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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founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."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: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday April 24 2015, @11:49PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday April 24 2015, @11:49PM (#174890) Journal

    What software are you going to run on this magical hardware?

    Unlike the prevailing von Neumann architecture—but like the brain—TrueNorth has a parallel, distributed, modular, scalable, fault-tolerant, flexible architecture that integrates computation, communication, and memory and has no clock. It is fair to say that TrueNorth completely redefines what is now possible in the field of brain-inspired computers, in terms of size, architecture, efficiency, scalability, and chip design techniques.

    A critical element was one-to-one equivalence—at the functional level of spikes—between TrueNorth and our software simulator, Compass. This equivalence allowed us to begin developing applications long before chips returned from the foundry and to verify correctness of the chip logic.

    If one were to measure activities of 1 million neurons in TrueNorth, one would see something akin to a night cityscape with blinking lights. Given this unconventional computing paradigm, compiling C++ to TrueNorth is like using a hammer for a screw. As a result, to harness TrueNorth, we have designed an end-to-end ecosystem complete with a new simulator, a new programming language, an integrated programming environment, new libraries, new (and old) algorithms as well as applications, and a new teaching curriculum (affectionately called, “SyNAPSE University”). The goal of the ecosystem is to dramatically increase programmer productivity. Metaphorically, if TrueNorth is “ENIAC”, then our ecosystem is the corresponding “FORTRAN.”

    We are working, at a feverish pace, to make the ecosystem available—as widely as possible—to IBMers, universities, business partners, start-ups, and customers. In collaboration with the international academic community, by leveraging the ecosystem, we foresee being able to map the existing body of neural network algorithms to the architecture in an efficient manner, as well as being able to imagine and invent entirely new algorithms.

    To support these algorithms at ever increasing scale, TrueNorth chips can be seamlessly tiled to create vast, scalable neuromorphic systems. In fact, we have already built systems with 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses. Our sights are now set high on the ambitious goal of integrating 4,096 chips in a single rack with 4 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses while consuming ~4kW of power.

    We envision augmenting our neurosynaptic cores with synaptic plasticity to create a new generation of field-adaptable neurosynaptic computers capable of online learning.

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  • (Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:55AM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:55AM (#174961) Homepage

    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&

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