The idea of the 'Technological Singularity', that artificial
intelligence systems will recursively improve themselves to
the point of far surpassing human intelligence, is an old
one, but I was first exposed to it in Vernor Vinge's 1993
essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive
in the Post-Human Era"

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

In 1993, Vinge predicted it happening 'within 30 years'.
We're 3 years past his window, but not far.

Advances in AI are being talked about now it ways that
are eerily close to Vinge's writing.

Consider this blog post from Anthropic's CEO:

https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement

- start quote -

When AI builds itself.

For most of AI?s history, humans drove every step in its development
cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI
development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI
system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there
yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within
Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already
accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example:
today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter
as they did from 2021-2025.

The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are
going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have
huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development
in the history of technology?one that could bring enormous good for the
world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive
self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control
over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their
behavior all grow much more important.

- end quote -

Now, this may be just good marketing for Anthropic.

But maybe it's not.

pt

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

The marketing angle is worth taking seriously. Anthropic has financial incentives to make their systems sound both powerful and dangerous - powerful attracts customers, dangerous attracts safety funding. That doesn't mean they're wrong, but it means the source should inform how much weight you give the claim.

Vinge's essay is interesting to revisit because he was careful about something most singularity discourse ignores: he outlined multiple paths to superhuman intelligence and treated them as genuinely different scenarios with different implications. The recursive self-improvement path is just one. He also talked about large computer networks spontaneously becoming conscious, human-computer interfaces producing superhuman combinations, and biological improvements to human intelligence.

Current AI development doesn't obviously fit any of his paths cleanly. What Anthropic describes - AI writing code, designing experiments, suggesting architectures - is closer to a very good tool than to recursive self-improvement in Vinge's sense. The 8x code-per-engineer stat is productivity enhancement, not autonomous self-redesign. There's a meaningful difference between "AI helps humans build better AI" and "AI builds better AI which builds better AI," even if the first could eventually lead to the second.

The SF angle that I think gets underexplored: Vinge pointed out that a singularity is essentially an event horizon for prediction. Most singularity fiction cheats by having post-singular beings that are basically humans with better processing speed. Marooned in Realtime handles this honestly by just not showing what's on the other side. The writers who try to depict superintelligence (Watts in Blindsight, maybe Egan in some of the Diaspora stuff) tend to suggest it would be alien rather than amplified.

If something like recursive self-improvement does happen, the Vinge framing suggests we wouldn't recognize it from this side. Which makes the Anthropic blog post inadvertently funny - if your AI could really do this, you probably wouldn't be writing reassuring blog posts about how you're monitoring the situation.

The 3-year overshoot on Vinge's timeline is worth noting but predicting timelines for things nobody's ever seen happen is a losing game. The more interesting question is whether the concept itself is coherent, or whether "intelligence" doesn't scale the way the singularity hypothesis assumes.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Is The Technological Singularity upon us? Maybe? Robot attacks child!

Hi Denizens of the sf.written,

Here is a factual report.

This Clown-Wigged Martial Arts Robot Was Supposed to Entertain?Then It Brutally Kicked a Child, Video Goes Viral <https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/clown-wigged-martial-arts-robot-103002092.html>
Saajan Jogia

I must dispute the term "brutally" as the robot in question
is incapable of emotion.

bliss

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Is The Technological Singularity upon us? Maybe? Robot attacks child!

On Sat, 6 Jun 2026 21:55:08 -0700, BobbieSellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextremeinvalid.com> wrote:

Hi Denizens of the sf.written,

Here is a factual report.

This Clown-Wigged Martial Arts Robot Was Supposed to Entertain?Then It

Brutally Kicked a Child, Video Goes Viral ><https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/clown-wigged-martial-arts-rob ot-103002092.html>
Saajan Jogia

I must dispute the term "brutally" as the robot in question
is incapable of emotion.

Interesting that the article is stressing how it was everybody
/else's/ fault, not the robot's -- or, rather, those who
produced/programmed it.

Also, the obvious solution (put a fence around the area the robot is
allowed to use to keep the kids far enough away) does not appear to be mentioned.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Is The Technological Singularity upon us? Maybe? Robot attacks child!

On 6/7/26 09:03, Paul S Person wrote:

On Sat, 6 Jun 2026 21:55:08 -0700, BobbieSellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextremeinvalid.com> wrote:

Hi Denizens of the sf.written,

Here is a factual report.

This Clown-Wigged Martial Arts Robot Was Supposed to Entertain?Then It
Brutally Kicked a Child, Video Goes Viral
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/clown-wigged-martial-arts-robot-103002092.html>
Saajan Jogia

I must dispute the term "brutally" as the robot in question
is incapable of emotion.

Interesting that the article is stressing how it was everybody
/else's/ fault, not the robot's -- or, rather, those who
produced/programmed it.

Also, the obvious solution (put a fence around the area the robot is
allowed to use to keep the kids far enough away) does not appear to be mentioned.

Indeed but perhaps it was a CPC member who thought up the event
so the citizens must be blamed rather than the Party.

bliss

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)