Sure, individually we adapt to new technologies pretty quickly. I’ve lived through vinyl, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, mp3 players and streaming music. It’s not like at any point I stopped figuring out how to listen to music I liked. But collectively, disruptive technology has a much bigger effect on companies, industries and even the balance of power between nations. Think about IT outsourcing. It’s not just that technology made jobs easier. It also made it easier to have people do jobs in countries where they didn’t have to pay people as much.
That’s what I think of when I think of the “singularity”. Some technological advancement that changes the way we do things in such a way that we can’t really imagine the world afterwards.