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What If One Country Achieves the Singularity First ?
WRITTEN BY ZOLTAN ISTVAN
The concept of a technological singularity ( 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founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."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
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Friday April 24 2015, @05:37PM
From your link:
I'm generally not a fan of the New Scientist magazine as what most of what I read in the past gave me the impression that perhaps science was being poorly understood, sensationalized or misrepresented. However, there was one interesting article in the 90s about the work of Stephen Thaler [imagination-engines.com]. Subscription required to read the full article [newscientist.com] from their site unfortunately. It's mentioned briefly on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] also though.
Thaler's basic premise was that we could already build neural nets that act as a self associative memory where they memorize images or other data and can recollect it when stimulated with part of that data or something similar to it. By introducing some random noise into these networks he succeeded in making them produce images, musical compositions and other designs that previously didn't exist. Too much noise and he would get bizarre "picasso cars", too little and he got the familiar memorized outputs, but in between came good ideas. A second neural net could also be trained to distinguish the good and bad ideas.
Now I know this is still a long way away from a truly general purpose AI brain but it certainly seems to me like creativity is not some holy grail of AI that remains beyond reach for artificial neural networks and computer software. How much of human artwork and creativity is truly unique and how much is just a random mash up of what has come before, filtered through critical eyes and popularity contests?
I don't think there was much wrong with the Turing Test personally. It fails when the tester makes poor choices for the questions.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?