Jack Clark: “They call this the singularity. I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun. … we should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI, but science as a whole, will speed up. This will feel confusing and disorienting, and it will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril.”
translated by AI, reviewed by the editors
· Science · Anthropic co-founder, in the Per Jacobsson Lecture at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok; the text was published in his Import AI newsletter
original
“For many years, researchers and science fiction authors have forecast a future in which AI systems drastically increase the pace of overall scientific and technical progress, making things move so quickly that it is hard for humans to keep up.
They call this the singularity. I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun.
The writer Vernor Vinge forecast this in 1993. “When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter time scale,” he wrote, describing the singularity as “a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules.” The singularity is here. The implications reach across every aspect of life. But the most important implication is a simple one: we should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI, but science as a whole, will speed up. This will feel confusing and disorienting, and it will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril.”— Jack Clark, Import AI 477, 17.10.2026 ↗
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The original is given verbatim and only as an excerpt — as much as the meaning needs; “[…]” marks a cut. The translation is ours.
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