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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founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."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 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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