technological singularity

The technological singularity, often shortened to the singularity, is a hypothetical future point at which technological progress, driven especially by artificial intelligence, becomes self-accelerating and outpaces human ability to predict or comprehend what follows. Science fiction author and mathematician Vernor Vinge set out the idea in a 1993 essay, and futurist Ray Kurzweil popularized it with his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near.

In AI discussions the concept is closely tied to the idea of an intelligence explosion, in which AI systems that surpass humans build ever more capable successors. It is distinct from the mathematical and physical sense of a singularity, such as a point where a function becomes infinite or the center of a black hole.

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