The statistician I. J. Good wrote “Intelligence Explosion” where he suggested that if a machine is created to be more intelligent than humans, it will be able to create a better machine. This process recursively creates an increasingly intelligent machine, which leads to exponential and sudden growth of intelligence. Renowned science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge called this event “the Singularity” and later popularized it through lectures, essays, and science fiction.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) defined singularity as “the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence”. Singularity is still not an everyday word or commonly understood term. However, proponents of singularity are active on the World Wide Web and periodically organize seminars about it. A well-known inventor and entrepreneur, Ray Kurzweil, is one of them. He explained his theory of how singularity will occur in his best selling book “Singularity is Near”. The main theme of the book is, “The key idea underlying the impending singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace”. He defines singularity as a future period of rapid technological change which will irreversibly transform human life. He generalizes Moore’s Law – “the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years” – for other technologies and predicted that the accelerating changes will continue to the technologies that are not yet invented.

According to SIAI, singularity can happen in more than one way. One method is Artificial Intelligence – when machines will achieve human intelligence. “Direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by the computer emulation” are other possibilities. Vernor Vinge, in Signs of the Singularity, describes two more ways to reach singularity; the Internet Scenario – where humanity, with its networks, computers, and databases become effective enough to be considered a superhuman being and the Digital Gaia Scenario, where “the network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being”.

A huge advantage of exponential increasing of intelligence creating smarter machines is that it will only need something small to start the process to have a domino effect of changes. As SIAI says, “All it takes is one technology – Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or perhaps something unforeseen – that advances to the point of creating smarter-than-human minds. That one technological advance is the equivalent of the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth”.

Singularity may occur faster than we expect, because the historical events that have moved technology forward show that each event took less time than the one before it. For example, “agriculture was invented ten thousand years ago; Socrates lived two and half thousand years ago; the printing press was invented five hundred years ago; the computer was invented around sixty years ago”. Even though looking at the past changes, it is unlikely to have a major event within a century, but “today’s changes occur on a cultural timescale, which bypasses evolution’s speed limits”. Therefore, we can’t predict the time of the next big event, singularity, but based on the current technological advances, it will presumably happen soon.

Singularity will bring many benefits. For example, an intelligent machine will be able to process data a lot faster than a human. The reason behind the huge speed advantage is that human neurons operate by sending electrochemical signals which at most propagates 150 meters per second along the fastest neurons and the neurons can spike a maximum of 200 times per second; whereas, the speeds in modern computer chips are at 2GHZ which is increasing exponentially – a ten million fold difference. Because of having this huge advantage in thinking (done by machines) “the entire subjective time span from Socrates in ancient Greece to modern-day humanity would pass in under twenty-two hours”.