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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founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."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) by slinches on Friday April 24 2015, @06:20PM

    by slinches (5049) on Friday April 24 2015, @06:20PM (#174783)

    Which I can't find right now, so that may not be true.

    But I doubt they are strongly positively correlated when you control for primary drivers of reported happiness like socioeconomic status and health.

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

    by frojack (1554) on Friday April 24 2015, @07:07PM (#174800) Journal

    Yeah, I saw the same study, or something similar in the past couple weeks.
    Seems to me they measured the wrong things - as I recall it was mostly economic measures.

    I'm guessing that super intelligent people go through life in utter despair over the state of mankind.
    But I'm merely guessing here.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 1) by Newander on Friday April 24 2015, @07:07PM

    by Newander (4850) on Friday April 24 2015, @07:07PM (#174801)

    I seem to remember a study that showed that ignorance is directly proportional to bliss.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Paradise Pete on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:47AM

      by Paradise Pete (1806) on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:47AM (#174938)

      I seem to remember a study that showed that ignorance is directly proportional to bliss.

      Happiness is highly correlated with having reasonable and realistic expectations.

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:39PM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:39PM (#175138) Journal

        OK, so let's say you're held in hostage, and you have the reasonable and realistic expectation that you will soon get killed in a cruel and painful way. Does that really make you happy?

        Happiness is highly correlated with having positive expectations.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:22AM

          by Paradise Pete (1806) on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:22AM (#180572)

          Happiness is highly correlated with having positive expectations.

          Realistic positive expectations. Of course you can be in a situation where there's little expectation of a good outcome, but in the general case, the happiest people are those with realistic expectations.