The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.Vinge, Vernor. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era". , in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, pp. 11–22, 1993. "There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is 'yes, we can', then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)"
Prominent technologists and academics have historically disputed the plausibility of a technological singularity and associated artificial intelligence "explosion", including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, Gordon Moore, and Roger Penrose. One claim is that artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones. Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig observe that in the history of technology, improvement in a particular area tends to follow an S curve: it begins with accelerating improvement, then levels off without continuing upward into a hyperbolic singularity.
In July 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk said the singularity had arrived.
History 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 of a technological singularity was made in John W. Campbell's 1932 short story "The Last Evolution".
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":
In 1977, Hans Moravec wrote an article where he envisioned a development of self-improving thinking machines and "super-consciousness".Moravec, Hans (1977). Intelligent machines: How to get there from here and What to do afterwards (wikidata). In 1988, Moravec published Mind Children, in which he predicted human-level intelligence in supercomputers by 2010, self-improving intelligent machines far surpassing human intelligence later, human mind uploading into human-like robots later, intelligent machines leaving humans behind, and space colonization.
The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge, first in a 1983 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". In 1986, Vinge published Marooned in Realtime, a science-fiction novel where a few remaining humans traveling forward in the future have survived an unknown extinction event that might well be a singularity. In a short afterword, Vinge writes that an actual technological singularity would not be the end of the human species: "of course it seems very unlikely that the Singularity would be a clean vanishing of the human race. (On the other hand, such a vanishing is the timelike analog of the silence we find all across the sky.)". Vinge's 1993 article "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" spread widely on the internet and helped popularize the notion of a singularity. Vinge wrote that the transition would signal the end of the human era, as the superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate, and that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Vinge argues that science-fiction authors cannot write realistic post-singularity characters who surpass the human intellect, as the thoughts of such an intellect are beyond humans' ability to express.
Minsky's 1994 article says robots will "inherit the Earth", possibly with the use of nanotechnology, and proposes to think of robots as human "mind children", drawing the analogy from Moravec. The rhetorical effect of the analogy is that if humans are fine to pass the world to their biological children, they should be equally fine to pass it to robots, their "mind children". Per Minsky, "we could design our 'mind-children' to think a million times faster than we do. To such a being, half a minute might seem as long as one of our years, and each hour as long as an entire human lifetime."
From 2006 to 2012, an annual Singularity Summit conference was organized by Machine Intelligence Research Institute, founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
In 2007, Yudkowsky suggested that many of the varied definitions that have been assigned to "singularity" are mutually incompatible rather than mutually supporting. 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.
In 2009, Kurzweil and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis announced the establishment of Singularity University, a nonaccredited private institute whose mission is "to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity's grand challenges." Funded by companies such as Google, Autodesk, and ePlanet Ventures, the organization runs an annual ten-week graduate program as well as smaller "executive" courses.
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. A superhuman intelligence—through either the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence—would theoretically surpass human problem-solving and inventive skill if it were invented.
I. J. Good, Vernor Vinge, and Ray Kurzweil view the creation of superintelligence as the trigger for the singularity, arguing that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what human beings' lives would be like after that.
The related concept of "speed superintelligence" describes an artificial intelligence that can function like a human mind but much faster. 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. Such an increase in information processing speed could result in or significantly contribute to the singularity.
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
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.
Moravec predicted in 1988 that the computing capabilities needed for human-level AI would be available in supercomputers before 2010, assuming that the rate of improvement continued.
The attainment of greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030 was predicted by Vinge in 1993.
In 2005, Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near, in which he predicted the creation of human-level artificial intelligence by 2029 and the singularity by 2045. 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".
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made escalating public statements about the singularity. In January 2025, he posted a cryptic six-word remark: "near the singularity; unclear which side." In June 2025, he published "The Gentle Singularity", an essay arguing that AI had already passed the "event horizon" and that "the takeoff has commenced". In July 2026, Altman said, more directly, "we are now in the singularity—this is the moment", but said the transition remained part of "one crazy exponential" curve without a single decisive tipping point.
Plausibility Prominent technologists and academics who dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity include Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, and Gordon Moore, whose law is often cited in support of the concept.
Proposed methods for creating superhuman or transhuman minds typically fall into two categories: intelligence amplification of human brains and artificial intelligence. The many speculated ways to augment human intelligence include bioengineering, genetic engineering, nootropic drugs, AI assistants, direct brain–computer interfaces, and mind uploading.
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.