Technological singularity

Alan Turing, often regarded as the father of modern computer science, laid a crucial foundation for contemporary discourse on the technological singularity. His pivotal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" argued that a machine could, in theory, exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of a human. But a technological singularity is not required for machines that can perform at or beyond a human level on certain tasks to be developed, nor does their existence imply the possibility of such an occurrence, as demonstrated by events such as the 1996 victory of IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer in a chess match with grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress. Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue". Subsequent authors echoed this viewpoint. In 1965, I. J. Good speculated that superhuman intelligence might bring about an "intelligence explosion": The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge, first in 1983 in an op-ed in Omni magazine arguing that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole". This was followed by his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he wrote that the transition would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate, and he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Another significant contribution to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045. == Intelligence explosion ==

Although technological progress has been accelerating in most areas, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia. But with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine significantly more intelligent than humans. If superhuman intelligence is invented—through either the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence—it will, in theory, vastly surpass human problem-solving and inventive skill. Such an AI is often called a seed AI because if an AI is created with engineering capabilities that match or surpass those of its creators, it could autonomously improve its own software and hardware to design an even more capable machine, which could repeat the process in turn. This recursive self-improvement could accelerate, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before reaching any limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation. It is speculated that over many iterations, such an AI would far surpass human cognitive abilities. ==Emergence of superintelligence==

A superintelligence, hyperintelligence, or superhuman intelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of even the brightest and most gifted humans. "Superintelligence" may also refer to the form or degree of intelligence possessed by such an agent. I. J. Good, Vernor Vinge, and Ray Kurzweil define the concept in terms of the technological creation of super intelligence, arguing that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what human beings' lives would be like in a post-singularity world. For example, given a millionfold increase in the speed of information processing relative to that of humans, a subjective year would pass in 30 physical seconds. Technology forecasters and researchers disagree about when, or whether, human intelligence will be surpassed. Some argue that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may result in general reasoning systems that bypass human cognitive limitations. Others believe that humans will evolve or directly modify their biology so as to achieve radically greater intelligence. A number of futures studies focus on scenarios that combine these possibilities, suggesting that humans are likely to interface with computers, or upload their minds to computers, in a way that enables substantial intelligence amplification. Robin Hanson's 2016 book The Age of Em describes a future in which human brains are scanned and digitized, creating "uploads" or digital versions of human consciousness. In this future, the development of these uploads may precede or coincide with the emergence of superintelligent AI. ==Variations==

Non-AI singularity Some writers use "the singularity" in a broader way, to refer to any radical changes in society brought about by new technology (such as molecular nanotechnology), although Vinge and other writers say that without superintelligence, such changes would not be a true singularity. ==Predictions==

performance on various benchmarks compared to human-level performance including computer vision (MNIST, ImageNet), speech recognition (Switchboard), natural language understanding (SQuAD 1.1, MMLU, GLUE), general language model evaluation (MMLU, Big-Bench, and GPQA), and mathematical reasoning (MATH). Many models surpass human-level performance (black solid line) by 2019, demonstrating significant advancements in AI capabilities across different domains over the past two decades. Numerous dates have been predicted for the attainment of singularity. In 1965, Good wrote that it was more probable than not that an ultra-intelligent machine would be built in the 20th century. He reaffirmed these predictions in 2024 in The Singularity Is Nearer. Human-level AI by 2040, and intelligence far beyond human by 2050 was predicted in 1998 by Moravec, revising his earlier prediction. A median confidence of 50% that human-level AI would be developed by 2040–2050 was the outcome of four informal polls of AI researchers, conducted in 2012 and 2013 by Bostrom and Müller. In September 2025, a review of surveys of scientists and industry experts from the previous 15 years found that most agreed that artificial general intelligence (AGI), a level well below technological singularity, will occur by 2100. A more recent analysis by AIMultiple reported, "Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040". ==Plausibility==

Prominent technologists and academics who dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity include Paul Allen, Robin Hanson has expressed skepticism of human intelligence augmentation, writing that once the "low-hanging fruit" of easy methods for increasing human intelligence have been exhausted, further improvements will become increasingly difficult. In conversation about human-level artificial intelligence with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, computer scientist Grady Booch skeptically said the singularity is "sufficiently imprecise, filled with emotional and historic baggage, and touches some of humanity's deepest hopes and fears that it's hard to have a rational discussion therein". Later in the conversation, Marcus, while more optimistic about the progress of AI, agreed that any major advances would not happen as a single event, but rather as a slow and gradual increase in reliability usefulness. There are two logically independent, but mutually reinforcing, causes of intelligence improvements: increases in the speed of computation and improvements to the algorithms used. and is comparatively similar to previous technological advances. "Most experts believe that Moore's law is coming to an end during this decade", the AIMultiple report reads, argue that software will present more complex challenges than simply operating on hardware capable of running at human intelligence levels or beyond. A 2017 email survey of authors with publications at the 2015 NeurIPS and ICML machine learning conferences asked about the chance that "the intelligence explosion argument is broadly correct". Of the respondents, 12% said it was "quite likely", 17% said it was "likely", 21% said it was "about even", 24% said it was "unlikely", and 26% said it was "quite unlikely". == Speed improvements ==

Both for human and artificial intelligence, hardware improvements increase the rate of future hardware improvements. Some upper limit on speed may eventually be reached. Jeff Hawkins has said that a self-improving computer system will inevitably run into limits on computing power: "in the end there are limits to how big and fast computers can run. We would end up in the same place; we'd just get there a bit faster. There would be no singularity." that the exponential growth curve could be extended back to earlier computing technologies before the integrated circuit. Ray Kurzweil postulates a law of accelerating returns whereby the speed of technological change (and more generally, all evolutionary processes) On the other hand, it has been argued that the global acceleration pattern having a 21st-century singularity as its parameter should be characterized as hyperbolic rather than exponential. Kurzweil reserves the term "singularity" for a rapid increase in artificial intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing: "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine". Kurzweil believes that the singularity will occur by 2045. His predictions differ from Vinge's in that he predicts a gradual ascent to the singularity, rather than Vinge's rapidly self-improving superhuman intelligence. Oft-cited dangers include those commonly associated with molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering. These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of Bill Joy's 2000 Wired magazine article "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us". == Algorithm improvements ==

Some intelligence technologies, like "seed AI", Second, AIs could compete for the resources humankind uses to survive. While not actively malicious, AIs would promote the goals of their programming, not necessarily broader human goals, and thus might crowd out humans. Carl Shulman and Anders Sandberg suggest that algorithm improvements may be the limiting factor for a singularity; while hardware efficiency tends to improve at a steady pace, software innovations are more unpredictable and may be bottlenecked by serial, cumulative research. They suggest that in the case of a software-limited singularity, intelligence explosion would actually become more likely than with a hardware-limited singularity, because in the software-limited case, once human-level AI is developed, it could run serially on very fast hardware, and the abundance of cheap hardware would make AI research less constrained. An abundance of accumulated hardware that can be unleashed once the software figures out how to use it has been called "computing overhang". ==Criticism==

Linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker wrote in 2008: "There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems." Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett said in 2017: "The whole singularity stuff, that's preposterous. It distracts us from much more pressing problems [...] AI tools that we become hyper-dependent on—that is going to happen. And one of the dangers is that we will give them more authority than they warrant." Some critics suggest religious motivations for believing in the singularity, especially Kurzweil's version. The buildup to the singularity is compared to Christian end-times scenarios. Beam called it "a Buck Rogers vision of the hypothetical Christian Rapture". John Gray has said, "the Singularity echoes apocalyptic myths in which history is about to be interrupted by a world-transforming event". In The New York Times, David Streitfeld questioned whether "it might manifest first and foremost—thanks, in part, to the bottom-line obsession of today’s Silicon Valley—as a tool to slash corporate America’s head count." Astrophysicist and scientific philosopher Adam Becker criticizes Kurzweil's concept of human mind uploads to computers on the grounds that they are too fundamentally different and incompatible. Skepticism of exponential growth Theodore Modis holds the singularity cannot happen. He claims the "technological singularity" and especially Kurzweil lack scientific rigor; Kurzweil is alleged to mistake the logistic function (S-function) for an exponential function, and to see a "knee" in an exponential function where there can in fact be no such thing. AI researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber has said that the frequency of subjectively "notable events" appears to be approaching a 21st-century singularity, but cautioned readers to take such plots of subjective events with a grain of salt: perhaps differences in memory of recent and distant events create an illusion of accelerating change where none exists. Hofstadter (2006) raises concern that Kurzweil is insufficiently rigorous, that an exponential tendency of technology is not a scientific law like one of physics, and that exponential curves have no "knees". Nonetheless, he did not rule out the singularity in principle in the distant future Economist Robert J. Gordon points out that measured economic growth slowed around 1970 and slowed even further since the 2008 financial crisis, and argues that the economic data show no trace of a coming Singularity as imagined by I. J. Good. In addition to general criticisms of the singularity concept, several critics have raised issues with Kurzweil's iconic chart. One line of criticism is that a log-log chart of this nature is inherently biased toward a straight-line result. Others identify selection bias in the points Kurzweil uses. For example, biologist PZ Myers points out that many of the early evolutionary "events" were picked arbitrarily. Technological limiting factors Martin Ford postulates a "technology paradox": most routine jobs could be automated with a level of technology inferior to that required for a singularity. This would cause massive unemployment and plummeting consumer demand, which would eliminate the incentive to invest in the technology required to bring about the singularity. Job displacement is no longer limited to the types of work traditionally considered "routine". Theodore Modis and Jonathan Huebner argue that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to rise but is actually now declining. Evidence for this decline is that the rise in computer clock rates is slowing, even while Moore's prediction of exponentially increasing circuit density continues to hold. This is due to excessive heat buildup from the chip, which cannot be dissipated quickly enough to prevent it from melting when operating at higher speeds. Advances in speed may be possible in the future by virtue of more power-efficient CPU designs and multi-cell processors. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has argued that there is a "complexity brake": the more progress science makes toward understanding intelligence, the more difficult it becomes to make additional progress. A study of the number of patents shows that human creativity does not show accelerating returns, but in fact, as suggested by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, a law of diminishing returns. The number of patents per thousand peaked in the period from 1850 to 1900, and has been declining since. The growth of complexity eventually becomes self-limiting, and leads to a widespread "general systems collapse". ==Potential impacts==

Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution. The new agricultural economy doubled every 900 years, a remarkable increase. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world's economic output has doubled every 15 years, 60 times faster than during the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligence causes a similar revolution, argues Robin Hanson, one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly weekly. Uncertainty and risk The term "technological singularity" reflects the idea that such change may happen suddenly and that it is difficult to predict how the resulting new world would operate. claims that there is no direct evolutionary motivation for AI to be friendly to humans. Evolution has no inherent tendency to produce outcomes valued by humans, and there is little reason to expect an arbitrary optimisation process to promote an outcome desired by humankind, rather than inadvertently leading to an AI behaving in a way not intended by its creators. Anders Sandberg has elaborated on this, addressing various common counter-arguments. AI researcher Hugo de Garis suggests that artificial intelligences may simply eliminate the human race for access to scarce resources, Alternatively, AIs developed under evolutionary pressure to promote their own survival could outcompete humanity. proposes an AI design that avoids several dangers, including self-delusion, unintended instrumental actions, and corruption of the reward generator. and testing AI. His 2001 book Super-Intelligent Machines advocates public education about AI and public control over AI. It also proposes a simple design that is vulnerable to corruption of the reward generator." in information processing. In biological terms, there are 7.2 billion humans on the planet, each with a genome of 6.2 billion nucleotides. Since one byte can encode four nucleotide pairs, the individual genomes of every human could be encoded by approximately 1 bytes. The digital realm stored 500 times more information than this in 2014 (see figure). The total amount of DNA in all the cells on Earth is estimated to be about 5.3 base pairs, equivalent to 1.325 bytes of information. If growth in digital storage continues at its current rate of 30–38% compound annual growth per year, Implications for human society In 2009, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Eric Horvitz chaired a meeting of leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and roboticists at the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove, California. The goal was to discuss the impact of the possibility that robots could become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions. They discussed the extent to which computers and robots might acquire autonomy, and to what degree they could use such abilities to pose threats or hazards. Frank S. Robinson predicts that once humans achieve a machine with the intelligence of a human, scientific and technological problems will be tackled and solved with brainpower far superior to that of humans. He notes that artificial systems are able to share data more directly than humans, and predicts that this will result in a global network of super-intelligence that dwarfs human capability. Robinson also discusses how vastly different the future would look after such an intelligence explosion. ==Hard or soft takeoff==

In a hard takeoff scenario, an artificial superintelligence rapidly self-improves, "taking control" of the world (perhaps in a matter of hours), too quickly for significant human-initiated error correction or for a gradual tuning of the agent's goals. In a soft takeoff, the AI still becomes far more powerful than humanity, but at a human-like pace (perhaps on the order of decades), on a timescale where ongoing human interaction and correction can effectively steer its development. Ramez Naam argues against a hard takeoff. He has pointed out that we already see recursive self-improvement by superintelligences, such as corporations. Intel, for example, has "the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of humans and probably millions of CPU cores to... design better CPUs!" But this has not led to a hard takeoff; rather, it has led to a soft takeoff in the form of Moore's law. Naam further points out that the computational complexity of higher intelligence may be much greater than linear, such that "creating a mind of intelligence 2 is probably more than twice as hard as creating a mind of intelligence 1." J. Storrs Hall believes that "many of the more commonly seen scenarios for overnight hard takeoff are circularthey seem to assume hyperhuman capabilities at the starting point of the self-improvement process" in order for an AI to be able to make the dramatic, domain-general improvements required for takeoff. Hall suggests that rather than recursively self-improving its hardware, software, and infrastructure all on its own, a fledgling AI would be better off specializing in one area where it was most effective and then buying the remaining components on the marketplace, because the quality of products on the marketplace continually improves, and the AI would have a hard time keeping up with the cutting-edge technology used by the rest of the world. Ben Goertzel agrees with Hall's suggestion that a new human-level AI would do well to use its intelligence to accumulate wealth. The AI's talents might inspire companies and governments to disperse its software throughout society. Goertzel is skeptical of a hard five-minute takeoff but speculates that a takeoff from human to superhuman level on the order of five years is reasonable. He calls this a "semihard takeoff". Max More disagrees, arguing that if there were only a few superfast human-level AIs, that they would not radically change the world, as they would still depend on other people to get things done and would still have human cognitive constraints. Even if all superfast AIs worked on intelligence augmentation, it is unclear why they would do better in a discontinuous way than existing human cognitive scientists at producing superhuman intelligence, although the rate of progress would increase. More further argues that superintelligence would not transform the world overnight: it would need to engage with existing, slow human systems to have physical impact on the world. "The need for collaboration, for organization, and for putting ideas into physical changes will ensure that all the old rules are not thrown out overnight or even within years." == Relation to immortality and aging ==

Eric Drexler, one of the founders of nanotechnology, theorized in 1986 the possibility of cell repair devices, including ones operating within cells and using as yet hypothetical biological machines, allowing immortality via nanotechnology. In 1988, Moravec predicted mind uploading, the possibility of "uploading" a human mind into a human-like robot, achieving quasi-immortality by extreme longevity via transfer of the human mind between successive new robots as the old ones wear out; beyond that, he predicts later exponential acceleration of subjective experience of time leading to a subjective sense of immortality. Beyond merely extending the operational life of the physical body, Jaron Lanier argues for a form of immortality called "Digital Ascension" that involves "people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious." This idea is the central to the television series Upload. ==History of the concept==

A paper by Mahendra Prasad, published in AI Magazine, asserts that the 18th-century mathematician Marquis de Condorcet first hypothesized and mathematically modeled an intelligence explosion and its effects on humanity. An early description of the idea was made in John W. Campbell's 1932 short story "The Last Evolution". In his 1958 obituary for John von Neumann, Ulam recalled a conversation with him about the "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." In 1988, Vinge used the phrase "technological singularity" in the short-story collection Threats and Other Promises, writing in the introduction to his story "The Whirligig of Time": Barring a worldwide catastrophe, I believe that technology will achieve our wildest dreams, and soon. When we raise our own intelligence and that of our creations, we are no longer in a world of human-sized characters. At that point we have fallen into a technological "black hole", a technological singularity. In 1988, Hans Moravec published Mind Children, Tipler's 1994 book The Physics of Immortality predicts a future where super–intelligent machines build enormously powerful computers, people are "emulated" in computers, life reaches every galaxy, and people achieve immortality when they reach Omega Point. There is no talk of Vingean "singularity" or sudden intelligence explosion, but intelligence much greater than human is there, as well as immortality. In 2000, Bill Joy, a prominent technologist and a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, voiced concern over the potential dangers of robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. For example, Kurzweil extrapolates current technological trajectories past the arrival of self-improving AI or superhuman intelligence, which Yudkowsky argues represents a tension with both I. J. Good's proposed discontinuous upswing in intelligence and Vinge's thesis on unpredictability. Autodesk, and ePlanet Ventures, the organization runs an annual ten-week graduate program as well as smaller "executive" courses. ==In politics==

In 2007, the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress released a report about the future of nanotechnology. It predicts significant technological and political changes in the midterm future, including possible technological singularity. Former President of the United States Barack Obama spoke about singularity in his interview to Wired in 2016: == Notes ==