Whilst I don’t really disagree with the other answers, I think it’s unfair for nobody to give the pro-singularity argument, so here it is.

We have reason to think that humans are a minimum viable general intelligence, like we evolved just enough to cross that rubicon, then evolution stopped mattering much because we started developing faster than it could keep up, and the difference between first proper intelligence and us is basically minor fiddling from an evolutionary perspective.

meanwhile our brains are a complicated mess that we barely understand and can’t improve upon. Or at least we’re not smart enough to improve it atm.

An agi will probably have a much more iterable brain (if nothing else they’ll be able to change some settings and see what happens, which we can’t really do either ethically or quickly.

Finally, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about an agi of human intelligence, because our intelligence is defined by some rather ridiculous limitations that no agi will ever have, so the first “human level” agi will be vastly better than us at some things (hell, even before LLMs computers were superhuman at lots of stuff).

Combine all that together, and you can imagine a scenario where the first proper agi is also so much better at designing agi than we are that it very quickly rebuilds itself into something even more beyond us. End result is it surpasses us faster than we can react, I think the name is meant to evoke the concept that there’s no way to see past the event horizon, once we’ve built it everything is different in ways we cannot predict.

As I said, I don’t actually think this is likely, but you deserved a nuanced answer not just everyone joking about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Mythos that defies evolution and all of natural history. An oversimplification that does not account for the real timeline and complexity between now and the end of the age of scientific discovery when all of science is a fully constrained engineering corpus. Typical collective group think from a society without meritocratic hierarchy after turning education into a class filter, and failing to prevent the nepotism of gross inherited wealth. Now there are no leaders to sell a future anyone wants to buy into, so they peddle dystopian shittery to justify their exploitation and tyranny. Fully constraining biology to an engineering corpus is exponentially more complex than all of current knowledge held, and by orders of magnitude. That is a whole technological age shift that makes the present look like a joke. This dystopian shit is just to justify the war that comes soon because these fuckwits cannot control themselves in every minor age of science. WW1 was Chemistry, WW2 was Physics, the next is Computer Science. The one for Biology is a likely candidate for the great filter. Biology is the greatest and final technology to master. Industrial wasteful tech is not even possible for a millennia before rare planetary resources are fully commercially exhausted. Several will be gone in less than a century. Biology is technology on the order of stellar lifetimes. In that age, you will have everything of now and so much more, but it will all be the result of biology. •»ÀĪÙ¬¶¬§¬×

AGI mcguffin, once scientific research has broken through to robots smarter than humans they expect some sort of magic to allow it to continue to become increasingly and faster smarter until it becomes infinite smartness. Ignores possibilities like humans never breakthrough on robots smarter than humans, or if it does happen there’s no reason to predict they’ll continue or turn into some super genius. It’s frequently brought up as an end to justify all sorts of terrible accelerationism usually ends justifying means garbage.