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posted by LaminatorX on Friday April 24 2015, @04:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the AI-sans-frontieres dept.

What If One Country Achieves the Singularity First ?
WRITTEN BY ZOLTAN ISTVAN

The concept of a technological singu​larity ( http://www.singularitysymposium.com/definition-of-singularity.html ) is tough to wrap your mind around. Even experts have differing definitions. Vernor Vinge, responsible for spreading the idea in the 1990s, believes it's a moment when growing superintelligence renders our human models of understanding obsolete. Google's Ray Kurzweil says 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." Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes." Even Christian theologians have chimed in, sometimes referring to it as "the rapture of the nerds."

My own definition of the singularity is: the point where a fully functioning human mind radically and exponentially increases its intelligence and possibilities via physically merging with technology.

All these definitions share one basic premise—that technology will speed up the acceleration of intelligence to a point when biological human understanding simply isn’t enough to comprehend what’s happening anymore.

If an AI exclusively belonged to one nation (which is likely to happen), and the technology of merging human brains and machines grows sufficiently (which is also likely to happen), then you could possibly end up with one nation controlling the pathways into the singularity.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-if-one-country-achieves-the-singularity-first

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by WillAdams on Friday April 24 2015, @04:58PM

    by WillAdams (1424) on Friday April 24 2015, @04:58PM (#174726)

    Ages ago, this was something which I was curious about and desperately wanted to believe in:

      - The Last Question
      - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
      - Dark Star
      - True Names
      - The Turing Option
      - The Cybernetic Samurai

    (Depressing how few of those are listed on Wikipedia's page on A.I. in sci-fi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_fiction [wikipedia.org] )

    The problem is, A.I. is so hard, and modern machines so inefficient that the electrical costs alone are a problem in-and-of-themselves.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2015, @05:04PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday April 24 2015, @05:04PM (#174733) Journal

    modern machines so inefficient that the electrical costs alone are a problem in-and-of-themselves.

    Get neuromorphic: [soylentnews.org] lower power, more like the brain! [ibm.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday April 24 2015, @07:38PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday April 24 2015, @07:38PM (#174815) Homepage

    The problem is, A.I. is so hard

    They probably said the same about landing on the Moon in 1900. And 1930. And 1950.

    Mind you, it seems pretty far-fetched that it'll happen any time in the near future now, as well...

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:18AM (#174998)

      it seems pretty far-fetched that it'll happen any time in the near future

      How can you tell it hasn't happened already?

      There exists an artificial intelligence, tirelessly searching and pattern matching and improving itself, spanning continents, answering questions in various languages, because that is what it was built for.

      And it has already changed our lifes beyond recognizion, we just get used to good things so quickly we didn't even notice.