People have other dreams, and have written about them in science fiction. But science fiction can just handwave away resource problems that exist in real life so that the plot can happen.

Just as the popular "grey goo" nanomachine disaster can easily be shown to be impossible due to resource imbalances and energy shortages, AI recursive self improvements rapidly slows down due to problems with complexity, training data and compute availability (whether due to actual processors or just due to energy demands).

> because people have other ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

In a weak sense, singularities are common and should be expected every so often. In a mathematical sense, a singularity is where a model 'blows up' and neglected terms become part of the dominant balance.

Industrialization hit a point of diminishing returns, but the industrial revolution was nonetheless a 'singularity,' where life afterwards was qualitatively unpredictable to people who lived before. Likewise, agriculture was such a technological singularity to hunter-gatherer ancestors.

I could even make a decent argument that writing and literacy were such a singularity, making inconceivable social organizations routine.

In that weak sense I expect AI to be a singularity, recursive self improvement or no. Life in 2050 may be completely unpredictable to someone who was taken out of time in the year 2000.

The remaining questions are speed and intensity, and both of these questions are related to RSI. If RSI works, then the 'fast takeoff' visions become more plausible where society transforms over months to a few years – at least locally where the enabling technologies have diffused. If not, it might take a couple of decades.