Glossary · −18° Superintelligence
Technological singularity
The hypothetical moment when technical progress, driven by intelligences able to improve themselves, would become too fast to be foreseen or understood.
Definition
The idea comes from the mathematician I. J. Good, who wrote in 1965 that an ultraintelligent machine could design machines better than itself, setting off an “intelligence explosion”. The novelist and mathematician Vernor Vinge popularised its name in 1993 (he had used it as early as 1983), borrowing the word from physics: as at the centre of a black hole, our models would stop working.
The singularity is less a prediction than a conceptual horizon. One may doubt its speed, its shape, even its possibility. But it raises a serious question: what is any thinking about the future worth, if the future is precisely what escapes all thought formed before it?
See also
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