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It was a fictional concept thought up by Vernor Vinge in the early 1990's, to satisfy the needs of some novels he wrote, then further developed as a serious idea:

http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

(It helps that Vinge is a professor of mathematics, as well as an SF author).

If increasing computing power is subject to diminishing returns, explain your own existence running on a 100 Hz, 25W meatware processor, and the exponential growth of supercomputer power.

"Surprise" by Leslie Fish
Remember the fifties, those fat complacent days
When the future seemed a century away?
Then up went Sputnik, gave the world a butt-kick,
And made it clear tomorrow starts today.

Beep beep, boop boop, hello there! (Gazhupa!)
Sputnik sails giggling through the skies. (hey! hey! hey!)
Red flags, red faces, jump in the race as
The space age begins with a surprise. (Surprise!)(more at url )
http://mindstalk.net/filk/surprise.txt

The idea is more vague than your statement about AI writing AI;

The idea of the technological Singularity is exactly "super-human AI (artificial or amplified intelligence) writing even more super-human AI in a positive feedback loop, ." It was Vernor Vinge who gave the term its current meaning. (As you can tell by my handle, I'm fan of some of Vinge's work.)

Kurzweil and others looking for techno-rapture might like it to mean other things; but if you're going to have a serious discussion about the technological Singularity, stick with the Vingean definition.

The interesting thing is, everyone's so held up on the artificial intelligence thing, most fail to recognize the other path to Singularity, the one that we're already soaking in: Intelligence Amplification. Any goofball with a smartphone now has access to a quantity of information that would have been shocking thirty years ago.

For example, last week I was Lowes looking at insecticides, trying to figure out what could get rid of the mosquitoes in my yard but not have a huge environmental impact or be highly dangerous to me and my dog. I pulled out the Centro (yes, outdated) and started Googling insecticides: more information at my fingertips at seconds, than I could have found thirty years ago in an hour at my local library. That makes me, in some ways, smarter than people were decades ago.

The first Singularity was the invention of speech: it allowed human beings to pool their knowledge and thinking power with others in the immediate vicinity. The second was the invention of writing, which allowed us to precisely share information with people distant in space (via messengers) and distant in time. This not only made possible the development of organizational hierarchies (can't have those without reports and paperwork); it was the invention of history.

The third -- or maybe the second-and-a-half -- was the development of a practical printing press. Without that one-to-many type of communication, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.

The invention of electronic and digital media, cheap many-to-many communication, is -- once we get copyright out the way and get indexing worked out -- going to let everyone have access to any bit of information humanity has ever put out. That's a game changer. It's already enough to make predictions based on models of the past useless.

That's a Singularity. You're living in it.

Which makes a difference, but ain't precisely about extinction seeing as we're several billion people.

There were between 3 and 5 billion passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans showed up. Less than five hundred years later, in 1914, the last one died.

Nature will wipe us out just as happily as we wiped out the passenger pigeon.

I don't think it's very likely that humanity will die out in the next few hundred years.

It's quite possible that humanity as we know it will not exist five hundred years from now. We will either have fscked up completely and be extinct; or we will have changed so much, hit some sort of Vingean singularity, that "human" will no longer be fully descriptive.

If you need a primer on the implications of wearable computing, read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (who is known for popularizing the Singularity concept.

He's a math & computer science professor, and writes technically savvy sci-fi that wins Hugo awards.

Just one example: give people the ability to invisibly send and read text messages, and you get something that looks just like Mental Telepathy. And this is just the surface! What if those invisible gestures and heads-up display contact lenses also let you Google something almost as fast and effortlessly as you can say the word? And for you nay-sayers, search existed before Google -- why did Google make things so much better? Research existed before the web & web search, why did the web make things so much better? Because if you cross certain thresholds in speed and accessibility, the quantitative difference becomes qualitative! Once searching for something becomes as easy as saying it, the very concept of *knowing* something changes. (Books already take us part way there. I "know" how to build a compiler. But if I couldn't reach for my copy of the "Dragon Book" I'd be awful lost!)

a plane crashing into the cables of a functioning elevator would be the least of your problems.what is more worrisome is that the fault tolerance required to sustain a project of this complexity would require software so advanced that most computer scientists think that it would only be possible after we hit the singularity limit for the worst case scenario of what could happen- check this story out.

I didn't listen to the article but I looked up Vinge and found his site: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html, using my Google augumented intelligence! I see that some of his references are to science fiction, which of course means he is a visionary, etc... Crackpots love to talk about the end of history and Life As We Know It- a hundred years ago it was the Marxists and now it's these guys. If we are so close, why can't my computer's OS fix itself? (Yeah,yeah it's not Linux).

To create an advanced, let alone superintelligent, sentient AI will take a lot more time and effort than is currently in place, afaik. Futurists and their ilk are doing nothing more than creating their own religious beliefs. They might as well be one those fundamentalist idiots babbling about armageddon and the rapture. This is mostly a rant but, let me state my three main opinions about futurists- 1. Are they afraid of death? Kurzweil is the best example here. I always hated Kurzweil's crap about uploading his mind into a machine and living forever, etc
2. Do they see the world outside at all? I truly do believe that most folks with P.H.D.s are intelligent (my father had one) but they can't seem to apply it to reality.
3. Whatever happened to cyncism and the death of the enlightenment? The idea that human progress is inevitably leading toward this singularity, the next political/economic/social revolution, utopia, etc. is shite. Technologies don't always work, and civilizations do collapse.

Vernor Vinge is a sci-fiction author who was the first to coin up the term singularity, and uses the idea in some of his novels. Linkie: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

If you would like to read one of his books I would suggest Across Realtime, which touches on this subject lightly. Although his other stories are somewhat less palatable for me (but I've only read three).

Other authors who delve more deeply into singularity issues are Greg Egan (hard going, but definatly worth reading) http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/, Charles Stross's Accelerando http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.htm l, and .

Science fiction is odd as a genre since the authors minds are affected by the technology they see possible at the time of writing. Science fiction writers in the past depicted a future with minimal use of networked computers for instance. So the theme seems to change over time, whereas other genres remain pretty static.