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The belief that a technological singularity is likely and that it should be actively prepared for, together with the movements organized around that belief.
Singularitarianism is the position that a Technological singularity is likely within a foreseeable period and that this warrants a deliberate response now, along with the loose set of movements built around that position. It is distinct from the singularity hypothesis itself: one can hold the hypothesis without any accompanying commitment about what to do. What makes a singularitarian is the second half — that the transition is important enough, and near enough, to organize one's work or one's institution around.
The label was applied within the extropian community around 1991 and used through the 1990s as a self-description. By the mid-2000s it had two very different referents. Ray Kurzweil used it in The Singularity Is Near to describe someone who understands the coming transition and plans their life accordingly, with an emphasis on personal survival to reach it. Eliezer Yudkowsky, in a set of essays written around 2000, defined it as a commitment to bring about a beneficial singularity and treated the safety of the transition as the whole point.
These readings diverged into two institutional traditions that still barely speak to one another, and the word is now used more often by critics than by adherents.
Three texts do most of the work. I. J. Good's 1965 paper describes the mechanism.1 Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay names the event and argues that it ends the era of predictable futures.2 Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines in 1999 and The Singularity Is Near in 2005 supply the trend-extrapolation version and the 2045 date that most people associate with the term.3
The movement's early social base was the extropians mailing list and the Cryonics community, where the singularity slotted neatly into an existing structure of belief: survive long enough, by cryopreservation if necessary, and superintelligent medicine will do the rest. This is why singularitarianism and Transhumanism overlap so heavily in membership despite being logically independent, and why the same people who organized around Max More's principles and later around Humanity+ also produced the first serious treatments of Whole brain emulation and Mind uploading. In its strongest form the package is a single conditional chain: reach the singularity, or be preserved until it arrives, and Longevity escape velocity follows from it rather than from biology.
The safety wing holds that an intelligence explosion is possible, that its outcome depends on properties of the first sufficiently capable system, and that those properties are not automatically good. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, founded in 2000, was the first organization created on this premise; it renamed itself the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013, in part because the word "singularity" had acquired connotations the organization did not want.
This wing's arguments were substantially absorbed into the mainstream by Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence in 2014,4 and from there into a research field — AI alignment — that is now pursued inside major laboratories and funded by governments. Most people working in that field today would not describe themselves as singularitarians, and many reject the fast-takeoff assumptions that motivated the founders. The intellectual descent is nonetheless direct, and it runs through the same Existential risk literature that produced Differential technological development.
The acceleration wing treats the transition as desirable and the main task as bringing it closer. Singularity University, founded in 2008 by Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis with corporate sponsorship, is its most visible institution: an executive-education and entrepreneurship organization built around exponential-technology framing rather than a research body. Its posture — that accelerating technology is the solution to human problems, and that the appropriate response is to build — reappears with different vocabulary in Effective accelerationism.
The same premise, opposite conclusionsBoth wings accept Good's argument. They differ on the conditional probability of a good outcome given a fast transition. The safety wing treats that probability as low by default and the alignment problem as unsolved; the acceleration wing treats it as high, on the grounds that capability and benevolence tend to correlate and that delay has its own body count. Neither number is measurable, and the disagreement has proven resistant to evidence.
Mainstream reception has been consistently cool, for reasons that are worth separating.
Scientific criticism focuses on the trend-extrapolation version. Curve-fitting across incommensurable technologies, treating computational throughput as a proxy for intelligence, and dating an event by the intersection of two extrapolated lines are all methodologically weak, and Kurzweil's own prediction scorecard is disputed by his critics on the grounds that he grades leniently. The wider case for Accelerating change as a law rather than a description of one industry's good half-century has never been established. The economist William Nordhaus's tests for a growth singularity in the data mostly came back negative.5
Sociological criticism focuses on the movement's shape. Critics have noted that singularitarianism reproduces the structure of eschatology — an approaching transformative event, a select group that understands it, personal salvation for those who prepare — and that this structure is doing rhetorical work independent of the technical argument. The philosopher John Gray and the computer scientist Jaron Lanier have both pressed versions of this objection. Adherents respond that structural resemblance to a religion is not an argument against a claim's truth, which is correct but does not address the question of why the belief is attractive.
A third criticism, from within the broader AI community, is that the movement's early focus on a hypothetical superintelligence displaced attention from the concrete harms of systems that already exist. That charge became sharper after 2022, when deployed models began producing measurable effects on labour, information, and safety without anything resembling recursive self-improvement.
The word has largely fallen out of use even where the belief persists. The safety wing's concerns are now discussed under "AI risk" or "alignment", inside institutions that would not use the older label; Anders Sandberg and others who worked on the movement's technical questions publish under ordinary academic headings. The acceleration wing's are discussed under techno-optimist banners of more recent coinage. Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Nearer, published in 2024, restated the original position and its 2045 date largely unchanged.
What has changed is the standing of the underlying question. Between 2000 and 2020, arguing that machine intelligence might exceed human capability within decades placed a person outside serious discussion. As of 2026 the question is treated as legitimate by national governments and by the laboratories building the systems, though the specific singularitarian claim — a discontinuous, self-driven capability explosion — remains a minority view among AI researchers rather than a consensus. The movement won the argument about whether the topic deserves attention and has not won the argument about its own mechanism.
Singularitarianism's durable contribution is institutional rather than theoretical. It created the first organizations to work full-time on the consequences of advanced AI, at a time when doing so carried professional cost, and it trained a cohort of people who now populate alignment teams, forecasting organizations, and philanthropic funders. It also supplied a vocabulary — takeoff speed, recursive self-improvement, Artificial general intelligence — that the mainstream adopted while discarding the movement's confidence about timing.
The unresolved question is whether the movement's early framing helped or hindered. A discontinuous-takeoff model concentrated attention on a single dramatic scenario, and if capability growth turns out to be continuous and diffuse, as Robin Hanson and others have long argued, then two decades of preparation will have been aimed at the wrong shape of problem.
paperGood, I.J. "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine." Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965.↩The source of the phrase intelligence explosion. The argument is entirely a priori: it describes a mechanism and offers no evidence that one can be built.
paperVinge, V. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era." VISION-21 Symposium, 1993.↩An essay presented at a NASA-sponsored symposium rather than a reviewed paper; it predicted the means to create superhuman intelligence within thirty years.
bookKurzweil, R. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005. ↩
bookBostrom, N. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014. ↩
paperNordhaus, W. "Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth." International Economic Review, 2021.↩The tests run on macroeconomic aggregates such as productivity and capital share, so they bear on economic growth rather than on machine capability.