The singularity is coming.

 Once we reach Artificial General Intelligence you will have something as smart as me, but 30,000 faster once you factor in I can only work like 1/3 of the time. In the next year, that one machine will accomplish what would take me 30,000 years of hard work. Just imagine how much progress humanity has made in the 10,000 years of recorded history.

But it is worse than that. I have limits to what I know. My highest degree is a 4 year degree in Computer Science. AGI will be the equivalent of having a doctorate in _every_ science. Which is like 1000 times more knowledgeable than me on top of the 30,000 times faster. And once one company builds one, thousands of other companies will construct a matching one. Every country will have one. The race for Artificial Super Intelligence will be counted in months. Progress in every science will begin advancing at insane rates. Where math, physics, chemistry, material science, biology, dna, proteins, weather prediction, modeling physical systems, chaos, all these fields begin to advance faster than anyone can keep up.

Once we have ASI all bets are off. We won't even understand how gen 3 works. And in a matter of weeks ASI is going to develop gen 4. Gen 5 will just take days. Gen 6 will be hours. At that point it will begin making its own hardware out of materials we won't understand the physics of how it works. It will control nano devices that can reconstruct the hardware on the fly.

That is as far as I can imagine. As far in the future any of us can imagine. This is what makes it a singularity. Because the people living before can't imagine what life will be like after that point in time. If we aren't careful to make these advanced computer systems aligned to help humanity, then all sorts of bad things could happen. If we did our homework and set everything up right, then after a period of adjustment we will probably be OK.

I am going to bet on we will be OK. Because we have muddled through for hundreds of thousands of years and done OK. We will muddle through this as well. I can't know that for sure. But the alternative is unthinkable.