Technology

Precious few individuals have not been touched by the explosion of information technology that humanity has experienced over the last few decades. So far, however, every last drop of technological marvelousness ever devised has been the work of human hands, and specifically, a human brain. And not one of those marvels has been able to do anything but follow the instructions, step by step, that it has been endowed with: original thought is the purview of living systems – humans chiefly, though animals too, to an extent.  This is about to change.

What, then, is the singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one’s view of life in general and one’s own particular life. – Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

A future beyond our ability to comprehend

Vernon Vinge, a professor of mathematics and science fiction author realised he was having trouble writing stories set in the future, past the point where technology creates smarter than human minds because he was having to try to write characters that were smarter than he was.  Vernon Vinge dubbed this the Singularity, after the centre of a black hole where models of laws of physics break down.

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities – on a still-shorter time scale.-  Vernor Vinge, The Coming Technological Singularity.

Upper limits beyond belief

How far can this process continue? If we regard computational processes that stay well within the realm of observable physics, the potential for intellect many orders of magnitude more powerful than human is perfectly feasible. Our capacities for reason may closer to the minds of our fellow primates than to the intelligences whose creation we can set in motion.

In other words, the development of artificial general intelligence may be comparable in magnitude to the rise of human life on Earth.

Even if you consider only the hardware of the human brain, as opposed to the software, you can see plenty of room for improvement. Human neurons spike an average of 20 times per second. And the fastest recorded neurons in biology spike 1000 times per second, which is still less than a millionth of what a modern computer chip does. Similarly, neural axons transmit signals at less than 150 meters per second. One meter per second is more usual. And that’s less than a millionth the speed of light. So it should be physically possible to have a brain that thinks at one million times the speed a human does without even shrinking it or cooling it. At that rate, you could do one year’s worth of thinking every 31 physical seconds –  Elizer Yudkowsy, Singularity Summit 2007

The Singularity

Coming upon us is a time of unprecedented power, and with that, unprecedented peril and promise. It is, in some ways a test of humanity – will we meet this challenge, or be consumed by our imperfections?

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” Statistician Irving John (I.J.) Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine