I have heard one definition of "a sudden change that makes something once niche and seldom-seen become ubiquitous", such as the sudden reduction in price of consumer computing in the 1990s

They are real but rare. Situations that change society as a whole. For example creation of printing press which spread both religion and literacy. Or creation of the combustion engine which lead to cars and trains resulting in the society spawl we now live in. Or the discovery of germ theory which revolutionized medicine. Or the the west India shipping company started selling rights to some of the profits of a shop if people gave them money early so they could afford the ship and the trip, effectively creating stock markets(especially the futures market). Or creation of the transistor instead of vacuum tubes.

People claim things are paradigm shifts so others will give them money but most typically aren't. Like 3d tvs were supposed to be a paradigm shift about 15 years ago, now when did you last even see a 3d movie or see a 3d TV for sale in a store? Vr was supposed to be a paradigm shift for games but it's still incredibly niche due to price, downsides of current tech and lack of software (software isn't developed because there's not a consumer base and there's not a consumer base because there's no software)

It's both! Marketing blabber and general public usage have obliterated any meaning, let alone its original one.

But in the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn was onto something...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions

He noted that scientific progress tends to be incremental, building and evolving what came before it. But there comes a time where what we thought we knew becomes incompatible with what we are now learning, forcing a paragigm shift.

E.g. Relativity replacing newtonian physics, or copernican heliocentrism replacing ptolemaic cosmology.

Edit: Very real. Impossible to predict. You only know after you had it.

A sociologist named Alvin Toffler wrote a book called "Future Shock' back in the 1960s. He predicted that there was going to be a massive shift from the Industrial Age to the Digital Era. A science fiction writer named John Brunner read Toffler's book and wrote "Stand On Zanzibar" a novel about the early 21st Century.

Brunner's book has things like school shooters, legalized marijuana, AI, LGBT+ becoming mainstream, etc etc.

Yes, that's more or less marketer-ese and a bullshit phrase at this point. In everyday usage it pretty much means "any change that we'd like to present as a major one", and there are ways of phrasing that so you don't sound like an advertising executive

A paradigm is a bandwagon.

Thus a paradigm shift is changing bandwagons. Either literally hopping from one to another or burning the old one down.

Yeah—Kuhn describes reading Aristotle’s Physics and being shocked at how nonsensical it was. Then he spent months going through it term by term, until everything finally clicked: Aristotle’s world has a fundamentally different ontology and causal structure that’s perfectly internally consistent, and in that world post-Galilean physics is wrong—as nonsensical as Aristotle’s physics initially seemed to Kuhn. And there’s no way to get from that world to this one without abandoning the former in toto.

In Kuhn’s view, paradigms are like parallel, mutually-incompatible worlds that happen to share the same surface-level phenomena.

It's a change in how people think about problems or their relationship to the world. For example right now if you wanted 8 circles of different colors with words in them you'd grab a drawing program and be done in 15 minutes, but if you think about things only in terms of how an AI can do it it will take an hour and a half of explainations and corrections and the resources necessary to maintain a small garden habitat for months or years.

paradigm, noun 1. A pattern, a way of doing something; especially a pattern of thought, a system of beliefs, a conceptual framework.

The "paradigm shift" in personal computing was the way computers changed from jealously guarded, centrally controlled, elite resources, to uncontrolled, delegate-able appliances that showed up at the outer edges of networks and organizations, where they could be applied to tasks that hadn't been computerized before. Computers had been a part of systems of control, but they looked like they were becoming agents of chaos, for a while.

The change in cost was the mechanism, the driver of the change, but it wasn't the paradigm shift itself.

The post-COVID work-from-home boom is a paradigm shift. Gig-economy work is a paradigm shift, but you could argue it's not a positive one. Vaccination was a paradigm shift. Small-scale solar power can be a paradigm shift.

I'm conflicted about your comment. Why do school shootings and LGBT acceptance belong in the same sentence? I know you're going to come back with some degenerate nonsense so don't even start with that

I think you're reading subtext which don't exist

This to me made it fully click

Well that will be good news to all queer people. It's so wonderful to hear that discrimination is over.

As a queer person I don't speak for all of us, but I didn't read any subtext there

It's wonderful that you're generous enough to realize you don't speak for all of us. That's truly a big step. Next step is realizing that your freedoms, such as they are, were paid for in blood

https://youtu.be/cDPnsTRAvIM?list=RDcDPnsTRAvIM

It's possible to talk about two different things in the same sentence without them being actually connected.

https://youtu.be/cDPnsTRAvIM?list=RDcDPnsTRAvIM

I was just listing things that were in the novel.

Thanks for seeing that.

It made me happy to see people talking about Kuhn in this thread. The term "paradigm shift" has been appropriated by marketers and grifters, but it still has a useful meaning in its original context.