The Singularity has nothing to do with the acceleration of technological progress. It is only somewhat related to interdisciplinary convergence. The universe is not specially structured for the Singularity to happen. History has not been particularly leading up to it, except in the sense that inventing new technologies gets easier when civilization has more advanced building tools and knowledge. The Singularity is the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, nothing less, and nothing more.

The Singularity is not a belief system. It is a likely (but by no means certain) future event with great potential for good and for ill. Sort of like nuclear technology, if nuclear technology could invent more advanced technologies on its own and have independent goals. Kind of scary, really.

The Singularity is a hurdle for the human species to jump, not a stairway to Heaven. It could fairly easily be avoided or delayed, either by blowing up most of the major cities, detonating H-bombs in the upper atmosphere (EMP), someone taking over the world, etc.

The Singularity is not mystical because intelligence is not mystical. The Singularity is just the development of a new type of intelligence. Intelligence operates according to the laws of physics and other rules, just like everything else. It’s not magic, though intelligence can sometimes seem like magic when it’s greater than our own.

Intelligence is what leads to people like Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, as well as miracle of human intelligence in general. Remember that every so-called “genius” is still firmly within the bounds of the natural variation of the human species. And our species is more uniform that most. After all, we went through a population bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. Maybe if we were more genetically diverse or went through even more serious challenges as we were evolving (perhaps more vicious, intelligent predators that didn’t fall from simple weapons like spears?), then we’d be way smarter than we are now. If that’s how history happened, our greater intelligence wouldn’t seem “special” — it’d just be the way things were.

Rather than looking at the Singularity as the culmination of complexity in the universe since the Big Bang, a highly dubious proposition, I look at it as a temporary thing we have to deal with before we can lay back and relax. A single intelligent species on a planet is not a stable state. It’s only a matter of time before an intelligent species (like humans) finds out the principles underlying its own intelligence and exploits them to create new variants of itself. In the wider multiverse, this has probably already happened countless times.

Some people say, “you can’t engineer intelligence — it’s too mysterious”. These are the same people that said life was animated by élan vital, that organic chemicals could not be synthesized from inorganic precursors, that the Earth was the center of the universe, and so on. The Bible or a tendency to pat yourself on the back may have taught you that the principles of intelligence are unbelievably complex or subtle, but that’s how most things we don’t understand often seem. Mysteriousness is cool, and if intelligence doesn’t have mysteriousness, then how can it be cool?

Others say, “human minds are Turing-complete machines, so any other type of mind will have similar capabilities to our own”. This is self-congratulatory conceit. Just because two machines are Turing complete does not mean that they can extract statistical regularities from sensory data and arrange them into concepts, inferences and decisions with equal ability. Depending on disparities in the knowledge base and processing structure of the mind, the amount of time it takes to learn something can vary by many orders of magnitude. It appears there are some things certain people just can’t learn. Animals can’t learn much that humans find simple, even though they obviously have some form of intelligence.

In the same way that someone of average intelligence will never be able to make contributions to the cutting edge of particle physics, we humans will never be able to achieve certain feats with our limited brains. Instead of crying about it or going into a state of denial, we need to come up with a theory of intelligence and use it to boost our own, as well as instantiate intelligence in a nonbiological medium.

It is a mistake to think that the intelligence we create will be on our side automatically, for instance by integrating ourselves sufficiently close with it, or by trusting that wisdom is inextricably connected to intelligence. This is optimistic fantasy. It makes a nice story, but the reality — that we’ll need to work our asses off to ensure that digital intelligence is aligned with our goals — is far less pleasant. It means we need to reevaluate our conception of the future. The problem — creating predictably benevolent intelligence — is absolutely overwhelming once you realize its scope.

Most of the challenges we face as individuals and as organizations have to do with other humans. Convincing them to do things, meeting their expectations, competing with other groups, ensuring structure in our organizations. This problem is totally different. There may be only one chance to get it right. It’s not about humans, but about a complex structure that we are just beginning to really understand — the relationship between cognition and “morality”, a shorthand for an extremely complex of human-specific rules and tendencies that many of us mistakenly assume automatically prepackaged with any intelligence.

This should not be a religion or a movement. It’s an engineering task. Much more mundane than you might think. The philosophy necessary for success may be complex, but the But just because it’s mundane doesn’t mean that it won’t be difficult or the that benefits of success won’t be sublime.

It’s a difficult task, but it seems possible. We just need to do it. Even if you’re not a programmer or AI theorist, intellectual, moral, and financial support means a lot.