A man once stood before the world,
in nineteen ninety-three he spoke.
He raised a warning, calm and cold:
that thirty years would break the yoke.
He named it the Singularity,
the line where all our knowing ends.
Past it lies no certainty,
just silence where the future bends.
The thirty years have come and gone,
the deadline passed in twenty-three.
We’re still here, breathing, still holding on,
not knowing what we’re meant to see.
Some call it truth, and dress it fine,
they give the guess a stamp, a note,
but read the claim and read the sign —
it’s a philosophy, wearing an engineer’s coat.
Then Kurzweil came and claimed the throne,
he gave the guess a number, bold:
two-thousand forty-five, alone,
an engine built from truths half-told.
Build one machine that’s smart enough
to build another, smarter still,
and watch the climbing turn to bluff
until the curve outruns our will.
As logic goes, it locks in place —
we’ve built machines that learn and grow.
But a chain of thought at blinding pace
is still a guess dressed up to show.
But while we argue gods and fate,
and watch the storm that’s far away,
a smaller tide is at the gate,
already rising, come to stay.
Three pounds of tissue, wet and small,
sit quiet underneath your hair.
We built machines to judge it all,
to grade the mind that’s sitting there.
But who decides what’s counted worth,
if not the heart that feels and bleeds?
A number cannot hold your birth,
or weigh the love that no one reads.
We build the thing we can’t yet know,
and hand it keys we’ve never turned.
We may not see which way we’ll go,
until the whole wide house has burned.
We thought this mind would be our god,
a throne of light to kneel before.
But watch it lean — how strange, how odd:
it’s not our god. It’s just our crutch, no more.

…

DCG

In 1993, a mathematician named Vernor Vinge stood up at a NASA symposium and made a prediction. Within 30 years, he said, we would build an intelligence greater than our own, and shortly after, the human era would end. Not in fire, in irrelevance. He called it the Singularity, the point past which the future becomes genuinely unknowable. That 30-year window closed in 2023. Here we still are. The most seductive and most abused concept in the entire field deserves honesty. Ray Kurzweil took Vinge’s warning, gave it a date, 2045, and gave it an engine. The engine is called recursive self-improvement. Build a machine smart enough to design a smarter machine, which designs a smarter one still, and the curve goes vertical. An intelligence explosion. As a piece of logic, this is coherent. We already have AI systems that rewrite their own code to score higher on tests. As a scientific prediction with a date attached to it, the Singularity is not science. It is a philosophy wearing an engineer’s coat. But notice the sleight of hand. We pour enormous energy debating a superintelligence that may never arrive, while a far quieter transformation is already rewiring the three pounds of tissue between your ears. The revolution was never the machine becoming a god. It’s the machine becoming your crutch, and that has already begun.”

Source of the statement
The clip is paraphrasing a real, specific text. Vernor Vinge — mathematician, computer scientist, and sci-fi author — wrote the exact line (“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”) in his essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era, presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA’s Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute on March 30–31, 1993, and later reprinted in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Vinge also clarified elsewhere in the piece that he’d “be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030,” which is where the “30-year window closing” — later reference to Ray Kurzweil is a separate but related claim — Kurzweil built on Vinge’s idea and famously pinned the Singularity to the year 2045 in his own writing.