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.
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.
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.
John W. Campbell's 1932 short story "The Last Evolution" contains a description of the idea of a technological singularity.
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":
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
— Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965)
In 1977, Hans Moravec wrote an article in which he envisioned a development of self-improving thinking machines and "super-consciousness". 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 first popularized by Vernor Vinge in a 1983 op-ed in Omni magazine arguing that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole" will occur. In 1986, Vinge published Marooned in Realtime, a science-fiction novel in which a few remaining humans in the future have survived an unknown extinction event that might well be a singularity. In a short afterword, Vinge wrote that a technological singularity would probably not end 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 online and helped popularize the idea 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.
Marvin Minsky's 1994 article says robots will "inherit the Earth", possibly with the use of nanotechnology, and proposes to consider robots human "mind children", drawing the analogy from Moravec. The rhetorical effect of the analogy is that if humans are happy to pass the world to their biological children, they should be equally happy to pass it to robots, their "mind children": "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 the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
In 2007, Yudkowsky suggested the various definitions of "singularity" are mutually incompatible rather than mutually reinforcing. For example, Ray Kurzweil extrapolates current technological trajectories past the arrival of self-improving AI or superhuman intelligence, which Yudkowsky argues represents a tension with both 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, an unaccredited 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 and 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.
Good, Vinge, and Kurzweil see creation of a superintelligence as the trigger for the singularity and say it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what human beings' lives will be like after that. 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.
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.
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.
In 1988, Moravec predicted that the computing capabilities needed for human-level AI would be available before 2010, assuming that the rate of improvement continued. In 1998, he revised his prediction, instead expecting human-level AI by 2040 and intelligence far beyond human by 2050.
In 1993, Vinge predicted the attainment of greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030.
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.
Four informal polls of AI researchers conducted in 2012 and 2013 by Bostrom and Müller gave a median confidence of 50% that human-level AI would be developed by 2040–2050.
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. In July 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk claimed the singularity had arrived.
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.
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 less skeptical about AI progress, agreed that any major advances would not happen as a single event, but rather as a slow and gradual increase in reliability and usefulness.
The possibility of an intelligence explosion depends on three factors. The first accelerating factor is the new intelligence enhancements made possible by each previous improvement. But as the intelligence improves, further advances will become increasingly complicated, possibly outweighing the advantage of increased intelligence. Each improvement should generate at least one more improvement, on average, for movement toward singularity to continue. Finally, the laws of physics may eventually prevent further improvement.
There are two logically independent but mutually reinforcing causes of intelligence improvements: increases in the speed of computation and improvements to the algorithms used. The former is predicted by Moore's law and the forecasted improvements in hardware, 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, but "quantum computing can be used to efficiently train neural networks", potentially working around any end to Moore's law. But Schulman and Sandberg argue that software will present more complex challenges than simply operating on hardware capable of running at human intelligence levels or beyond.