Singularity

By
admin
Published: May 14, 2009Posted in: Tags:

 

The Singularity is a staple of science fiction.  Like many historical science-fiction ideas, the concept of the singularity is highly speculative, and criticized as pseudo-science.

After the creation of a superintelligence, a technological singularity is the theoretical future point that will happen during a time of accelerated changes.

Statistician I.J. Good, wrote about an ‘Intelligence Explosion’.  He suggests that if machines can even slightly surpass human intellect, they can improve their own designs in ways that their original human designers did not predict.  That action can recursively augment them into far greater intelligences.  The first round of self-improvements may be small.  As the machines become more intelligent, they will get even better at becoming more intelligent, leading to an exponential and sudden intelligence growth.

The analogy between the breakdown of moder physics near a gravitational singularity and the drastic changes in human society are referred to as ‘The Singularity”.  Professor Vernor Vinge argues that the Singularity will happen after an intelligence explosion.  Vinge popularized the singularity in lectures, science fiction, and essays in the 1980s.  In 2000, the founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, stated his concern over the dangers of Vinge’s singularity. 

Multiple singularities have happened throughout history, affecting the growth rate of economy dramatically, according to Professor Robin Hanson.  The technological singularity will increase economic growth between 60 and 250 times, similar to how the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past did.  Innovations that replace human physical labor can trigger the Singularity event.

Ray Kurzweil beleives the inevitability of a technological singularity is implied by long-term pattern of accelerating change that generalizes Moore’s Law to technologies that predate the integrated circuit.  He argues the accelerated change will continue to technologies that are not invented yet.

 

ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg‎ (SVG file, nominally 1,189 × 924 pixels, file size: 362 KB)  According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.

 

 

More Info:

About the Author

I've been developing professional websites and web applications, since january 1996 for small startups, entrepreneurs, and corporations in every industry imaginable. I'm also a published author, videographer, photographer with a high interest in Innovative Technologies, Robotics, Animatronics, Internet Technologies, Endangered Languages, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, and more.