Humanity is turning a corner. The signpost is marked "AI." Everyone knows what it stands for. Who knows what it means? We know what it's beginning to look like.

"Singularity" is an odd word. Then 20th-century physicists got hold of it and situated it at the very boundary of space-time, to the eternal bafflement of the lay mind. A singularity became the inexplicable, infinitely charged nothing out of which the universe grew following the Big Bang. A new "singularity" now looms -- the moment, fast approaching, when our machines surpass us in intelligence. Conservative futurists -- an oxymoron if ever there was one -- see it coming around 2045.