THE SINGULARITY

In my web-wanderings, I’ve noticed repeated references to the “Singularity.” In a rare burst of interest, I looked it up. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The technological singularity is a hypothesised point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two.

Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. Vernor Vinge later called this event "the Singularity" as an analogy between the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity and the drastic change in society he argues would occur following an intelligence explosion.

My suspicion is that machine intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence, but not because machine intelligence is improving.