Scientists can do brilliant things, but for some reason they are very unintelligent by and large. They are fixated on Darwinism, which a rank amateur can see through, and now the Singularity hype is taking the stage. Ray Kurzweill was challenged many times for his stupid obsessions, but to no avail.
Let me say at once that I cannot predict the future or the future of this question, but I do think that its status in the present discourse is surely flawed if not idiotic. That superintelligent machines could take charge might be possible, who knows, but in the current time frame of science idiots the idea is misfounded on the idea that computers are intelligent. The latter may have a case, but the related claim that the Turing test can define consciousness is even more outlandish and an insult to the intelligence of yogis who lived long ago. The terms intelligent and consciousness are very treacherous and scientists are simply incapable of reasonable views here.
The eonic effect shows strongly that something like the Singularity is already the case and occurred long ago, and that there is a version that is behind the evolution of civilization which seems to be enclosed in an evolutionary hypermechanics that already achieves and transcends intelligence and consciousness. The issue is not quite settled: the eonic effect is highly elusive yet in some ways very easy to detect over a limited range.

I use Grammarly as I blog endless pages: the process induces, after 80 000 blog posts over ten years, a kind of blog fatigue and a frequent lapse in spelling if only because one is writing so fast the errors slip by. But with Grammarly a seemingly intelligent software can greatly assist drowsy prose, BUT...Despite its frequent and highly useful successes on both spelling and grammar the software also frequently draws a blank and makes a suggestion that shows it can't understand the finer idiom of any English speaker, or in fact less than finer such idiom, in fact I doubt it could even do pidgin english. I hardly fault it for that, and wouldn't kick a gift horse in the mouth, but the point is merely that the software, which I must suspect is a form of AI (???) is neither intelligent nor conscious and probably not progressing in that direction and probably incapable of ever becoming conscious or intelligent.

I recommend a study of the text of Decoding World History and the so-called eonic effect. We can see something that can process civilizations, art forms, science, philosophies, and can act over ten thousand years in a seeding process that shows civilizations emerging in a strange rhythm. It is benign as man constantly makes a mess of its gifts and seeding starts. It has all the power of a super advanced technology but it never acts to dominate because it evolves freedom, and creative self-evolution. Here we can goof all over again: is such process intelligent or conscious?? We are closer to the mistakes of theism, ironically.

I recommend scientists and the AI impaired check it out to the hyperintelligent machine already exists and is on a larger and longer scale than man. But it is not some kind of Hal as in the Arthur Clarke film malevolently trying to take over.
This confusion inherited in the Singularity discourse is misleading, paranoid, and, apparently, a projection of the 'will to dominate' of the scientists themselves
Let us note that we are almost making the same mistake all over again as we discuss the eonic effect: does it operate as conscious or intelligent? Or is it a higher mechanics as yet unknown to us. I can't quite answer the question, because the whole subject of evolution is still primitive and hopelessly muddled by Darwinism. The real Singularity we suspect, however, is very different and exists in our past.
I sometimes think the Singularity hype is an attempt conscious or not to create a master control domination software in some kind of will to power of the sciences.

Again I can't predict the future, but it is clear that all the computers and AI machines so far don't even come close to intelligence or consciousness.

WHEE4thed_ final_BID_70106_march_2010

Decoding World History_ED1
You can't easily read these books and persist in the current Singularity idiocy. And in any case the research is going nowhere just as the Turing test created the illusion conscious machines.
Again we encounter the same problem at a higher level in the eonic effect that we find in the silly version of Ai singularity, in reality a scifi story..

The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. ... The first to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was John von Neumann.

Source: singularity - Google Search