition and synthetic voice generation have advanced. They are still far from perfect but they are FAR FAR better than they were even 5 years ago. The same is true in most other fields of AI.
I do think we're getting close to a "tipping point" in AI. Remember how the Internet went from a curiosity to a mainstream phenomena around 1994/1995? Well, I expect the same thing to happen with AI sometime soon. That is to say, we're close to getting to a point where the capability of narrow-AI is going to become much more useful and explode into the public awareness. I expect this to happen within the next 5 years, probably more like within the next 2 or 3 years. I expect the same thing to happen in the area of augmented reality(enabled by location aware applications on smart phones)
