Rather then just looking at existing markets, however, believers in the possibility of a mid-century Singularity should design Singularity prediction markets. I attempted to do this myself, on a very small scale, when I proposed a bet to Kurzweil. Under the bet I would give him a very small amount of money today and in return at some future agreed-upon date he would give me a 10-meter-diameter solid diamond sphere. The idea behind my bet was that if the Singularity were near, nanotechnology would make it very easy to make large diamonds in the relatively near future. Kurzweil, alas, turned me down. He emailed me making the very reasonable argument that “Everything I write about could come true and for physical reasons that are not currently understood a ten-meter-round diamond might be hard to fabricate.” But still, since the mere approach to the Singularity would cause massive price changes, it should be possible to design future markets that provide good estimates of the likelihood of a Singularity occurring.
James D. Miller once offered to bet Ray Kurzweil:
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