The concept of "singularity" in this context is so much out there that basically, should it happen, it will be obvious. Think the Matrix, deus ex machina (liter

The concept of "singularity" in this context is so much out there that basically, should it happen, it will be obvious. Think the Matrix, deus ex machina (literal, proper meaning), Skynet (whether benevolent or not), Wall-E, etc. More formally it's the acceleration of machine intelligence and subsequent capabilities to such an extent that Star Trek would look downright ancient compared to this post-singularity reality (save for the warp-space travel part, but interestingly enough a "decent AI" would probably deem it much more prioritary than humans to colonize outer space in order to ensure its own survival, and hopefully ours as well if our relationship is one of cooperation/parasitism). It is a fascinating concept, but it depicts such an unprecendented discontinuity in history, a "civilizational breakthrough" that's so dramatic in scope, that there's no historical ground to it whatsoever over ten millenia. Which makes the concept of singularity somewhat of a belief, much less "not a question of if but when" than, say, self-driving cars, quantum computing or even the human-level AI threshold itself. Nock Bostrom "Superintelligence" book is a bit tedious and descritive, but I think it does a much better job than Kurzveil's rather pop-oriented publications (though I praise him for helping tech be known and sought after by the general public, it's exactly what we need to scale).