FOOM

FOOM and the singularity get used as synonyms, and they are not. FOOM names a mechanism: a system improves its own ability to improve, so capability compounds over hours or days instead of decades. The singularity names a limit on prediction, the point past which change outruns anyone's ability to forecast it. FOOM is one proposed route to that point, and the word for the point came from elsewhere: Stanislaw Ulam reported John von Neumann using it of technology in Ulam's memorial tribute in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol 64 no 3, May 1958, written a year after von Neumann died. That passage is Ulam's recollection of a conversation, and it is about accelerating technological progress, not superhuman intelligence.

The mechanism itself has an older and duller name. I. J. Good described the intelligence explosion in 1965, in "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine". FOOM is the sound-effect spelling of the same idea.

It comes out of an argument, and one side said no

The index in The p(doom) song, annotated traces the term to the Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-FOOM debate, which ran on Overcoming Bias in late 2008. Robin Hanson argued for slower distributed growth; Eliezer Yudkowsky argued for a hard takeoff. MIRI collected the exchange as a book in 2013.

That provenance is the part most short definitions leave out, and leaving it out gets the term wrong. FOOM is a contested position whose primary source is a debate, so a definition that presents it as the settled account of how capability scales is misreporting its own citation. Both sides of that exchange are part of the term's meaning.

The same essay's twins table puts FOOM next to the nuclear chain reaction, each fission causing more than one. The parallel is about how the argument runs, compounding that feeds itself, and it goes no further than that. It carries no evidence either way about whether software behaves the same.

"Intelligence explosion" and "hard takeoff" travel in the same sentences as FOOM, and the three are near enough to swap in casual writing. FOOM carries the extra connotation of its own spelling, which is a joke about speed, so it reads as forum register. The 1965 phrase reads as the paper it came from.