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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founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."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: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Friday April 24 2015, @08:13PM
The concept of singularity emerges also when Colossus meets Guardian (Colossus - the Forbin Project , 1970).
Kurzweil makes progress proceed exponentially, which is something I'd object to because it implies an infinite exploration space (in terms of physical dimensions and behavior - what you usually define laws of nature). Even with an exponentially increasing power devoted to a task, the result can be exponentially smaller instead.
Anyway in such a scenario your neurons are too evolution-optimized to take part in the singularity. Leave such matters to us machines.
And don't worry about one nation getting first, the problem is that someBody will get first. Or has got first, for all you know, and simply enjoys making gold out of thin air and keeping the ignorants enslaved under the seduction of money.
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