How singular the singularity

This article summarizes an old idea in the scientific community, dating back I suspect before the 1980s, though I haven't researched the origins of this verbal formulation of a much older idea. 

The link to the whole article  explaining what scientists mean by "a singularity," may go to a page you have to sign in to so here is part of the article, written by Wally Bahny, a blogger for techrepublic.com

Moore’s Law (i.e., the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years) has been expanded to anything technology related. As a matter of fact, Moore’s Law is expected to continue for at least five more years and perhaps much longer. The question becomes, though: What will be the change that causes us to deviate from that theory?Some say it will be a dramatic slowdown in technological advancement. The human race will eventually hit a wall, and we’ll be stuck at a technological level. This might happen centuries from now, or it may be next year, but we will come upon that point; our brains can only handle so much advancement and innovation. Entomologist and population biologist Paul Ehrlich gave a lecture on June 27, 2008 in San Francisco during which he stated that the human brain has not changed much in about 50,000 years. Cultural evolution information such as this leads to the wall-type theory: But, what if the opposite happened? What if that wall was beyond the point where humans could create autonomous, thinking, self-advancing machines? Machines could reprogram their own source code and essentially learn freely without human intervention (think Data on Star Trek). This point in technology could trigger what has become known as The Singularity (or the Technological Singularity). If it is possible for humans to reach this point in technological advancement, the machines could create new, better versions of themselves (thus advancing their intelligence) or simply rewrite their source code to advance their intelligence. Without the limitations of the human brain, the cap on intelligence could be infinite.

Reverse engineering this idea, so to speak, makes me wonder if the idea of god always had this combo horror/ joy effect. But that's a subject for another blog.