Computer scientist and science fiction author Vernor Vinge popularized the concept and coined the modern term for this tipping point, “the singularity,” in a 1983 essay. “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”
