Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 1 of 171
The singularity as existential risk
The last few years have produced an increasing amount of popular discourse about the singularity, which describes events in technological development that would lead to human-level machine intelligence, and would lead to computers achieving superintelligence. Following this occurrence, there would come an explosion of intelligent machines with cognition so advanced that it poses an immediate existential risk to humanity. Machine intelligence would learn how to improve independently of human programmers; it would spawn other machines capable of improving their intelligences, resulting, some argue, in the end of the human race.