The Singularity

[Evil Chris]

Is it all bullshit? Or could it just be possible?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress?typically associated with advancements in computer hardware or the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.

Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

Humans should make sure that they can always just pull the plug if necessary.

[Evil Chris]

nobody has heard of this? Well ok nevermind... we'll talk about it after we've downloaded our brains.

[pimplink]

no one knows.. we have to wait till the situation arrives..

[John-ACWM]

Technology is amazing,in good and bad

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by Evil Chris

Is it all bullshit? Or could it just be possible?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Humans should make sure that they can always just pull the plug if necessary.

Of course it's possible. Once we develop true artificial intelligence, the development of technology as a whole will explode within a matter of years.

The only problem is actually developing true artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as people once thought. Human consciousness is embodied and embedded in physical reality. That is to say, we "outsource" a vast portion of our cognitive processes to the environment, and are attuned to the natural world in millions of different ways through many millions of years of evolution. So the simple functionalist approach we spent the latter half of the 20th century on is unlikely to lead to similar results.

To create truly creative AI, we need to surpass things that developed through evolution in vast amounts of time. Obviously, simply "inventing" something like that is possible. So, we would need to use a simulation of evolutionary processes to accomplish it. But since it took nature millions of years, it will cost us a rather large amount of time as well.

First we'll need to invent the technology necessary to run such simulations, then we'll need to build a framework of software to run them in, and finally, we'll need to run them. Combined, those things may well take another few centuries.