Beep beep boop. Beep beep – boop. This could be how we’ll all talk one day if Google’s predictions about humanity’s future come true.

Well, kind of. Metro attended the tech giant’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, in Mountain View, California, last week.

To gasps from attendees – Metro included – Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s AI lab, DeepMind, said: ‘When we look back at this time, I think we will realise that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.’

Wait, what is the ‘singularity’?
The singularity is the theoretical moment when AI – that tech that currently spits out Love Island fruit videos – becomes smarter than humans.

This would open up a world where people could augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their brains naturally possess.

‘That word, “singularity”, really registered with me,’ says Dorfman.

‘Singularity means, mathematically, that you spew off into infinity all of a sudden.

‘It will be the inflection point where we move into a different regime of how quickly we can do the work that would have historically taken years or even decades, now only taking months or even shorter.’

Dorfman, who has been with Google for nearly two decades, has already seen this in action.

Most science isn’t pouring colourful liquids into beakers – it’s coding tests on powerful computers, now often using AI tools.

‘What is the slowest, most laborious part of what we do? That’s what we were trying to focus on,’ she says.

‘I’ve watched scientists go, “I used to have to code this myself, and now I have this tool, I tell it what I want it to do, and then I go to sleep. When I wake up in the morning, it’s explored 1,000 different things”.’

The future is ‘exciting’ to people like Dorfman because the singularity means people could try out ’10 different things’ in a flash.

‘I think that there’s also going to be an expected fundamental shift in the productivity and outputs of science,’ she adds.

Read More: Google thinks we could reach ‘singularity’ soon – what does that mean?