the singularity

The most widely repeated fact about the singularity is a year. Ray Kurzweil put it at 2045, in The Singularity Is Near, 2005, and the thing he was dating is the point past which technological change outruns prediction. So a word for the failure of forecasting travels with a forecast attached, and the forecast is the part that sticks.

The provenance is older and quieter. Stanislaw Ulam reported John von Neumann using the word 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: a recollection of a conversation about accelerating technological progress rather than about superhuman intelligence. Vernor Vinge made it a thesis in The Coming Technological Singularity, prepared for the VISION-21 symposium in 1993. Kurzweil's date followed twelve years later. Why anyone expects such a point at all comes down to one clause: machines design the next machines, which is the mechanism FOOM describes.

The p(doom) song, annotated dates the word to May 1958. In the song it annotates, the singularity is the thing the training run leads to.

The Omega Point

The nearer neighbour is not a mechanism but a destination. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) described a final point of maximum complexity and consciousness that the universe evolves toward. He wrote it in the 1920s to 1940s, the Church barred publication in his lifetime, and it appeared after he died; Frank Tipler reworked it as physics in The Physics of Immortality, 1994. The song reaches the idea through an Orion's Arm article, which makes the singularity a religious destination.

One names a limit on what can be known in advance. The other names a place the universe is going. A date pulls the first reading toward the second: once there is a year attached, a statement about the edge of prediction starts reading like an appointment.