Technological Singularity: What Do We Really Know?

The concept of the technological singularity is frequently reified. Futurist forecasts inferred from this imprecise reification are then criticized, and the reified ideas are incorporated in the core concept. In this paper, I try to disentangle the facts related to the technological singularity from more speculative beliefs about the possibility of creating artificial general intelligence. I use the theory of metasystem transitions and the concept of universal evolution to analyze some misconceptions about the technological singularity. While it may be neither purely technological, nor truly singular, we can predict that the next transition will take place, and that the emerged metasystem will demonstrate exponential growth in complexity with a doubling time of less than half a year, exceeding the complexity of the existing cybernetic systems in few decades.