As far as ML, we have seen this before. When the tools get cheaper and easier to use, adoption goes up. RoR + cheap cloud servers and easy VC financing greatly increased the number of startups.
Now TensorFlow and the Nvidia Pascal architecture have made ML accessible and fast.
If there is one thing history has shown us, it is that the Hacker News comment section is full of myopic pessimists with an axe to grind (no offense peers!) -- just go back and look at the Dropbox launch thread here.
Even if ML doesn't meet all the hype (it won't for a time, and then later on it will probably exceed it and create things we can't even dream about right now) there will be an entire wave of ML startups, products and jobs.
There is a ton of money to be made on the ML train guys. It's the new social-local-mobile. Much will be shit, some will change all our lives for the better.
I'm old enough now to know how this works.
Edit PS.
I've heard listenable, interesting music completely generated with tensorflow. I have seen artwork that is arguably as good as anything any of the greats have put out generated through similar methods, and we are in the infancy of machine learning.
Machines have beaten humans at chess, go and most impressively in my opinion Jeopardy!
ML is real and it's here and you should leverage it as much as you can, all the knowledge and tools are free.
It's patently ridiculous to say that we are currently living in the singularity, though, it defies the very meaning of the term.
"The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, can not continue"
- John von Neumann
I would argue that the intelligence explosion has already occurred. Human affairs as we knew them when that line was uttered have been fragmenting and crumbling all across the world.
The internet itself, the current 10 billion or so machines networked together have resulted in a fundamental change in the human condition.
All of us are operating with amplified brains now. We have access to knowledge from the entire corpus of human information at the touch of our fingers, or now with our voice.
I would say human intelligence is already machine amplified.
The runaway reaction has already begun.
That's exactly the wrong way to think about it IMO. My vision of Machine Programming is that it's a fluid OS/UI that adapts application architecture to how people actually use them. So for example you have "Deep Excel" which is trained first to give the basic functionality of a spreadsheet, but as each person uses it, it gets data about most used/combined UI elements, follow on actions etc... that "rewire" through RL the UX to behave in the way that the user indicates it wants to behave.
So each instance of the program running would be unique to each user and constantly changing to make it more adaptive to their needs. Network these in a deeper system and you can iterate on design and functionality of products way faster.
Didn't MS add a "dancing UI" to office at one stage?
Aside - I think it's really ironic for people with no technical know how to go on a talk show and say "learn ML or you're toast". First, the inertia of the world economy is much greater than 3 years. Second, it's unrealistic to ask every 7-11 cashier to go learn ML. Third, programming is a complex art and we're surely not 3 years away from the singularity. Most people I know who have some ML knowledge also realize how far we are from a computer program that can read code, read specs, and then decide how to implement or fix existing code. And last, even if all of the above were moot, I think it's more likely that we write a program that successfully helms a Fortune 500 company before we write one that produces or improves on software. The former could be more easily reduced to a game of chess while the latter requires some massive novel research into "creativity". Maybe it's Mark Cuban who should be learning ML!