Richard Sutton shares his 1975 essay predicting the intelligence explosion at age 17
RichardSSutton · x · 2026-10-31
Turing Award winner and RL pioneer Richard Sutton shares why he is sanguine about the singularity: he saw it coming over 50 years ago. In 1975, at 17, he wrote that a breakthrough in understanding the brain would trigger exponential self-improvement — once man creates intelligence greater than his own, that intelligence should create greater intelligence still, so 'the level of intelligence will shoot up with incredible rapidity, probably within the space of years,' leaving humanity either behind by a superior intelligence it can no longer understand, or transformed into that intelligence itself.
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