Wiktionary
n. A predicted future event in human history caused by the ever-increasing ability of new technology to speed up the rate at which new technology is developed.
Wikipedia
The technological singularity (also, simply, the singularity) is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. According to this hypothesis, an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would, qualitatively, far surpass all human intelligence.
Chalmers, David. "The singularity: A philosophical analysis." Journal of Consciousness Studies 17.9-10 (2010): 7-65.
Science fiction author Vernor Vinge said in his essay The Coming Technological Singularity that this would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate.
The first use of the term "singularity" in a technological context was made in 1958 by John von Neumann. In the same year, Stanislaw Ulam described "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue". In the 1990s, Vinge popularized the concept, linking it to I. J. Good's "intelligence explosion", and predicting that a future superintelligence would trigger a singularity.
Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity to occur around 2045 whereas Vinge predicts some time before 2030. At the 2012 Singularity Summit, Stuart Armstrong did a study of artificial general intelligence (AGI) predictions by experts and found a wide range of predicted dates, with a median value of 2040.
Usage examples of "technological singularity".
Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity –.
It's an ironic accident of the calendar that all this religious interest in transcendental events should be mixed with the objective evidence that we're falling into a technological singularity.