technological singularity
In plain wordsA moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it.
The hypothesized moment when the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, or another runaway acceleration, would make technological change outpace human comprehension, so that the world beyond it could not be anticipated from this side. The name borrows from mathematics and physics, where a singularity is a point at which a function or model breaks down. Eliezer Yudkowsky distinguished three schools that share the word: an event-horizon school (Vernor VingeVernor Vinge, prop. n.: An American science-fiction author and mathematics professor who popularized the 'technological singularity': a coming point when smarter-than-human minds change the world so fast that no one can foresee what follows.: once minds smarter than ours exist, our predictions fail), an accelerating-change school (Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil, prop. n.: An American inventor of reading machines and speech technology who became the best-known prophet of the 'singularity', predicting human-level AI by 2029.: exponential trends in computing culminate around 2045 in a merger of human and machine intelligence) and an intelligence explosionintelligence explosion, n.: The idea that once AI gets good enough at improving AI, each smarter version could build a smarter one faster still, so abilities would snowball far beyond human level in a short time. school (I. J. Good: self-improving AI produces a runaway). In current AI discourse 'the singularity' usually means the intelligence-explosion version. Critics call the idea unfalsifiable or quasi-religious, a 'rapture of the nerds', a jibe usually traced to the novelist Ken MacLeod; defenders reply that it names a real limit on forecasting.
Whether or not you believe in the singularity, the forecasting problem it points to is real.
Origin
Stanislaw Ulam's 1958 tribute to John von Neumann recalls von Neumann remarking that accelerating technological progress seemed to approach an essential singularity in human history. Vernor Vinge tied the idea to superhuman intelligence in a 1983 Omni column and his 1993 essay 'The Coming Technological Singularity'; Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near (2005) popularized it.
Usage note
People who expect or work toward it are called singularitarians. Sam Altman's 2025 essay 'The Gentle Singularity' argued that the transition may feel gradual from the inside. Not to be confused with a gravitational singularity, the source of the metaphor's 'event horizon'.
Related
- intelligence explosionintelligence explosion, n.: The idea that once AI gets good enough at improving AI, each smarter version could build a smarter one faster still, so abilities would snowball far beyond human level in a short time.
- law of accelerating returnslaw of accelerating returns, n.: Ray Kurzweil's claim that technology improves at an ever-faster rate, because each advance helps build the next, so progress speeds up exponentially rather than steadily.
- Vernor VingeVernor Vinge, prop. n.: An American science-fiction author and mathematics professor who popularized the 'technological singularity': a coming point when smarter-than-human minds change the world so fast that no one can foresee what follows.
- Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil, prop. n.: An American inventor of reading machines and speech technology who became the best-known prophet of the 'singularity', predicting human-level AI by 2029.
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann, prop. n.: A Hungarian-American mathematician who shaped the design of modern computers, co-founded game theory, and is the first person known to have spoken of a coming technological 'singularity'.
- superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist.
- takeofftakeoff, n.: The stretch of time between AI reaching roughly human level and AI becoming vastly superhuman. People argue over whether it would take decades, years, months or just days.
Sources
- Ulam, S. (1958). John von Neumann, 1903–1957. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64(3, Part 2), 1–49.
- Vinge, V. (1993). The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center.
- Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.
Mentioned in
I. J. GoodI. J. Good, prop. n.: A British statistician who broke codes with Alan Turing and in 1965 argued that a machine smarter than us could design still smarter machines, setting off an 'intelligence explosion'., intelligence explosionintelligence explosion, n.: The idea that once AI gets good enough at improving AI, each smarter version could build a smarter one faster still, so abilities would snowball far beyond human level in a short time., John von NeumannJohn von Neumann, prop. n.: A Hungarian-American mathematician who shaped the design of modern computers, co-founded game theory, and is the first person known to have spoken of a coming technological 'singularity'., Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil, prop. n.: An American inventor of reading machines and speech technology who became the best-known prophet of the 'singularity', predicting human-level AI by 2029., Vernor VingeVernor Vinge, prop. n.: An American science-fiction author and mathematics professor who popularized the 'technological singularity': a coming point when smarter-than-human minds change the world so fast that no one can foresee what follows., Ben GoertzelBen Goertzel, prop. n.: An American AI researcher who made 'artificial general intelligence' a widely used name and built a research community around the goal of human-like, broadly capable AI., law of accelerating returnslaw of accelerating returns, n.: Ray Kurzweil's claim that technology improves at an ever-faster rate, because each advance helps build the next, so progress speeds up exponentially rather than steadily., rapture of the nerdsrapture of the nerds, phr.: A mocking nickname for the 'technological singularity', comparing the belief that superintelligent AI will transform the world to the religious idea of the Rapture., TESCREALTESCREAL, abbr.: A critical label for a cluster of related belief systems, including transhumanism, effective altruism and longtermism, that its coiners say drive the push to build AGI and share roots with eugenics., transhumanismtranshumanism, n.: A movement holding that people should use technology, such as genetic engineering, brain implants or AI, to overcome human limits like aging, disease and death, and become more than human., ultraintelligent machineultraintelligent machine, n.: I. J. Good's 1965 name for a machine smarter than any person at every kind of thinking, which could therefore build machines smarter than itself.