Last Sunday on X, Elon Musk spoke about the Singularity. The entirety of his post: “We are on the event horizon of the Singularity.”

     Us sci-fi geeks knew exactly what he meant: a reference to Vernor Vinge’s 1993 paper, “The Coming Technological Singularity.”

     The term was first used by polymath John von Neumann in 1957: “The ever accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity beyond which human affairs, as we know them, cannot continue.”

     Vinge expanded the topic into a 5,000-word article. “We are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.”  

     His 1993 article predicted a computer with human-level intelligence by 2030. Mainstream critics thought it would be ten thousand years before our computers reached that level.

     Today computers have reached human intelligence in many areas. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is still a few years away, but everybody can see it’s an onrushing train and we’re standing on the tracks.

     A typical recent headline: “AI cracks superbug problem in two days after microbiologist worked on it for a decade.”

     This is where The Singularity starts, with the production of knowledge slipping out of the hands of humans.

     We don’t know what will happen–that’s part of the mystery of a Singularity: you can’t see through to the other side.

     The previous Singularity in human history was a mysterious change that took place about seventy thousand years ago.

     Humans had been using Acheulian hand axes since the days of Homo Erectus, hand-knapping them to the same design for a million years. If it was good enough for grampa, it was good enough for us, and our simple stone tools and command of fire made us the apex predators wherever we went. Living was easy with eyes closed, strawberries fields forever. Nobody needed anything new.

     Paleontological evidence shows that the lungs and mouth and throat of hominids evolved in accordance with adaptation to language. Language is one of the most ancient parts of being human, along with control of fire and the use of stone tools, but until the mental singularity of 70,000 years ago, humans were just another animal with a couple tricks for survival, on a similar level with animals using primitive technology–birds made nests, beavers made dams, termite hills were air-conditioned–technologies similarly unchanged for millions of years.

     Then some new language trick went viral. The Neanderthals were left behind by the discovery of symbols: an invention that separated human communication from the barkings and squeals of other animals. This inaugurated the present era of the breakneck pace of innovation.

     According to myth, Eve bit the apple, the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and after that the kids started coming up with violations of tradition such as combining tools–putting a stone point on a wooden spear. Boy, did that ever change things! A continuing cascade of new inventions–that’s the archaeological evidence of the singularity.

     Paleontology has resorted to the term “anatomically human” for the fossils that pre-date that ancient singularity. Modern humans began showing up in the geological record about 300,000 years ago. We’d been using the same primordial toolkit that Homo Erectus used for a million years without coming up with any innovations.     

     Then, after the singularity, a great gush of innovation began. It had impact on the environment and the rest of the biological world–we can date the origination of clothing, for instance, by the evolution of new species of human body lice that adapted to survive in clothing rather than in hair.

     The Neanderthals could copy the useful new technologies but they remained on the previous side of the Singularity. Maybe the Neanderthals’ language was of the same kind as a dog’s understanding of language.

     Chaser was a border collie.

     Chaser learned the names of 1,022 objects, and she demonstrated that she understood the meanings of those separate names, categories, and commands in a series of hundreds of fetch trials. Sometimes the dog did better than her handlers, who reportedly had to write the names on 1,022 toys to recall them correctly.

     A dog may know a thousand words but it doesn’t know what tomorrow is. You can’t show the dog a picture of tomorrow.

     Bertrand Russell once remarked that “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his father was poor but honest.” Dogs lack the symbolic elements of human language to express abstract ideas, which is a basic difference in the communication abilities of humans and animals.

     And nobody knows how the change was made. Noam Chomsky claims all humans are born with a sentence structure blueprint programmed in their brains, invariant across the species, and that each language is but a variation upon this “universal grammar” generated by an as-yet unidentified “language organ” that sprang up overnight out of nowhere. We are born already knowing language, somehow.

     Language is ancient. It isn’t something we invented overnight a hundred thousand years ago, leaving the mute Neandertals behind. Nope, everything about language requires long, long evolution of the airway and the larynx and the tongue and the lungs and the brain and the ear.

      Like today’s dogs, early humans had vocabulary but no grammar. Early hominins would be lounging around the camp and one of the tribe would breathlessly arrive and say, “Dead elephant!”

     Everybody would immediately pick up all the handaxes they could carry and follow the Dead Elephant guy back to the scene of the mortality, where they would hack through the tough skin with handaxes and hurl handaxes at any lions or hyenas who showed up to attempt to usurp the meal.

     The oldest samples of the Acheulian stone tool industry are hand axes found in Konso, Ethiopia, dating to about 1.4 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans used the same stone axes for a quarter million years until the grammar Singularity arrived.

     We’d evolved away from apes because of stone tools and fire and language and manual dexterity and brain size, all co-evolving with each other. Neanderthals actually had much larger brains than modern humans but they never grasped the mental gymnastic tricks that the Singularity gave us.

     It’s a singularity because we can’t see past it to a beginning, or understand what our lives were like before. It was a disjuncture between the Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal: it could not be explained to the Neanderthal, because it was about the newly generated ability to parse nested sentences of information.

     The thing that changed us into humans seems to be grammar. Instead of listing things and actions, we became able to weave our modern elaborate verbal structures. Our memory became communal. We became able to see the future.

     Neanderthals easily understood the old language, “Gronk eat fish,” but the newfangled method of interconnecting past, present, and future tenses, along with interior connections to abstractions, required brain hardware that only the Cro-Magnons developed.  

    The onset of the Technological Singularity explains why we seem to be alone in the universe. We aren’t hearing any radio signals from other civilizations in the galaxy. Perhaps whenever an intelligent race arises in the galaxy and develops technology, within a few hundred years the technology goes asymptotic and the race leaves its meat life behind.   

     Previous speculation has been that technological planets destroy themselves as soon as nuclear weapons are discovered, and that’s why we don’t see any. The Singularity theory says that 200 years after you invent radio, you’ve zoomed through the Singularity and civilization essentially comes to an end and the people revert to being placid, well-cared-for farm animals while the robots continue expanding out into the stars.

     The robots will have as much interest in communicating with other biological civilizations as Columbus had in setting up diplomatic relations with the termites and honeybees of the New World.

     The Technological Singularity doesn’t mean humans are in danger. Machine technology will take up the baton of the front edge of consciousness, but it alse means the machines will automatically do everything for humans and humans will all be perpetual loafers kept as pets unable to comprehend the higher consciousness of the machines.

     The thing that changed us into humans seems to be grammar. Instead of listing things and actions, we became able to weave our modern elaborate verbal structures. Our memory became communal. We became able to see the future.