HESPERIA, CALIF., June 7 (Our Hesperia) — By Eric Swanson
A Rome-based translation company’s AI trend shows machine translation may reach human-level quality by the end of the decade, Popular Mechanics reported, adding a new benchmark to debate over the “technological singularity.”
The metric comes from Translated, which tracked AI translation performance from 2014 to 2022 using “Time to Edit,” or TTE, according to the report. The measure looks at how long professional human editors take to fix AI-generated translations compared with translations done by humans.
Translated analyzed more than 2 billion post-edits over the eight-year period.
It takes a human translator about one second per word to edit another human translator’s work. In 2015, professional editors took about 3.5 seconds per word to check a machine-translated suggestion, while the figure was about 2 seconds per word at the time of the report.
Popular Mechanics said the trend suggests that, if it continues, Translated’s AI could reach human-level translation quality by the end of the decade or sooner.
That finding does not establish that a broader technological singularity is imminent. The sources reviewed describe the singularity as a prediction-heavy and contested concept, not a settled event with a precise date.
The technological singularity is generally described as a possible point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and accelerates technological change. Predictions about when that could happen vary widely.
Ray Kurzweil, identified as an American computer scientist and futurist, has long predicted human-level AI around 2029 and the singularity in 2045. Kurzweil is continuing to stand by a near-term prediction for human-level AI and has also forecast a major expansion of intelligence by 2045 through brain interfaces involving nanobots.
Wikipedia’s technological singularity entry summarizes earlier predictions, including Vernor Vinge’s 1993 forecast of greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030 and Kurzweil’s 2005 prediction of human-level AI around 2029 and the singularity in 2045.
The same entry summarizes informal AI researcher polls conducted in 2012 and 2013 by Nick Bostrom and Vincent C. Müller as producing a median 50% confidence that human-level AI would be developed between 2040 and 2050.
Other supplied sources gave different timelines. ETC Journal articles from 2025 placed a possible transformative singularity in the 2030s or 2040s. The Institute for the Study of Poetic Cybernetics and Realities claimed the effective onset occurred between October 2025 and January 2026, but that claim was not independently verified in the reviewed materials.
For Hesperia and the High Desert did not include local adoption data, local policy changes or local business use tied to Translated’s AI translation metric.
