Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

What happens when we create something smarter than ourselves, and it keeps getting smarter.

When intelligence becomes limitless, the future becomes unknowable.

Welcome to the singularity.

It's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days, the singularity.

To some, it's the moment when robots rise up and humanity gets wiped off the galactic scoreboard.

To others, it's a utopian future where artificial intelligences solve every problem and

usher in an age of eternal prosperity.

But what is the technological singularity really?

It's a topic we've tackled before, including the question of whether it is inevitable,

and we'll come back to that today.

Because whether or not we could avoid the singularity or even should avoid it, the idea

looms large over every major discussion

of the future, and has since the concept first emerged decades ago.

At its heart, the singularity is the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human

intelligence, not just in playing chess, generating cat pictures, or even helping fix my atrocious grammar,

but in one critical way, the ability to improve itself, recursive self-improvement,

an AI that can design a smarter AI, which then builds an even smarter one, until intelligence

skyrockets in a runaway cascade. The term singularity was borrowed from

...