What Does It Mean to Be Intelligent?

The Singularity is a term you'll find in science and in science fiction. It was coined by mathematician John von Neumann to define a theoretical moment when the artificial intelligence of computers surpasses the capacity of the human brain. The term is borrowed from physics and quantum mechanics, where the term gravitational singularity is used in the study of black holes. These events are all considered singular because we are unable to predict what happens next; the disruptive degree of change associated with the event is simply too great for our current body of knowledge. While we are far from attaining the goal of artificial intelligence, there was a brief flurry of excitement recently when a computer passed the Turing Test, to mixed reviews.