--- alias: - Singularitarianism - Technological Singularity - The Singularity category: Ideology created: 2026-06-20 location: Silicon Valley, California summary: Singularitarianism is the belief, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and popularized by Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book and his Singularity University, that accelerating technology will soon produce a machine superintelligence and an irreversible transformation of human life. tags: - Concept - Singularitarianism - TechnologicalSingularity - ArtificialIntelligence - Transhumanism - Superintelligence updated: 2026-06-20 --- Singularitarianism is the belief that the continued acceleration of technology, above all artificial intelligence, will within a few decades produce a superintelligence that vastly exceeds human capability and triggers a transformation of human life so rapid and profound that the world beyond it cannot be predicted. The transformation is called the technological singularity, a term the mathematician and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge gave the idea in 1993, and the futurist Ray Kurzweil popularized it in his 2005 book *The Singularity Is Near* and in the Singularity University he cofounded in 2008. It is one strand of the broader [transhumanist](/concepts/transhumanism/) and artificial-intelligence-risk milieu.[^1][^2] ### Origins of the Idea The germ of the concept predates the name. In a 1965 paper, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," published in *Advances in Computers*, the British statistician and former Bletchley Park cryptanalyst I. J. Good defined an ultraintelligent machine as one that "can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever," and reasoned that because designing machines is itself an intellectual activity, such a machine could design still better machines: "there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind." He concluded that "the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." Vinge credited Good's intelligence explosion and an earlier remark attributed to [John von Neumann](/people/john-von-neumann/), reported by Stanislaw Ulam, about an "ever accelerating progress" approaching "some essential singularity," as the sources of his own formulation.[^3][^4] The word "singularity" carries over an analogy from physics and mathematics, where it names a point such as the center of a black hole at which the established equations break down and ordinary description fails. Applied to history, it marks a horizon beyond which existing models of the future stop working, because the appearance of intelligence greater than human renders the subsequent course of events opaque to human forecasters.[^1] ### Vinge and the 1993 Essay Vinge set out the thesis in "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute on March 30 to 31, 1993, and reprinted that winter in the *Whole Earth Review*. Its opening claim is blunt: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." He added the estimate that "I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030," and defined the singularity as "a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules."[^5][^6] Vinge enumerated several routes by which superhuman intelligence might arrive: the development of conscious and superhumanly intelligent computers; large computer networks that "wake up" as a single superhuman entity; intimate computer-human interfaces that amplify the user toward superintelligence; and biological enhancement of human cognition. He treated the event as both plausibly imminent and, by its nature, beyond human control, arguing that once entities of greater-than-human intelligence drive progress, the cycle of self-improvement would compress to ever shorter timescales.[^5] ### Kurzweil and the Law of Accelerating Returns Kurzweil, an inventor known for work in optical character recognition, text-to-speech, and music synthesis, developed the idea into a quantitative forecast. His 1999 book *The Age of Spiritual Machines* and especially *The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology* (2005) argued for what he called the "law of accelerating returns," the claim that the rate of technological progress, and of evolutionary information processes more generally, grows exponentially rather than linearly. He defined the singularity as "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kurzweil projected that a computer would pass a valid Turing test and that machine intelligence would match human intelligence around 2029, and that the singularity proper, including the merger of human and machine intelligence, would arrive about 2045; he restated and updated the case in *The Singularity Is Nearer* (2024).[^7][^8] Kurzweil's vision fuses the intelligence forecast with the older transhumanist program: he writes of nanotechnology rebuilding the body, of radical life extension and the defeat of aging, and of eventually uploading or backing up the patterns of the human mind, themes he pursued personally through a regimen of supplements and an interest in resurrecting his late father from preserved records. In 2012 he joined Google as a director of engineering working on machine learning and language processing.[^7] ### Institutions In 2008 Kurzweil cofounded Singularity University with the X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, locating it at the NASA Research Park at Ames in Mountain View, California, as a corporate-funded teaching and incubation venture aimed at "exponential technologies"; its early backers included Google, and it was later renamed Singularity Group. The Singularity Summit, an annual conference Kurzweil helped launch in 2006, was organized for several years by the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/), founded by [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/).[^9][^10] Within that community the singularity idea split in mood. The optimistic, Kurzweilian strand anticipates the transition as broadly benevolent, while the artificial-intelligence-risk strand around Yudkowsky, [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/), whose *Superintelligence* (2014) gave the intelligence-explosion scenario its most influential academic statement, and the [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) and [rationalist](/concepts/rationalist-community/) networks treats an uncontrolled intelligence explosion as a potential extinction event to be guarded against. The critics Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru grouped singularitarianism with transhumanism, [Extropianism](/concepts/extropianism/), cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism under the acronym "TESCREAL," arguing the cluster forms a single ideology favored among the technology elite.[^11][^12] [^1]: "Irving John Good Originates the Concept of the Technological Singularity," History of Information, on the singularity analogy and the lineage from Good to Vinge and Kurzweil. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2142 [^2]: Kurzweil, Ray. *The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.* Viking, 2005. [^3]: Good, I. J. "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," *Advances in Computers,* vol. 6 (1965), with the definition of the ultraintelligent machine, the "intelligence explosion," and the "last invention" conclusion. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2142 [^4]: "Quote Origin: The First Ultraintelligent Machine Is the Last Invention That Humanity Need Ever Make," Quote Investigator, on Good's phrasing and the von Neumann remark reported by Ulam. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/04/ultraintelligent/ [^5]: Vinge, Vernor. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30 to 31, 1993. https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html [^6]: "Vernor Vinge Predicts 'The Singularity,'" History of Information, on the 1993 presentation and the Whole Earth Review reprint. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2141 [^7]: Kurzweil, Ray. *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (1999); *The Singularity Is Near* (2005); *The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI* (2024). [^8]: "The Singularity Is Near," publisher description and summary of Kurzweil's definition and his 2029 and 2045 forecasts. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291221/the-singularity-is-near-by-ray-kurzweil/ [^9]: "NASA Ames Becomes Home To Newly Launched Singularity University," NASA, on the 2008 founding by Kurzweil and Diamandis at the NASA Research Park. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-ames-becomes-home-to-newly-launched-singularity-university/ [^10]: "What is Singularity?" Singularity Group, on the founding futurists and the venture's exponential-technology mission. https://www.su.org/about-us [^11]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014. [^12]: Torres, Émile P., and Timnit Gebru, on the "TESCREAL" bundle (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism); see the *First Monday* treatment, 2023 onward.