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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founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."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: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2015, @07:40PM
If a brain can do it, we can do it. The brain is a machine.
There's no guarantee of an intelligence explosion, but if neuromorphic chips get improved and stacked, they could approach and exceed the power of the human brain. There's also the possibility of building a synthetic biological brain or a brain-computer bridge.
Fill up a 1.5 L volume with neuromorphic chips or computer-enabled neurons, and you compete with the existing constraints of the human brain (the brain is said to consume 20 W of power, but you can use more with the goal of increasing efficiency as you make improvements). Scale that up to 2 L or more, and you could see an exponential increase in "intelligence". Increased brain volume seems to loosely correlate with greater intelligence, and a large portion of human and animal brains are devoted to sense and movement, not higher thinking. So you could get more bang for your 1.5+ liters. Eventually you deal with interconnect constraints, but if you scale your machine to the size of modern day supercomputers, the results could be dramatic. You may even be able to control the "explosion".
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(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Friday April 24 2015, @09:12PM
Right. And if we had a limitless supply of unobtanium, we could use it to power our antigravity time machine flying cars.
Will we eventually build a computer smarter than an human? I'm sure of it. Will it happen in my lifetime? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Will that computer recursively design exponentially more powerful computers in an intelligence explosion? Ha! Good one. Now, pull the other finger....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2015, @10:01PM
Only 100,000 IBM TrueNorth chips [ibm.com] are needed to reach 100 billion "neurons". Less than an order of magnitude more than the scale of some supercomputers (Tianhe-2 uses 32,000 Intel Xeon and 48,000 Xeon Phi chips). 70 mW per chip times 100,000 chips is a miniscule 7 kilowatts. Even if total power consumption was a thousand times more, that's less than some of the aforementioned supercomputers.
Now manufacture TrueNorth on a 7nm process and see what happens to those figures. Stacking neuromorphic chips is also a lot more likely than traditional chips because they use a less power and generate a less heat. NAND also gets hot, and there are commercially available 32 layer V-NAND chips, with 128 layer products in the works.
Keep in shape and you might get to see the next phase of civilization.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday April 24 2015, @11:41PM
Great. So you're proposing we throw an as-yet-nonexistant number of chips into a giant Beowulf cluster just to reach the number of transistors as a brain has neurons.
What software are you going to run on this magical hardware?
As impractical as the hardware is, it's the least of our worries when it comes to human-type artificial intelligence. You can throw more hardware at the problem until the cows come home and it's still not going to come up with the answer.
Right now, the only way we know for certain that we could create a computer analogue of an human brain through brute force by means of throwing more hardware at it...is with a physics-level simulation. And we're so far away from that sort of computation it's ludicrous to suggest human civilization will ever be capable of it.
Assuming I don't do anything stupid and civilization doesn't collapse in the mean time, I should have at least another few decades, minimum, and not unreasonably half a century. Possibly even more depending on what kinds of medical advances are made before then and my access to them.
I fully expect to see computers that are superficially human-like. I've already gotten some impressive robocalls, and there's Siri and Watson. We already have computers that play better games of chess than any human ever will, and lots of other computers that do all sorts of other things than any human ever will.
I'm much less sanguine about the possibility of the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" being licked in my lifetime. A lot of pieces are starting to come together such that I wouldn't be surprised if it happens, but I'd be a fool to expect it to.
But a superintelligent singularity of exponential intelligence growth?
Please. That's such a bad joke it's not even funny once. Every human society has been plagued with nutjobs convinced that the gods are going to arrive any moment and boy will they be pissed -- and this singularity fantasy is just more of the same bullshit. Once it was angels in chariots; then aliens in UFOs. Jesus and his flaming sword o' death; now Rosko's Basilisk. Yawn.
And, again, if it did happen...the point in worrying about it...is...what, exactly...?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday April 24 2015, @11:49PM
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(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:55AM
My buzzphrase-o-meter melted from overload midway through the second paragraph. The resulting conflagration took out my bullshit meter with it -- which was a good thing since it at least shut up the infernal racket the thing was making.
I mean, have you any clue how often marketing departments compare their sniny new toys that never see any practical application to brains?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.