2029 AGI. For Gwendolin Kirchhoff the Technological Singularity is the key concept for diagnosing the salvation promise of machine convergence as secularised eschatology. 2032 biological immortality. 2045 thousandfold intelligence. Ray Kurzweil has been giving these dates for decades, with minor shifts, and he calls the culminating point the Technological Singularity. The term comes from mathematics: a singularity is a point at which a function goes to infinity, at which the previous rules cease to apply. Kurzweil transfers this figure to technological development and claims: from a certain moment, which he dates to 2045, progress accelerates so strongly that no prediction is any longer possible. The human being, fused with machines, becomes at least a thousand times more intelligent. Biology becomes optional. Death is abolished.
If you read this paragraph and think it sounds like science fiction: that is the point. It is science fiction. But it is sold as engineering forecast, by a man with twenty-one honorary doctorates, employed at Google, listened to by investors who move billions. The question is not whether the Singularity arrives. The question is why so many people believe in it. What about this idea is so attractive that, despite the lack of empirical foundation, it carries an entire movement?
#Forecast or prophecy
What distinguishes Kurzweil’s predictions from technical forecasts is a structural feature: the mechanism changes, the date stays. In The Singularity Is Near (2005) nanotechnology was the key to biological immortality. In The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) it is AI-supported drug development. The time frame has not budged: always the early 2030s. An engineer who swaps his mechanism and keeps his date is not forecasting. He is believing.
Independent assessments of his 105 specific predictions for 2019 reached hit rates between 7 and 24 per cent, not the 86 per cent he himself claimed. The discrepancy is explained by the vagueness of his formulations: whoever predicts that computers will be embedded in clothing can record almost any outcome as a hit. What he reliably predicted correctly (faster chips, wireless internet, smartphones) followed the public roadmap of the semiconductor industry. As soon as a prediction depended on biology, physics or human behaviour rather than on transistor scaling, he was wrong (cf. Kurzweil, 2005; Kurzweil, 2024).
#The structure behind the promise
Jochen Kirchhoff has formulated the decisive sentence: the theosphere has become the technosphere. What was once the sphere of the divine, the space in which human beings located transcendence, meaning and salvation, has migrated into the sphere of technology (cf. Kirchhoff, 2022).
The parallels are not superficial. They are structural:
- Eternal life becomes Longevity Escape Velocity: biological immortality by 2032, sold by a man who markets nutritional supplements under the brand name TRANSCEND.
- Resurrection becomes the digital avatar. Kurzweil has built a chatbot from the writings of his deceased father.
- The transformation of creation becomes computronium: hypothetical matter in which every atom serves as logic gate, the planets dismantled and converted into computational substrate.
These are not analogies a critic brings in from outside. It is the same psychic structure: the fear of death, the longing for transcendence, the demand for an order greater than the individual. These needs did not disappear when the churches emptied. They changed their carrier (cf. Kirchhoff, 2022).
#The ontological confusion
Spengler wrote in 1931 in Man and Technics: that one was too shallow and cowardly to bear the fact of the transience of all that lives, and crawled behind ideals so as to see nothing (cf. Spengler, 1931). Kurzweil crawls behind exponential curves.
But the deeper error is not psychological, it is ontological. If you question the Singularity thesis on its premise, you find a single, unproven assumption: that consciousness is a computation that can be detached from its biological carrier and transferred to silicon. That is the premise of computationalism, and it is precisely the premise that would have to be proven, not the foundation on which forecasts are built. Gwendolin Kirchhoff formulated the central objection in the Everlast AI debate (2026): one can produce coherence, for example in a blockchain. But the blockchain is therefore not conscious. The Singularity does not fail at computing power. It fails at the confusion of description and being.
Schelling’s natural philosophy offers the counter-concept: nature is not dead matter that can become spirit through technical enhancement, but living spirit that expresses itself in matter. Schelling formulated in 1797 in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: nature should be the visible spirit, the spirit the invisible nature (cf. Schelling, 1797). Whoever has seen this once does not resolve the Singularity thesis through a quarrel about computing power. It dissolves because its basic assumption is false. It is not the machine that produces consciousness. Consciousness is the ground in which machines, like everything else, appear. If you bring this thought to mind, the entire Singularity narrative tips: it promises to produce, by enhancing the part, the whole from which the part stems.
#Why the term is nonetheless important
The Technological Singularity is philosophically worthless as forecast. But it is diagnostically illuminating as symptom. Jochen Kirchhoff has described the entire transhumanist movement not as technical evolution but as pathogenesis: a progressive symptom-development of a particular psycho-physical illness. What is sold as progress — the fusion of the human being with the machine — is the attempt to push back human life into the inorganic and to fetter it there (cf. Kirchhoff, 2023). The Singularity is not the goal of this pathogenesis. It is its end-stage: the point at which the living is to be fully transferred into the calculable.
Mumford described in 1967 in The Myth of the Machine the autonomisation of the principle of the calculating machine as externalisation of an already-completed imprisonment of the human being in abstract rationality (cf. Mumford, 1977). The Singularity promises salvation through precisely that imprisonment. It treats the problem as solution.
If the question occupies you of why transhumanism exerts such attraction despite its philosophical weaknesses, the answer lies not in technology but in anthropology: the human being needs transcendence. They need the feeling that something reaches beyond them. When the old narratives no longer carry, this need migrates. The Singularity is the place at which it currently arrives. The entries on boot problem and computationalism deepen the philosophical strands that form the core of this critique.