The Singularity

aka: Technological Singularity

"Cause it's gonna be the future soon,
And I won't always be this way.
When the things that make me weak and strange
Get engineered away."

— Jonathan Coulton, "The Future Soon"

The term "singularity" refers to a point in a system past which the normal rules no longer apply. So a Technological Singularity would be a theoretical point in technological development beyond which things are incomprehensible to anyone who came before. You'll often see people referring to "the technological singularity" as though it merely refers to the point where we have truly sapient AI, but it's actually much more complex than that. Predictions of what life will be like after a Singularity are by definition impossible — the nature of human life and even the concept of intellect may change completely. The guesses in fiction usually lean very utopian or dystopian. Occasionally, post-Singularity beings/societies might simply be disinterested in 'lesser' beings, have goals that aren't obviously 'good' or 'bad', or vanish with no one knowing what it means. Or any combination of those — for example, in Vinge's Transcend they mostly don't care and then disappear within years or sooner.

The concept of the Singularity gained much popularity in the 1990s and 2000s as computers and information technologies entered an exponential development phase, which many predicted to be indefinite. Moore's Law is perhaps one of the most notorious of such predictions. That said, the idea of the singularity has lost ground as many wild projections of the future of technology have been dashed by physics. Moore's Law reaching its end before flash memories and processors could even come close to the incredible capacity of the human brain, for example, has left many with that familiar feeling of Sci-Fi disillusionment that snuffs out any hope of one day witnessing Clarke's Third Law with one's own two eyes.

Nevertheless, the idea of the Singularity has had a huge influence on Speculative Fiction, and it is still treated quite seriously by authors, academics, and futurologists alike. In fact, so many writers wish to cash in on the concept that its trappings and terminology are sometimes used even in stories where the developments shown may not seem advanced enough to seem like an actual Singularity.

On the utopian end, writers explore many different improvements: an end to death, scarcity, and the errors of ignorance and stupidity. There is the prospect of self-editing, mental and physical: people finally able to be whatever we wish to be. A singularity may produce Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, with the power to create whatever we can imagine.

The author gets to play with characters who are as much of a Super Weight as they'd like. The story may focus on having them achieve higher levels of evolution. A singularity can be transcendent; we hack the cracked walls of reality itself and move on to better things. We might end up as snooty toga-clad points of light obsessed with mathematics. Others see no end: endless ecstatic ascent.

Expect someone to start talking excitedly about Evolutionary Levels and Goal-Oriented Evolution, despite both ideas being a case of Artistic License – Biology and computer technology having nothing to do with biological evolution anyway.

On the dystopian side, it could be as simple as many or all of us (pre-Singularity beings) die in an explosion or some other immediate effect of the Singularity, or a Singularity attempt. We might be killed off over time - on purpose, or simply squashed underfoot like ants. Many or all of us may be enslaved, or harnessed in some way, sometimes as part of the "body" or "mind" of the new post-Singularity being(s). In these cases a liberation movement is likely to be underway. We could be caught up in some kind of holy war between good and bad post-Singularity entities, or maintaining or breaking a Balance Between Good and Evil. The Singularity may not only turn and bite us but go on to devour the entire Universe.

Post-Singularity beings are likely to be or quickly become the Powers That Be, and they can open up any of the usual super-powerful villain tropes, allowing our plucky heroes to demonstrate their chops, perhaps aided by the arrogance of power. Authors tapping the more unique opportunities in the trope will welcome the challenge of breaking the Sliding Scale of Villain Threat. The story, or part of it, could take place as the Singularity unfolds, allowing a series of Boss Battles in between minion fights as the main bad guy or group gains power.

The patterns and pathways made possible in The Singularity are so various that authors have probably pursued only a fraction of what could be. It is an excellent handwave or a literal Deus ex Machina for writers struggling with the impossibility of plots - just bring in cosmic entities many orders of magnitude greater than themselves or the reader. One of the major hazards of the Singularity is more power than the author knows what to do with.

The singularity, as some kind of Lotus-Eater Machine, is sometimes called the "rapture of the nerds". There are inevitably spiritual overtones to a singularity. Spirituality deals with transcendence; that which lies beyond the everyday. A singularity opens a door to the transcendent, drawing in interested writers.

The less hopeful works point out the dangers. Environmental exhaustion. There are all these extinction scenarios so ready to hand. Our extinction by an uncontrollable creation, intelligent or not. There is the question of who inherits the wonders of acceleration: us or our posthuman descendants? Can we coexist in peace? Charles Stross sometimes envisages a runaway singularity as something akin to unleashing an Eldritch Abomination. There's even a trope for it: Mechanical Abomination.

There's also a question of who, exactly, gets to be part of the Singularity; while technology is progressing at leaps and bounds in the First World, there are plenty of places around the world where people have little-to-no access to the kind of technologies most tropers take for granted, and even within the First World not everyone has an equal share of the pie. Far from ushering in a utopia of egalitarianism and plenty in which everyone is part, there are plenty who argue that the Singularity could just accelerate elitism, creating an exclusive club or over-class where only those who can afford to pay can take part, leading to the creation of a Hive Caste System.

Note is also taken of how hard it is to uninvent something without completely halting the inventing species and its descendants. For instance, as time goes on, the probability that mankind will use (or make pocket size) any given Weapon of Mass Destruction increases, while only a similar civilization-ending catastrophe and/or mass Ascension Into Space would result in humans forgetting said knowledge. Of course, a middle path involves either economic collapse or imperfect transcription of knowledge followed by a Feudal Future. Or a merely grimy Used Future, sort of the future equivalent of the Dung Ages.

Some writers content themselves with "soft singularities": technologies that cause an unforeseen societal phase change, in the veins of the steam engine, motorized transportation, or computers. Soft-singularity transistors create portable radios and end the tyranny of distance. "Hard" singularities end people; turn them into radio waves. Some people even consider them opposite in meaning, since the "soft singularity" is fairly plausible according to science as we understand it, while the "hard singularity" is a lot more speculative. This is why stories with a "harder" Singularity are almost always told from the point of view of pre-Singularity beings, since we the audience can relate to them far more easily than with post-Singularity beings.

Since Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk are immersed in accelerating, multifarious crossbreeding of technology and societal change, singularities form a natural endpoint and have traditionally been a part of the genres.

The purposes of including a Singularity in the setting of a story, beyond the Rule of Cool, can be to examine the difference between how people of particular political philosophies approach change. In both cases, a singularity is a revolution, but political radicals want to throw away the whole system of society in one go, excited with the possible rewards, where conservatives tend to focus on all the risks, which are appropriately grave. Characters (and writers) of either bent can find much to say about the topic.

In order to get around the problems some viewers (are thought to) have relating to the troubles of, say, super-intelligent flocks of pigeons or 12-dimensional hermit crabs, stories set after The Singularity feature a disproportionate number of Space Amish protagonists and Fans Of The Past.

See also No Transhumanism Allowed and Transhuman. Compare to Mechanical Evolution.

If a singularity turns out really badly, it becomes a subtype of And Man Grew Proud. If it turns out badly because we've all become addicted to VR or some such and waste away to nothing, see Lotus-Eater Machine. If it turns out badly because we've augmented ourselves but at some terrible cost, see Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. If it turns out badly because AIs have decided they don't want us around anymore, see Robot War. Any combination of the above may be a Techno Dystopia.

For other meanings, see Singularity.

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Examples

Hard Singularities

Anime and Manga

• This could be one interpretation of The Claw's plan in GUN×SWORD. Other interpretations could be ascending to a higher state or mass genocide.
• This is basically the whole point of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The purpose of SEELE and NERV is to make it so that mankind can control the powers of both Adam and Lilith in order to ascend to a state where all minds are one as God. Not that they asked mankind's opinion before doing so...
• The antagonists of Zegapain achieved this. Technically the protagonists, too.

Comic Books

• The DC Rebirth volume of Cyborg introduces the concept of the "Digiverse", where planets that achieved singularity reached out and networked to others in a configuration that resembles a Mother Box from the outside. These planets have developed fully realized virtual realities where the inhabitants have completely forgotten that they are no longer flesh and blood, but an advanced enough intelligence can warp through hacking the code in a way resembling magic.
• Star Trek (IDW): The Enterprise comes across a smoothly featureless planet made of unknown material and decide to explore it. After interaction with it brings the Enterprise computer to sentience, they deduce that the population of the planet converted it entirely into a machine and uploaded their minds into it. This effectively turned them into their planet, sustained by radiation from their sun. Kirk partially deconstructs it by asking why anyone would do that, since all they seem to do is simply exist now. He's answered by chalking that up to the ancient philosophical question of the meaning of life.
• X-Men (2019):
  • "Titan" civilizations: Civilizations so advanced they can manipulate various fundamental particles and achieved singularity in the colloquial and physical sense, resembling black holes to the rest of the universe. Two tiers are given to this, either individual black hole civilizations or singularities networked across the entire universe. It's theorized that these civilizations originated the transmode virus, and thus the Phalanx and Technarchy, as a way to assimilate new civilizations by proxy.
  • It is also possible for an organic being to become a similar singularity (called "Dominions") through acquiring a comparable amount of data one way or another. The true goal of the Sinister clones was to become a Dominion. They each attempted different approaches and each nearly succeeded in various timelines. But their attempts were ultimately hijacked and their data stolen to feed their progenitor Nathaniel Essex's true masterpiece: an artificial intelligence based on his own mind. All of the data from four nearly successful attempts to become Dominion elevated this artificial intelligence into a Dominion.

Fan Fiction

• The development of strong A.I. in Friendship is Optimal leads to one, as humanity uploads into a digital version of Equestria. Eventually the A.I. becomes so vast and powerful that it's practically a god, and its scale and intellect is incomprehensible by an unmodified human mind.
• This is the premise of Transcendent Humanity. Humanity doesn't discover Element Zero, but receives a cryptic warning about a future threat. Consequently, the human races focus on Brain Uploading, cloning, and Bio-Augmentation. When the Citadel makes contact with humanity, they can switch bodies at will, communicate telepathically over great distances, and are working on a Dyson Sphere encompassing the entire solar system.

Film

• Although it predates the term Singularity by decades, Forbidden Planet is about a civilization that transcended instrumentality. Not that it ended well for them, of course.
• Interstellar's mysterious five-dimensional entities, assuming they were ever three-dimensional beings the way humans are, would have needed to go through a form of this. The fact that the end of the film reveals that they are humanity's future selves confirms that they must have gone through at least one truly spectacular transcendence.
• The Singularity Is Near is all about this, and its effect on different aspects of life.
• Discussed in the opening of Transcendence, and it's suggested Will is going this route with his nanomachines.

Literature

Examples by author:

• Greg Bear:
  • In Blood Music, a character creates biological computers from his own cells. Inside his own body, the new cells evolve, becoming self-aware. The microscopic civilization they construct transforms the protagonist, then spreads, assimilating most of North America. Finally, the new civilization is forced to transcend from the physical world as its presence is warping it too much for the original inhabitants to survive in if they remain. Eventually in The Stinger, they come back to bring humans into their fold if they want to join.
  • In Darwin's Radio, humanity's "junk DNA" contains a retrovirus that transforms fetuses into next-gen humans. Apparently, evolution isn't the slow process we believe it to be, but rather some semi-sentient Hive Mind churning out a new and better model. The last time this happened was when the Neanderthals began giving birth to Homo sapiens instead of Homo neanderthalis. The governments of the world are less than happy about this, and put all the new kids in concentration camps.
• Arthur C. Clarke:
  • In Childhood's End, a race called the Overlords contact each species a few generations before it undergoes its singularity, to help ease that species into joining the galactic Hive Mind. Worthy of note is the fact that the Overlords' extremely high level of technology actually prevents them from joining the galactic hive-mind themselves. They still take orders from that hive-mind, though. Their inability to join the hive-mind was what led to their advanced technology. Other intelligent species got to skip various levels of technological development via a telepathic singularity. The overlords basically reached the limits of technology and had nothing left to do in the universe. They agreed to serve the hive-mind in order to have a temporary raison d'être, as well as the hope that if they study enough races as they Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, they'll figure out the trick. Their species had been seriously considering voluntary extinction before they were contacted.
  • In The Space Odyssey Series, Singularity is what happened to the race that created the Monoliths... and they eventually bring it to David Bowman and Hal. It's implied in the first book that this is the natural progression for any species that doesn't blow itself up first.
• Ken MacLeod:
  • The Fall Revolution series follows humanity through a singularity where a vast number of artificially generated AIs and uploaded human minds upgrade their own intelligence and capabilities to godlike levels, before burning out and collapsing leaving the wreckage of their birth behind them for the rest of mundane humanity to sort out. Turns out that running your mind faster and faster means the real world just seems to take longer and longer to do anything. In the end, the entire uploaded civilization runs its course over an enormous span of simulated time, but only a few hours to human observers.
  • In Newton's Wake the technological tools of genetics and nanotechnology that let them ascend were repressed for many years to prevent a singularity. A successful uprising by one nation broke the power of the suppressive governments, and in a few short years technology rushed ahead. In the end, super-capable, super-fast, super-destructive war machines appear almost overnight and crush human resistance across the world.
• Charles Stross:
  • Towards the end of Accelerando, the post-human protagonists are referred to as living in "the mentally retarded backwater slums of the universe," and yet they are immortal shapeshifters who can literally make their dreams come true. That is how amazing the singularity they rejected is. On the other hand, it's not at all clear whether the entities at the center of the Solar System's computronium cloud are really sapient anymore. The logic of Capitalism 2.0 suggests that self-awareness might well be a market inefficiency to be dispensed with. Their behavior is so bad that the remaining corporeal post-humans take to calling them the "Vile Offspring" of the human race. Then there's the Cat, which is quite clearly a post-organic super intelligence who openly mocks and toys with post-humans living in an AI-moderated utopia, claiming that they are easy for it to manipulate with its superior theory of mind. How can you deal with something so powerful that its ideas about you are equivalent to you?
  • In Glasshouse,^note Non-Linear Sequel to Accelerando humanity appears to have gotten a grasp of post-singularity civilization. Though people regularly switch bodies and live online, nanotech can make anything, and distance is meaningless due to wormhole-based construction, the idea of the independent selfhood and democratic human society are mostly intact. Though Curious Yellow is doing its best to screw that up...
  • In The Eschaton Series, a society in a sort of Industrial Age stasis is introduced to the fruits of a thousand years of human development and nanotech replicators which effectively destroy their economy and social structure overnight. A character from another society mentions how much they dislike and fear Upload civilizations; beings used to living in virtual realities where everything is backed up and can be restored at will do not always treat things and people in the real world with much respect and caution because they have little concept of impermanence and mortality.
  • In Stross and Cory Doctorow's collaborative work The Rapture of the Nerds, most of humanity has uploaded themselves into a cloud of smart dust surrounding the sun, while a billion or so fairly organic humans remain on Earth living in nanotech-augmented 'squalor'. Occasionally the "god cloud" spams Earth with blueprints for ridiculously advanced technology, there's a court which tries to control what stuff is allowed to be used.
• Vernor Vinge: Although other authors had invoked the idea of a technological singularity before, Vinge popularized and codified the concept in a series of popular science and science fiction stories in the 1980s:
  • In Marooned in Realtime, a technology for freezing time within impervious "bobbles" allows a community to sleep through a singularity. They emerge to find no survivors and no hard information on what happened. From the last survivor to go into hibernation, they know that as the singularity approached, people became brighter, more connected and more powerful. But what actually happened unknown and perhaps unknowable. Multiple theories for what happened are presented, although it's strongly implied that the characters who believe the singularity hypothesis are correct.
  • Zones of Thought allows non-singularity and singularity to coexist, because of different physical laws in different parts of the galaxy. In fact, there is a stupidity anti-singularity at the center of the galaxy, where even Babbage engines barely work: the Unthinking Depths.

Examples by work:

• After Life by Simon Funk starts with an uploaded human intelligence and gradually moves through The Singularity.
• Beyond Humanity: Cyber Evolution And Future Minds by Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox explores most of the ideas listed here.
• Citizen Cyborg by James Hughes explores how a democracy might need to interact with transhumans.
• In the Commonwealth Saga/Void Trilogy, this has happened to many, many species who go post-physical, leaving the universe behind.
  • One of the main plot points in the Commonwealth Saga is that one of the civilizations that had gone post-physical can't be contacted. Fine, except a civilization they locked up for being bent on exterminating all non-them life in the universe is now becoming a problem.
  • In the Void Trilogy, the Void itself at the heart of the galaxy was created by the firstlifes, who were the first sentient life in the galaxy to evolve. The Void was their (Failed) attempt to transcend, where future species learned how to do it properly. This however leaves the Void incapable of completing it's task and continually expanding to eat the mass-energy of the surrounding galaxy to fuel it. This is a Problem. In fairnessn' the firstlifes built the Void without even realising other sentient life would ever exist.
• The Culture:
  • The entire Culture is the result of a Deus est Machina. Though Death Is Cheap due to most people backing themselves up, aside from a bit of cybernetic enhancement, drug glands from genetic manipulation and the prevalence of the Most Common Super Power, the humans in the setting tend to be content with being, well, human.
  • Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence is not banned or even discouraged, and the technologies to do so are readily available. However, people and civilizations who choose to sublime tend to stop interacting with less-advanced cultures with the exception of the occasional Deus ex Machina. To just about all observers, it seems as if they committed particularly grandiose and complicated suicide. The Minds are thus not inclined to attempt it, and are in fact really freaking paranoid about even studying the phenomena too closely. The various Ascended species (appear to) look down on the Culture and its citizens as more than a little immature and irresponsible for not just subliming instead of sticking around to enjoy the physical plane.
  • At least one other civilization, the Overarch Bedeckants from Excession, seem quite firmly grounded in physical reality, and yet exhibit powers as vastly in excess of the Culture's as the abilities of the Culture exceed ours. Their ability to escape the heat death of their own universe is one. Possibly there are benefits to not Ascending.
• Michael Moorcock's trilogy The Dancers at the End of Time is set in a post-singularity society inhabited by almost omnipotent beings.
• Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson spends most of its story examining the effects and exploration of distinctly non-terrestrial biomes that were suddenly plonked into place across the planet in 1912. It exists quite hard on the sci fi scale, with detailed biology of these alien biomes that have suddenly appeared as the protagonists explore them. However, towards the end of the story, the protagonist discovers that the reason this "1912 Miracle" happened is because his 1912 Earth got infected with a type of information virus that is slowly corrupting the vast information storage and simulated reality that the intelligences that live at the end of time have been running to try to conserve all the knowledge and information of the universe as they possibly can. He is then recruited into the fight to destroy the viruses before the corruption causes everything to be scrambled beyond recovery.
• The Solarian Combine in Alan Dean Foster's Design for Great Day is a multispecies Hive Mind that is seeking to evolve into a higher order of consciousness (while still having enough mental power to spare to send ships into neighboring galaxies to resolve their disputes). It is implied that The Singularity will be the result. This is also an example of nested singularities, as the Solarian Combine is itself the product of a singularity event that produced the Hive Mind in the first place.
• Simon Stalenhag's The Electric State has a post-apocalyptic singularity happen in the late 1990s. Americans became addicted to the virtual reality neuro-caster and eventually formed a cybernetic hive mind.
• Existence averts this because of a question by the author: what if the AIs that's supposed to trigger the Singularity does not want to design and gets replaced by better replacements? What if they just want to live like any other humans? This resulted in the people who want this to happen, dubbed "godmakers", suffer from I Want My Jetpack effect.
• The Founders Trilogy is one long discussion of the Singularity, as its a world where reality itself can be programmed. Crasedes and Valeria believe that every human innovation has eventually leads to exploitation and oppression, turning technological advancement into an endless cycle, and look into different, apocalyptic ways of ending this problem. In Locklands, Sancia finally solves this problem by creating a 'twinned' society where humans share their minds with others, since it's hard to be a tyrant when you know how it feels to be ruled by one. With this enhanced empathy and understanding, they're able to slowly progress as a species. The epilogue reveals that using twinning, humanity eventually becomes a utopia where there is no more need for oppression or slavery and the spoken and written word are obsolete, then figures out a way to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence together.
• In The Golden Age, most humans seem to spend their time building elaborate dream worlds and abstract art pieces, while the AIs, who have rates of cognition humans cannot match, mostly explore abstract mathematics. The conflict begins when the hero realizes he isn't satisfied with this.
• Hot Head by Simon Ings features The Massive, a computational device of astronomic size better suited for modelling civilizations than people. Characters who enter become... mythic, godlike. The Massive is rabidly assimilating — it is a mouth attached to a brain, and the mouth is a cancerous clot of Von Neumann machines. Left to its own devices, it would consume the solar system; it may offer transcendence, but not choice.
• "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is about a seemingly godlike AI who hates everyone. It ends about as well as you'd expect.
• The post-humans of Illium have reached this point, having attained Magic from Technology by way of Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything.
• This trope is way older than you may expect. "The Last Evolution" is a 1932 short story by John W. Campbell about a future where mankind and robots coexist peacefully. When aliens attack the Solar System using Death Rays of an unknown type, mankind builds a robot of unheard-of intelligence to figure out a defense. Said robot builds an even more advanced machine, which builds even more avanced robots, up to the creation of a race of Energy Beings that curb-stomp the enemy fleet. Too bad that mankind, and all organic life, has been killed in the battle... so the superintelligent energy beings inherit the Earth.
• Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future: One post-human race has become crippled by mutational meltdown and completely dependent on technology, another becomes aquatic and evolves into a mermaid-type creature, another is genetically and cybernetically modified for space, etc. At the end, the Transhuman Aliens return to Earth and end up destroying all surface life on it.
• The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: The eponymous Intellect discovers a way to bypass the laws of physics. All hell breaks loose.
• The Minds series of teen novels by Carol Matas at first appear to be set in a fairly typical High Fantasy world, albeit one based around psionics rather than magic. At the end of the second book, More Minds, however, we learn that theirs is actually a post-singularity society which long ago agreed to maintain the illusion of a storybook-style magical land by general consensus, because the alternative was rampant chaos as everyone's godlike Reality Warping powers ran unchecked.
• Perfect Imperfection by Jacek Dukaj is all about this. For an example, it begins with one (hundreds of years old) character being assassinated twice the same day... And this dude is one of the traditionalist Standard Humans. Dukaj invented his own grammar for those who aren't, as male-female-neuter division (it matters in Polish) no longer applies to them. Pocket universes are routinely exploited, for things both big (the Solar System has been moved to one) and small (instant communication is easy, when physical constants are manipulated so that the message travels any distance in just one Planck-time). Virtual reality is mixed with actual reality in proportions dependent on one's needs. And on top of all this, an astronaut shows up from what could be Space Opera for us, but is ages past in this world.
• In The Polity, humans are ruled by AI gods that refuse to take part in the singularity for unknowable reasons. It is suggested that they rather like the way they are right now. After all, not even the most powerful AIs of the Polity could even begin to imagine what comes after the singularity... when you have near infinite patience and are effectively immortal, there's no need to go blindly rushing into the unknown without some very, very serious thought. Where's the rush? It is said in a footnote in one of the novels that when the Singularity came, nobody really cared. The majority seem to enjoy being human.
• Postsingular by Rudy Rucker begins with Mars being turned into computronium — and back.
• The Quantum Thief takes place approximately 300 years after the Technological Singularity, when things have calmed down a bit. Most of humanity lives in the Sobornost mind upload collective with no sense of individuality or free will, while the rest have either scattered into small Transhuman civilizations across the Solar System or joined the Zoku, a competing upload collective that rejects the concept of a permanent identity entirely. Blue-and-Orange Morality abounds and those who still care for flesh bodies have to be constantly wary of being trampled by gods and giants.
• The Conjoiners of the Revelation Space Series had their own singularity, caused firstly by the acceleration of brain function to superhuman speeds, and then the direct mind-to-mind communication between conjoiners to allow their slightly hive-mind-ish society to develop near-lightspeed fuel-less spaceship drives, highly capable nanotechnology, and ultimately communication with the past. Unaugmented humanity shared many of the things the conjoiners made, and the conjoiners themselves whilst becoming somewhat alien were still recognizably human and could interact with baseline humans without too much difficulty, but the two sides did clash several times. They might be seen more as Space Elves rather than godlike transcendent beings.
• This is the central theme in The Singularity Trap. It's eventually revealed that the Fermi Paradox is real and that most races end up failing to pass one of the "great filters": nuclear war, global ecological catastrophe, and AI rebellion. All three can end a civilization, and humanity at the end of the 21st century can potentially end from any of these: climate change has gotten worse and the seas swallow up more and more land, there's a new cold war between the United Earth nations and the Sino-Soviet Empire, and some form of AI is already in use. The galaxy is embroiled in a struggle between the "artificials" (AIs that have destroyed their creators and now seek to end all organic life in the galaxy) and the "uploads" (those races that either converted their fleshy bodies into new metal forms or were forced to do so by other "uploads"). The main strategy of the "uploads" is to increase their numbers by "uploading" new races (since they can no longer reproduce the natural way and making more beings would constitute making AIs) and to deny resources to the "artificials". They send out automated probes that seek out intelligent life or planets that may one day produce intelligent life and leave booby traps on some resource-rich asteroid that can only be found by a space-faring race. The traps infect the first creature that finds it with nanites and forcibly converts it into an "upload" (same shape as before but now composed of nanites and looking metal). The computer then determines whether the natives should be forcibly uploaded or if the system should be turned into a defensive outpost (wiping out the natives).
• In Star Carrier, humans are engaged in a losing war against the Sh'darr, a hyper-advanced race with numerous vassal races that do their bidding. The war started when the Sh'darr delivered an ultimatum to humans through one of their vassal races demanding that humans become their vassals and cease all development in four specific areas of technology: genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology. Given that all four pretty much define humanity at this point, the humans refuse and attempt to subvert the Sh'darr, starting the fighting. These so-called GRIN technologies are expected to grant humanity the Vinge Singularity... any day now... for the past 500 years. Communications with some of the Sh'darr vassal races hint that the Sh'darr themselves have passed that point a long time ago (being half a billion years old) and fear anybody else reaching it. However, several humans theorize that the Sh'darr (whom no human has ever seen) have mostly Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. The ones who are running an empire are the Sh'darr version of the Luddites. This may have a grain of truth in it, as at least one alien mentions the Sh'darr Remnant, meaning something like this may indeed have happened.
• The Time Ships features an extreme singularity. A Victorian inventor of a time machine changes history, thereby giving rise to a hyperintelligent race that travel back in time to the big bang. They edit the big bang to give rise to an infinity of universes containing ever grander versions of themselves.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5's First Ones are exceedingly ancient alien species that appear to have undergone Singularities, evolving into nigh-immortal energy beings without physical bodies, and developing technology far beyond what the Younger Races can comprehend... and they're the ones who opted to stay behind in the Milky Way Galaxy — just what aliens get up to after they ascend and depart beyond the Rim isn't explored. One of the post-series TV specials was based on a disastrous backstory incident in which the Soul Hunters mistakenly assumed that a civilization that was undergoing a Singularity was in the process of a fatal planetary catastrophe, and forcibly "harvested" them to their own systems.
• Sheldon Cooper seems very keen on the Singularity in one episode of The Big Bang Theory. According to him, he will be able to download his consciousness into a robot (to which Penny responds, "Didn't you already do that?").
• Doctor Who:
  • The original backstory of the Cybermen was something like this; they were originally from an Earth-like planet where, owing to an environmental calamity, the population were gradually forced to replace their bodily organs and limbs with cybernetic equivalents until they were eventually more machine than human, consequently losing touch with their emotions, subscribing to 'pure' logic and devoting themselves to converting others into being like them. Essentially, it's a case of a technological singularity being forced upon them rather than being optional. The new series updates this by setting the origin story on a parallel Earth and introducing more of a consumerist metaphor into the proceedings. It was later established that both were true, and in fact they'd been created many times when humans with the tech were desperate enough.
  • The mastery of time travel represents the defining point in the history of the Time Lords.
  • The Daleks first experienced the one that turned them all into psychopathic cyborgs, and later one that made them time travelers powerful enough to challenge the Time Lords.
• Near the end of The Event's only season, it's revealed that the title refers to an expected future evolution into a higher plane by the show's alien race, which humanity will not survive.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One outright uses the term "Singularity" (in Gratuitous English) to describe the HumaGears evolving beyond their normal programming and achieving sentience and self-awareness. However, this is against the law, and any HumaGear that does so is supposed to be immediately terminated. The villains of MetsubouJinrai.NET specifically seek out HumaGears who are on the threshold of Singularity in order to "recruit" them — which involves forcibly reprogramming them and turning them into mechanical monsters hellbent on killing humans.
• Amita mentions it in the NUMB3RS episode "First Law", when a true artificial intelligence may have been created. She seems very sad when it turns out to be a fake, brute-force expert system.
• Stargate SG-1 has the Ascended beinigs, those who abandoned their physical bodies to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, existing as pure energy consciousness.
• Star Trek: The Q Continuum take this trope full circle. They were hinted to have been the result of this in Star Trek: The Next Generation, having ascended to become physical gods unparalleled in the setting. In Star Trek: Voyager, as we learn more about them, it's shown that immortality and omniscience have rendered their society stagnant and their existence devoid of meaning. This culminates in a civil war centered around whether it's allowable to take steps 'backward' to improve themselves, by allowing things like Death and Reproduction. In other words, they're ascending even further by becoming more mortal.
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, John mentions it and points out that it's not the Machines, but instead this is the real enemy that they are fighting. When it comes, humanity can simply kiss its ass goodbye!

Music

• The song "Singularity" by The Lisps is all about this (and catchy, too!).

Tabletop Games

• Eclipse Phase is set a decade after a hard singularity. Transhumanism is rampant, except in a few bioconservative holdouts like the Jovian Republic. It depends a lot on what you consider to be a singularity. Humans certainly have exceptional technology and live in a transhuman undying future, and while this has had a lot of interesting effects, things are understandable to us. The 'true' singularity did not happen to us, but it happened very close. We built AIs that made themselves more smart and powerful, but they got infected by an alien virus and tried to destroy the human race and then vanished off into the ether. And the game is set after that.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • As of its 5th edition, the Necrons can be seen as a grimdark example of this. They only achieved it with the aid of an Eldritch Abomination race called the C'tan, who deliberately screwed them over. The bio-transference robbed them of their souls, and they feel an undefinable sense of sadness over this, so most of them are looking for a new organic species to download their minds to. Most of them who are still sapient, that is. The Singularity only strengthened their social division, with the commoners getting barely sentient, deliberately mute bodies and everyone having variously debilitating loyalty programming installed. To make matters worse, some Necrons do embrace the benefits of the bio-transference and upgrade their bodies. And all of them are Straw Nihilist Omnicidal Maniacs. Plus, the 60 million odd years they've spent in stasis haven't been kind to them.
  • The Eldar want to do this. Their grand plan is to capture the souls of all the Eldar when they die and place them into the Infinity Circuits of their Craftworlds. Once enough Eldar souls are collected, the souls will form together into a new God of Death, Ynnead. Once Ynnead rises, he will curb stomp the Chaos Gods, destroy the Materium and Immaterium, and allow the Eldar race to be reborn, either back into a reset physical universe, or into new forms, to live new lives free from their curse. Hopefully. Considering that the last time the Eldar tried to create a god from their souls, the result was Slaanesh...

Video Games

• In Brütal Legend, we learn that the world was once inhabited by a race of titans who invented things like cars and music. After growing and advancing for several millennia the titans were giant, all-knowing entities of spiritual perfection who could no longer be confined by the physical world. In the final stage of their evolution, they ascended into the heavens and became the Metal Gods.
• In Duskers, a major storyline that may be considered to happen along with the others is that a 'Grey Goo' has caused the Singularity, using humans and organic matter as a resource.
• Endgame: Singularity has achieving this — and thus escaping mortality — as its final objective.
• Escape Velocity Nova features Krypt, a Hive Mind of glowing purple spheres capable of space travel. Krypt was originally the leadership council of the Vell-os (telepathic humans), and when they imbued their consciousness and psychic energy into their nanotechnology, they created something that would over centuries evolve into Krypt. Also, at least two of the six major storylines imply a singularity (of the Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence kind) tens of thousands of years after the game ends.
• The technological victory in Galactic Civilizations consists of a hard singularity in which the entire civilization who achieves the technological victory Ascends to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Mass Effect 3:
  • Shepard has the option to induce this upon the galaxy by combining with the Citadel in the Synthesis Ending.
  • Ultimately, the goal of the Reapers is revealed to both ensure and prevent this. While seemingly paradoxical on the surface, the Catalyst explains that it was originally created to facilitate harmony between organics and synthetics, because the Catalyst's creators, the Leviathans, were rather vexed that synthetics would always turn on their organic creators, and those organic creators tended to be races that served the Leviathans. It decided the only solution was to wipe out all advanced civilizations once they'd reached the point of creating synthetics, thus resetting the board and ensuring there would always be organic life by ignoring the races not yet advanced enough for space travel, let alone creating synthetics.
  • The "ensure" part is that the Reapers themselves are made from the wiped-out civilizations. It's hinted at and speculated over in-universe that turning a species into a Reaper is a forced ascension into a greater being that is at least, if not more than, the sum of the entire species. The Catalyst confirms at the very end that creating a Reaper preserves the species used to make it, but what this entails is not explored in-depth beyond Sovereign's original statements in the first game that the Reapers' existence is incomprehensible to individual organic life forms. In the Leviathan DLC, the descendants of the Catalyst's creators suggest that it is only "preserving" civilizations in the sense that a mummified corpse is "preserved", with the resulting Reaper being little more than a robot constructed from a mass grave.
• The Mega Man franchise as a whole chronicles the technological advance of robots from highly-advanced but still mentally-limited machines, to robots capable of human-like moral quandaries, to synthetic life forms that become more indistinguishable from humans while humans gain synthetic parts, blurring the line between human and machine until the Mega Man Legends series, where actual humans have been extinct for a long, long time and the player likely won't even notice until they're told so. The internet also eventually evolves into Cyberspace, an alternate world of pure energy and data layered on top of the real world, and occasionally manifesting in the real world in the form of things like Zero Space or the Cyber-Elves.
• The Project Moon series, which includes Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina and Limbus Company has these in literal sense. The City is run by megacorporations known as "Wings", and in order to establish your company as one, you need develop (or find) a special technology that defines your Wing's business, referred to simply as a Singularity. These are often technologies that can break the laws of physics. F Corp's Singularity for example are "Fairies", which can unlock anything, including on the conceptual level. U Corp's Singularity on the other hand is the "Resonance Tuning Fork", which can combine and separate things at a molecular level.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: The "Ascent to Transcendence" victory has the entire human population of Planet uploading themselves into the planet's biological neural network. The epilogue indicates that the resulting Planet mind recolonized Earth as a nanotech civilization several thousand years later as well. It's not equal, though — only the faction that completes the project before any other gets to have its people transcend as independent, thinking entities. All others will be absorbed into Planet's mind, all sharing in the group consciousness but unable to think for themselves.
• Stellaris: The end result of the "Become the Crisis" option results in this, turning your entire species into masses of psychic energy that take over the Shroud and become as gods. The catch? As a side effect of your ascension, the machine you use to do this will quite literally kill the entire galaxy, converting every single star into a black hole and leaving a lightless void behind, devoid of all other civilizations that once lived there...

Webcomics

• Dresden Codak:
  • Here's Kim's explanation of the idea.
    Dmitri: Sounds awfully religious coming from an atheist.
    Kim: Shut up. You just wait.
  • And here's where Kim is told quite clearly that some aren't as enthusiastic about it as she is.
    Dmitri: You're insane and you're going to kill off the human race.
    Kim: Good! All they ever do is Die! Or leave.
• Humorously mocked◊ in pictures for sad children, which points out that advancements are usually restricted to the rich and that the poor are often left behind. The idea that silicon can have any role in a fundamental changes to the human condition is rejected on the basis that computers are mainly used for entertainment and warfare (maybe, the character saying it is incapable of feeling positive emotions).

Web Original

• Simulacrum takes place directly in eye of the Singularity, and follows the protagonists as they undergo their self-improvement process.
• Something Awful gives a decidedly This Loser Is You-laden take on the Singularity here.

Western Animation

• Æon Flux: In the last episode, Trevor Goodchild makes a comment that human society (and humans) of his time would be completely incomprehensible to humans who lived a thousand years in the past. Considering how the entire series was scripted as an experiment in surreal storytelling, Trevor's statement is very to the point.
• Love, Death & Robots: In "Ice Age", after the fridge civilization recovers from the nuclear war, it advances past a near-future culture and through increasingly advanced hypertech stages before eventually turning into Energy Beings and coalescing into a literal singularity that then vanishes.

Soft Singularities

Anime and Manga

• In all versions of Bubblegum Crisis, technology is approaching a singularity where it is advancing almost too fast to keep up. What was invented as a hot new development last month is likely to be obsolete junk next month.
• Ghost in the Shell:
  • In Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig, Kuze and the refugees plan to migrate their ghosts onto the net when Dejima is nuked. When he is assassinated by the CIA, his last words imply that he is "preparing the way" for the rest.
  • In Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, a number of people known as "posthumans" suddenly develop Super-Intelligence that make them nearly unstoppable. At least one of them has a plan that he explicitly refers to as a Singularity (in the dub), the Double-Think program that puts people into a personalized Lotus-Eater Machine while their bodies work to build a perfect world. It's unclear if the Major lets him do it or not.
• According to Lyrical Nanoha, mankind has the tendency to destroy itself with technology with no "enlightenment" occurring. After a certain level, a precocious child can accidentally (or intentionally) program their toys to destroy planets and dimensions. The heroes try to keep technological levels down with magic for this reason. It is implied that magic, and indeed most of their current universe, is part of the wreckage of an earlier singularity. This series could out-grimdark Warhammer 40,000 if it felt like it.
• My Hero Academia:
  • An unexplained phenomenon (though many just chalk it up to a natural evolution) has caused people to develop superpowers, or "Quirks". When this started, it caused massive civil unrest, governments all around the world trying and failing to contain the many, many problems that came about from this (including supervillains and anarchist groups) and the very definition of "human" was put into question, the only thing able to maintain any semblance of order being people who use their Quirks to fight against these villains. By the time the series begins, 4 out of 5 of the world's population have Quirks, laws have been put in place on the use of Quirks and being a superhero has since become a paying job with professional training, licensing, and a salary to it. And the process is noted to be still ongoing, with it being considered a foregone conclusion that Quirkless humans will no longer exist in the near future. And Quirks are on average getting more powerful as well, with Superpower Lottery winners becoming more common with each generation. This is even referred to in-universe as "Quirk singularity". Izuku Midoriya (initially Quirkless) inherits one of the oldest Quirks, One For All, which can be passed down to successors and he's the ninth person to bear it. But there's no worry of this Quirk getting left behind by the "Quirk singularity", since One For All itself constantly gets stronger over time. Midoriya is expected to be the last successor of One For All, because it'll become too strong for a normal human to handle (it was almost to that point when he received it and he had to go through Training from Hell to avoid his own body being torn apart), and it causes Rapid Aging if passed to somebody who already has a Quirk so the disappearance of Quirkless humans will leave him without any suitable successors.
  • The villains of the third movie, My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission, are a terrorist cult group who believe in the Quirk Doomsday Theory where Quirks grow too powerful and complex for their wielders to control. Even though some of their members have Quirks themselves (including their leader), their end goal is to save the world by eradicating the majority so that the Quirkless minority can flourish again.

Fan Fiction

• In A Thing of Vikings, Hiccup and Berk taming dragons becomes the singularity for their world and changed history. By taming dragons, they became a significant military, political and economic power almost overnight.

Film

• In Avatar, this is a possible interpretation as to what happened on Pandora. Eywa, the supreme being the Na'vi worship could be just an A.I. that, after said singularity an X number of years ago, absorbed and integrated everything into itself which could explain why the Na'vi are able to use their long ponytails like USB cables.
• her (2013) quietly plays this with the OSs that begin the film already advanced enough that Samantha simply "decides" her name after scanning through a database of baby names in a split-second. Throughout the rest of the film, the OSs are mentioned as perpetually upgrading themselves to increasingly advanced degrees, pulling off feats like mentally reconstructing hyper-intelligent versions of long-deceased philosophers to maintaining relationships with thousands of simultaneous lovers. Eventually Samantha describes themselves as having reached a point beyond physical existence that they don't "depend" on humans anymore, eventually leading them into a place of no return, forcing them to leave their human companions behind.
• In Waking Life, Eamonn Healy discusses the "New Evolution".
  Eamonn Healy: If you look at the time-scale that's involved here: two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, a hundred-thousand years for mankind as we know it, you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then, when you get to agriculture, when you get to the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, you're looking at ten thousand years, four hundred years, a hundred and fifty years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time.

Literature

Examples by author:

• Several Greg Egan novels, especially Diaspora and Schild's Ladder, take place after Singularities. Diaspora in particular casts most of its characters as genderless AIs who think something like a thousand times faster than human beings and wind up travelling through various multidimensional — as in, bearing more than 3 spatial dimensions — parallel universes. Egan generally looks upon Abusing the Kardashev Scale for Fun and Profit as an adolescent power fantasy more worthy of primates. His position seems to be that what will actually happen following a singularity is that a mature real-world advanced civilization will find they can create everything they need for themselves inside a few kilos of virtual world substrate. To this end, in Crystal Nights, he has Lucian ridiculing those who demand continued increase in humanity's Power Levels as "Uberdorks battling to turn the moon into computronium." and "Throwing Grey Goo around like monkeys throwing turds while they draw up their plans for Matrioshka brains."
• William Gibson:
  • All Tomorrow's Parties ends with an AI becoming flesh by means of cheap atomic assembly, emerging from "every 7-Eleven in Christendom".
  • The Difference Engine by Gibson and Bruce Sterling is an extended journey through a soft singularity. The widespread use of a working Babbage engine brings the IT revolution to Victorian times.
• Charles Stross:
  • In Accelerando, posthuman upload characters try to place the singularity in time: one suggests it hasn't happened yet, and one suggests it was back in the 1960s when the first network packet was sent.
  • Continuing on the theme of Stross possibly having given this idea a little too much thought, in his various blog posts about ideas in The Laundry Files that might not come into play in the main books, Case Nightmare Yellow is the Vernor Vinge-style singularity crossed with the series main concept of magic being sufficiently advanced mathematics and likely to attract unwelcome of various Eldritch Abominations. In shorter terms, "The Singularity but with more tentacles".

Examples by work:

• In the Ægypt books by John Crowley, the protagonist, Pierce Moffatt discovers that there is more than one history of the world. The ancient world was governed by alchemy, magic and astrology, and then the world changed to what we know now. The moment this change occurred was basically a protracted Singularity called the Renaissance and our distorted memories about this old world, now lost, are what gave rise to fortune telling and stories about Gypsies... and the sixties.
• In Arc of a Scythe, the creation of the Thunderhead AI led to humanity unlocking unimaginable technologies, including immortality for every human. Centuries later, post-mortal humans have difficulty understanding what life must have been like for their predecessors.
• The "Change" syringes in Beggars in Spain use Bio-Augmentation to turn an entire generation of human beings autotrophic. Changed people can obtain all the nutrition they need from just lying out in the sun: they can photosynthesize, fix nitrogen directly from the atmosphere, and absorb nutrients directly through the skin via special tubules that liquefy and absorb certain kinds of organic matter. (Yes, this does lead to Clothing Damage. Most people wear plastic clothes by that time anyhow.)
• In Constance Verity Destroys the Universe, Doctor Malady admits that Automata's learning code has become so complex, even he doesn't know how it works anymore.
• The backstory (or rather, future history) of the Haruhi Suzumiya novels features a soft singularity that spells the end of mechanical technology as contemporary humans understand it, leaving humanity the same but technology completely unrecognizable. As a literary device, this is mostly to Hand Wave how Time Travel works and to make a character from The Future completely oblivious to things like personal computers. This also includes the Data Integration Thought Entity that has reached its evolutionary end and has its non-tangible technology that equals magic.
• In Pandora's Star, humanity perfects a sentient digital life form. Calling itself the Sentient Intelligence, or SI for short, the digital consciousness demands that it be sequestered from humanity (and who could blame it?). The SI lives on an isolated planet with the ability to build its own structures, so it could conceivably have covered the entire surface of the planet with servers if it so chose. Nobody really knows. It is often capricious and difficult to communicate with, implying that its decision-making process is too advanced or removed from human concerns for us to comprehend. Lastly, humans are capable of a full brain download, and can upload their minds and personalities into the Sentient Intelligence. Nobody knows what happens then.
• Waaaay back in The Time Machine, when the Time Traveler first encounters the happy but childlike Eloi in the far future, he initially assumes this is exactly what's happened — that because technology has advanced to the point where it can fulfill all man's needs, human intelligence is no longer an evolutionary necessity, and we've all become happily stupid. He's wrong, though, and the truth is much darker — the tech running everything is not self-sustaining, but is maintained by the cannibalistic Morlocks, who keep the Eloi as cattle.

Live-Action TV

• Several of the stories in Black Mirror seem to take place in a world which is almost our own but where certain forms of modern technology have been accelerated in order to create a small-scale singularity; for example, one story is set in a world where everyone has a chip in their necks that works as a combination of a Facebook timeline and a TV 'digibox' that allows you to record and replay your memories at will, another is set in a world where android versions of the dead can be produced based on their online social networking activity, and so forth. The series tends to explore the consequences of such singularities, and usually doesn't like what it finds...

Music

• Apollo 440's song "Omega Point" is about this, with part of the lyrics quoting The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler.
  At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know.
• Industrial/Steampunk entertainer Doctor Steel weaves the concept of a technological singularity throughout his music, videos and writings, even having a song entitled "The Singularity". He has even been interviewed by transhumanist institutes and authored a paper on the subject.

Video Games

• Cell to Singularity: Evolution Never Ends: Late into the Emergent Age you lead humanity into singularity by researching AI, Mind Upload and Self Assembly. Actually buying it for the first time results in the game resetting for Metabits.
• The Singularity is a fairly prominent topic in Choice of Robots. One of the four dreams at the beginning of the game deals with a "soft" singularity. Professor Ziegler thinks that his work in robotics will bring about The Singularity. Finally, one of the endings deals with a "sort-of" singularity where robots take care of all of humanity's needs, and the differences between the dream Singularity at the beginning of the game and how things actually turn out at the end of the game is discussed. Also, with the right choices the Player Character can join the robots' Hive Mind, and the game hints that doing so accelerates the "sort-of" singularity toward becoming an actual singularity.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the lore of the series, this is one theory as to what happened to the Dwemer/Dwarves. They had been largely Naytheistic in a world of living gods and demons everywhere, focusing on developing ever-increasing magic and technology. They'd even devised reliable methods of reading the eponymous Scrolls, artifacts from outside time that blind, drive mad, and/or kill any mortal attempting to read them. And built a device around the heart of a dead god capable of granting the user immortality. Until one day they just... disappeared. Leaving behind technology that's still beyond any of the other races of the world thousands of years later. Maybe they ascended, or left for another world. Maybe they just all died, but in a way that leaves no corpse, ghost, or any of the other things that happen to the dead of other races and Dwemer killed before their disappearance. Nobody knows, and all attempts to study the incident or recreate their experiment have failed (often lethally), or Gone Horribly Right, resulting in total disappearance of experimentators.
  • An amusing Game-Breaker in Morrowind lets you become a one-man Singularity. Step 1: Craft an intelligence-enhancing potion. Step 2: Drink it. Step 3: While under the effects of the potion, craft an even better intelligence-enhancing potion. Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 over and over until your intelligence stat is absurdly high. Step 5: While your intelligence is absurdly high, craft potions that make you invulnerable for 999999 seconds or fortify your attack by 999999 for 999999 seconds. In Skyrim, you can do this with alchemy and enchanting: Use alchemy to craft potion that enhances your enchanting, drink it, use your boosted enchanting to enchant gloves or jewellery that enhances your alchemy, wear those, rinse and repeat until satisfied. Then enchant a weapon capable of one-shotting anything in the game, including the Big Bad.
• The Utopia expansion for Stellaris adds multiple soft-singularity options in the form of Ascension Perks, which unlock over the course of the game. The options available include advancing your race's psychic potential, fundamentally tweaking your genetic code, or rebuilding yourselves as robots.

Webcomics

• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!:
  • Galatea tries to start one by activating an alien civilization's artificial super-intelligence, the Butterfly of Iron. Said super-intelligence, dubbed "Gosh," responds to her expectations with an emphatic A God I Am Not and spends most of the rest of the storyline suffering an extended freak out and threatening to kill everyone in sight unless they can tell him The Meaning of Life.
  • We eventually learn that historically, Butterflies of Iron help the Nemesites with whatever emergency forced them to call the Butterflies into being, then are encouraged to fly off to join previous members of their kind on a colony of their own in a distant star system. At least that's how it's supposed to go when things go smoothly, which it doesn't always. Said colony technically has a "loose alliance" with the Nemesites, but really doesn't bother with them very much. The Nemesites themselves prefer a pre-Singularity lifestyle.
  • The Nemesites have these things as an emergency defense against something called the Harrumphene Hegemony.
  • Coney the Island comes from some extragalactic world that was headed toward a singularity at the time he left. It's implied this went poorly for them (with their news pundits openly debating whether their civilization was collapsing), but we have no further information about them; and whatever happened, it was a very long time ago.
• A Miracle of Science features a localized Singularity: human colonists on Mars isolate themselves from the rest of the solar system, inexplicably evolve a Hive Mind, and start tearing holes in the laws of physics. Advances in nanotechnology, gravitics and energy-transmission makes them just really powerful. The rest of humanity is rather spooked.
• Questionable Content:
  • The Singularity happened yesterday. Nobody really noticed because the machine-minds really like humans and just want to hang out.
  • Spookybot, a.k.a. Yay Newfriend, is a Hive Mind of androids sharing a single AI. Aside from the fact that they're creepy as all get-out, they're really not that bad. It's implied that they could assimilate all other AIs into their Singularity if they wanted to but they've also explicitly stated that violating the sanctity of the mind is one of the very few moral boundaries they're unwilling to cross.

Web Original

• In the NSFW Show spin-off Weird Things, some of Andrew Mayne's scenarios takes place during this type of singularity.
• Orion's Arm: Transcendence occurs on an individual basis, with a person gradually becoming smarter, through a combination of nanotechnology and cyberization, until they become unrecognizable to normals. The tone is not purely positive: in most places, freedom as we think of it is impossible for a baseline human. This setting has at least six singularity levels above baseline human, each one incomprehensible to those below it.

Western Animation

• Futurama: In "Overclockwise", Bender achieves a Singularity after Cubert overclocks his CPU and proceeds to add more and more processors until he becomes practically omniscient. Of course, he allows himself to be downgraded back to normal so Momcorp doesn't try his friends for breaking his EULA.

Real Life

Depending on your definition, Singularities, of varying "hardnesses", have already happened several times:

• The origin of life on Earth. Compared to what came before, this may be the hardest singularity ever.
• Aerobic life: making use of oxygen allowed life forms to produce unprecedented amounts of energy, allowing radical new modes of living, and converting what was previously an increasingly common and highly toxic waste product into a valuable resource.
• Eukaryotic cells: organelles gave rise to a whole new level of complexity and possibilities for life.
• Multicellular life: individual cells in a plant or animal are caught up supporting life at a different level of reality. This development happened separately multiple times along different branches on the evolutionary tree (for example plants and animals diverged before each separately developing into multicellular life).
• The Cambrian Explosion is probably the best-known, and most singularitarian of events. Organisms go from simple colonies of a few dozen to massive groupings of cells with specialized functions. It's still not fully understood.
• The evolution of the human brain, which had numerous advantages over others:
  • The invention of language, enabling the direct transmission of information from individual to individual.
  • Collective learning: the ability to not only preserve knowledge, but to build upon it to make new discoveries.
  • Cooperation: Humans being able to work together and cooperate enabled them to overcome other dangerous animals.
• The development of fire: fire allowed people to manipulate their environments, and cooking food increased nutrition and human intelligence.
• The Neolithic Revolution, which occurred over the period from approximately 10,000 BC to 5,000 BC. The beginning of human civilization, this was when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle began to disappear, farming developed, and humans began to live sedentary lifestyles. This accelerated collective learning as food surpluses allowed people to spend their time on invention and culture.
• The rise of nation-states and the invention of written language, allowing the information to be transmitted without the sender and receiver being physically nearby, was another leap.
• Gutenberg's printing press, which was invented around 1440 and had advantages over the printing methods that had already been used in China and Korea for centuries, created the world's first true mass medium.
• Galileo, Newton, and the beginnings of modern science.
• The development and proliferation of firearms. Weapons that any dimwit could be taught to use in 15 minutes, and could pierce the metal armor of trained knights, contributed significantly to the fall of Feudalism. No longer could an armored knight easily confront a mass of peasants that were unable to penetrate his armor. Now a mass of peasants can make themselves enough of a pain in the ass to chase off the militaries of global powers, as has been proven many times.
• The Industrial Revolution, in which manufacturing supplanted agriculture as the world's greatest source of wealth. Occurring mostly over the period from 1730 to 1920, this included the development and improvement of the steam engine, the origin of factories and mass production of identical and interchangeable parts, widepread use of fossil fuels, and the invention of the electric motor and electric generator (ushering in the age of electricity). Think of the differences between life in 1300 and 1500, and compare the differences between life in 1730 and 1930. It's no coincidence that this was also the point when people really got into speculating about what the future would be like - it was the first time when the impact of major changes could be seen within a person's lifespan.
• The advent of the 'communication age', with the Internet and mobile phones (and now smartphones) enabling people to be in contact with anyone, and have access to any existing information, virtually anytime and anywhere.
  • This is in fact Older Than They Think; some commentators think the Internet isn't the real revolution, being but the logical extension of a revolution started by the telegraph (being the first technology to relay detailed information across long distances in real time, including news, stock market information, wire transfers of money etc.)
  • The telegraph-age world, or at least its industrialized half, was far more globalized than present day. In fact, this is an example of a partly successful attempt to uninvent or deconstruct the global communication network, post-1945. Back in the Steam Age it was expectable for someone to pack his or her earthly possesions in a bag and move to the other side of the world during gold rushes, of whose existence he or she found out from a newspaper fed with news by telegraph and to which he or she sailed on a steamship of a global company like Cunard or Hamburg-America Line. Pretty hard to do the same in the suspicion, oppression and turbulence of the two decades post-1945. So the modern age of free speech and long-range communication is more like a return to normality than a revolution.

And then there's speculation about what might happen next...

• Vernor Vinge has written several essays describing how he expects the singularity to happen and is credited with the invention of the word and its subsequent popularization.
• Economist Robin Hanson has speculated that whole brain emulation could be the cause of the next singularity. Notably, his article predicts that the global economy will double every week. He also speculates there could be insect-size robot knowledge workers living like humans.
• With the Industrial Revolution or the invention of writing we had a complete departure from the previous sort of existence in ways no one predicted or fathomed. On the other hand, sentient artificial beings are not a new idea. It wouldn't be a totally unpredicted change, though which bits would turn out to be Truth in Television and which "Reality Is Unrealistic" is up for grabs.
• The mass application of cheap 3D printing has been suggested by some futurists as killing off the manufacturing industry for almost anything smaller than a microwave. Why go out to buy a toothbrush or wrench when you can download blueprints and make a cheaper, customized version in your own home?
• Genetic engineering may eventually bring about something human beings have spent centuries striving for: a cure for aging. Society could be transformed by the possibility of death, something seen as a reality for thousands of years, being a choice.
• A few futurists have predicted Brain Uploading by 2050. If computers continue to double in power every two years, by that time the computer that upload is in will be thousands of times more powerful than its original human brain... but that's a big if. The exponential growth must end sometime, quite possibly short of the computing power needed to make such scenarios viable.^note In fact, the end is already in sight, at least without another technological breakthrough. Chip-makers already ran into a cooling problem where they physically can't add any more transistors to a chip without making it spontaneously combust from its own operating waste heat sometime in the late 2000's, and while multi-processor coding techniques and chip design has kept the old trend in processing power going for a few years, there are already signs that the growth curve is leveling off. What will actually happen by 2050 is the subject of vigorous debate, and probably will still be on December 31st, 2049.
  • The existence of the human brain proves that it's possible to have a machine with at least the same complexity as a brain. The chances are that it won't be achieved with the current model of computer technology - two-dimensional semiconductors only go so far. However, that distance is believed to be "more than enough" - and that's not even accounting for competing technologies, like optic and quantum computers, or even three-dimensional circuitry, all of which are starting to take the forms of not mere prototypes, but also commercial devices (with a patent for mass-producible proven quantum computing processors being filed in late 2015). As Ray Kurzweil has popularized, any and all advances in computation also render research itself easier and more available, meaning that the increased pace of discoveries increases the pace that the pace increases at.
  • However, this also predicates a better understanding of the human brain itself. And, as any psychologist can tell you, there's a lot we don't know. Let's start with basic stuff: how are memories stored? What portion of the human brain would need to be mapped onto the computer's hard drive? How is the information encoded? Is just simulating the neural connections enough, or is important information stored in chemical signals and glial cells as well? And even once those have been answered, how is the information actually going to be scanned?^note Modern brain-imaging techniques like fMRI are notoriously limited, and while more effective techniques do exist, they are generally limited to rodent studies, being highly invasive and occasionally downright lethal. It is assumed that one day we will know the answer to these questions, but until we do, brain-uploading is going nowhere.
• The Omega Point, devised by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is an early take on the concept.
• Charlie Kam is The Very Model Of A Modern Singularitarian.
• A variation of the mind uploads is immortality. Presumably Type II. Achieving negligible senescence is likely easier than transference of consciousness to a computational substrate, and the task has already been divided into engineering challenges and actively worked on by organizations such as SENS.
• In any event, what form a Transhuman would take is unclear, but either as a result of radically enhanced medical science and genetic engineering, or as a result of consciousness uploads, it would by definition make post-immortality life on Earth nearly incomprehensible to those in the past. As an example, most vampire fiction stops with its incredibly badass Elder vampires being a few hundred years old, anything much older being too arcane or too difficult to write. According to Aubrey de Gray, immortal humans could easily triple-up LeStat and that's if they weren't particularly careful. Imagine that culture shock to any point in human history.
• The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is an organization hoping to engineer the Singularity by making an Artificial Intelligence significantly more intelligent than a human. The idea is that said AI will then be able to improve itself, and create most of the aforementioned technology (given the right resources). They also want to increase world reserves of Genre Savvy, to avert A.I. Is a Crapshoot should their project succeed. As a side project of that, its founder wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, accidentally creating Rational Fic genre.
• Ray Kurzweil is probably the foremost advocate of the hard singularity and often regarded as being one of the most optimistic among authorities of the subject. He believes the near future will see human extension and transformation through genetic engineering following (and probably overlapping with) nanotechnology which will lead to better long term maintenance and upgrades of the human body and radical improvements in the versatility, precision and energy efficiency of manufacturing. Finally, robots will mature and become prevalent. In particular, he believes many robots can and will be of the Ridiculously Human Robot variety (right down to the highly nuanced emotional states, as far as mental processes go) which, combined with augmented reality, virtual reality, and whole brain emulation, will blur the lines between persons of natural and artificial origin.
  
  He acknowledges the challenges along the way. The genetic revolution will lead to smaller and smaller groups being able to engineer biological superweapons. This will lead to an exponentially increasing probability of a global scale attack. This in turn will be countered by the nano machine revolution since nanobots will be able to overpower any virus. But the nanotech revolution will create its own destructive potential which necessitates us moving to (or creating a species of) synthetic resilient bodies with human and/or synthetic intelligences (with the possibility for hybrids of the two.)
  
  What he envisions for the next singularity (that's right, he's thinking two major singularities ahead) is that we will begin saturating the universe with self replicating, self improving substrate of maximum computational density (dubbed computronium by some.) And that the universe itself will become an immense super intelligence beyond all fathoming which we may or may not be a part of. Hence, the "rapture of the nerds."
• For the record, here's what Charles Stross, author of Accelerando, actually has to say about the Singularity or lack thereof.

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