[Popular Mechanics] The term "singularity" is often used to describe a hypothetical moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and then begins to improve itself at an uncontrollable rate. More simply, people often use the term "singularity" to refer to the moment when AI becomes conscious, like Skynet becoming self-aware in the movie Terminator. But the notion of a "technological singularity" originated as a broader metaphor for a point beyond which technological change becomes so fast that the future is hard for humans to predict.In 1958, mathematician Stanisław Ulam recalled a conversation with physicist John von Neumann about accelerating technological progress reaching "some essential singularity" in human affairs. At that point, the term didn’t refer to a theory of machine consciousness. But in 1993, mathematician and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge made the concept influential in AI circles. In his book The Coming Technological Singularity, Vinge argued that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence could cause a runaway change in civilization, after which our ability to forecast events would fail.
The futurist Ray Kurzweil later popularized the term, especially through his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. In that work, he gave "singularity" a more specific meaning, claiming that humans would merge with increasingly powerful nonbiological intelligence by 2045. So while many of us are worried today about the dangers of AI, and some experts even believe that the "AI singularity" is already here, Kurzweil’s idea is a lot more radical than that. He doesn’t just postulate that machines will develop the same abilities as human brains. Instead, he says that AI-driven machines will merge with our brains and become one with them. And in Kurzweil’s techo-optimistic view, that’s a good thing.
In 2005, that might have seemed a little farfetched. But given recent advances in neural prostheses and brain-computer interfaces—and of course in AI—Kurzweil’s prediction about the singularity seems much more plausible now. Still, some aspects of his cybernetic singularity remain counterintuitive, if not entirely hard to believe. Just how, exactly, does a machine merge with a human? Just how does human consciousness get uploaded into the cloud? Just who would "I" be if I’m an immortal digital copy of myself living in a nonbiological body?
In the 2024 revision of his book, retitled The Singularity Is Nearer, Kurzweil addresses those and many other similar questions. He emphasizes that the transfer of human consciousness from our bodies into nonbiological systems won’t happen all at once, or in just one way. In fact, the transfer’s already begun, in the form of digital simulations of our appearance and ways of thinking and speaking. Always the optimist, Kurzweil sees the upside of our contemporary deepfake problem.