The Technological Singularity
As I mentioned earlier, it is obvious that life is forever speeding up. In almost every area, change is occurring faster and faster. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries; calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes; communication that used to take months happens in seconds.
The reason for this acceleration is that each new development is, so to speak, standing on the shoulders of what has come before.
The idea that there might be a singularity in human development was first suggested by the mathematician Vernor Vinge, and subsequently by others, most notably Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near. They argue that if computing power keeps doubling every eighteen months, as it has done for the last fifty years, then sometime in the future there will be computers that can equal the performance of the human brain. From there, it is only a small step to a computer that can surpass the human brain. There would then be little point in our designing future computers; ultra-intelligent machines would be able to design better ones, and do so faster.
What happens then is a big question. Some propose that humans would become obsolete; machines would become the vanguard of evolution. Others think there would be a merging of human and machine intelligence – downloading our minds into computers, perhaps. The only thing we can confidently predict is that this would be a complete break from the patterns of the past. Evolution would have moved into a radically new realm.
But this transition, as major as it would be, would not yet be true singularity in the mathematical sense. Evolution – whether human, machine, or a synthesis of the two – would continue at an ever-increasing pace. Development timescales would continue to shorten, from decades to years, to months, to days. Before long, they would approach zero. The rate of change would then become infinite. We would have reached a true mathematical singularity.
September 21st, 2009 at 7:22 am
[...] I mentioned earlier, there are effectively two singularity theories: the Technological singularity and the Consciousness singularity. The year 2012 has come to serve as a hub, nexus and strange [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
It’s not that long from now. I believe we will see computers progressing hyper-exponentially. All the way to infinity. How can we compute infinite information? Using a single particle positioned in a superposition of infinite analog states and letting it interact with other particles. There would be limitations on what we could read out of the devise due to bandwidth constraints. But within the machine it could come with the entire number pi or any other number. If that’s not feasible then how about creating an open time-like curve somehow. compounding computer power as much as you want…
January 7th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Hard to swallow but something really will come in 2012. It’s almost here.
The idea of human and machine together is amazing!