The technium itself is accelerating in its rate of change. He demonstrated that this kind of exponential acceleration is not unique to computer chips but is happening in most categories of innovation driven by information, in fields as diverse as genomics, telecommunications, and commerce. Ray Kurzweil, a legendary inventor and computer scientist, seized on this metaphor and applied it across a broad range of technological frontiers. So the singularity became a black hole, an impenetrable veil hiding our future from us. If we make an AI which in turn makes a greater AI, ad infinitum, then their future is unknowable to us, just as our lives have been unfathomable to a slug. In mathematical terms it resembles the singularity of a black hole, because, as Vinge announced, it will be impossible to know anything beyond this threshold. This progress in IQ and power, when graphed, generates a rising curve which appears to approach the straight up limit of infinity. In Vinge’s analysis, at some point not too far away, innovations in computer power would enable us to design computers more intelligent than we are, and these smarter computers could design computers yet smarter than themselves, and so on, the loop of computers-making-newer-computers accelerating very quickly towards unimaginable levels of intelligence. The power of computers has been increasing at an exponential rate with no end in sight, which led Vinge to an alarming picture. Mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge applied this metaphor to the acceleration of technological change. This disruption on the way to infinity is called a singular event – a singularity.
In other words, although an object’s entry into a black hole is steady and knowable, once it passes this discrete point nothing whatever about its future can be known. In the canonical use, an object is pulled into the center gravity of a black hole it passes a point beyond which nothing about it, including information, can escape.
The singularity is a term borrowed from physics to describe a cataclysmic threshold in a black hole. But the current concept of a singularity is not be the best explanation for the transformation in progress.
There’s a visceral sense we are experiencing a singularity-like event with computers and the world wide web.