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DanyalEscaped:
"What do you think about the Technological Singularity?

The Technological Singularity is the idea that in the (near) future an 'intelligence explosion' will happen, resulting in technological progress that's quicker than a ('non-enhanced', biological) human can understand.

Fundamental to the idea of the Singularity is the concept of 'Seed AI' or 'recursively self-improved AI'.

Seed AI is a hypothesized type of strong artificial intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement. If the AI was about as good at programming as the people that created it, it should be able to reprogram itself to be even more intelligent. Having improved itself it would then become better at improving itself, potentially leading to an exponential increase in intelligence.

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

Computers are already better than human intelligence in many ways. Your calculators can calculate quicker than you do, Wikipedia stores more information than your brain, computers can beat the best humans at chess, etcetera.

Humans still beat AI at things like pattern recognition and language. This isn't strange: the computational power of the human brain is only rivaled by the biggest and most expensive supercomputers. But if the exponential progress of computing power progresses like it has done for roughly the last century, affordable PCs will have the same power as the brain before 2030.

It seems likely that we'll figure out how the brain works (and use this to construct human-like AI) roughly around that year. Vernor Vinge expects the Singularity to happen before 2030, Kurzweil suggests 2045.

Human-like AI means that we can combine the best characteristics of human thinking and computers. You know in which ways you are 'superior' to computers, but there are many ways in which computers can improve upon human thinking...

Speed. Our axons carry signals at 75 meters per second or slower. A machine can pass signals along about 4 million times more quickly.

Computational resources. The brain’s size and neuron count is restrained by skull size, metabolism, and other factors. AIs could be built on the scale of buildings or cities or larger. When we can make circuits no smaller, we can just add more of them.

Rationality. As we explored earlier, human brains do nothing like optimal belief formation or goal achievement. Machines can be built from the ground up using (computable approximations of) optimal Bayesian decision networks, and indeed this is already a leading paradigm in artificial agent design.

Introspective access / editability. We humans have almost no introspective access to our cognitive algorithms, and cannot easily edit and improve them. Machines can already do this (see Eurisko and metaheuristics). A limited hack like the method of loci greatly improves human memory; machines can do this kind of thing in spades.

There is no reason in principle why machines could not surpass our abilities at technology design or general reasoning by a similar margin. The human level is a minor pit-stop on the way to the highest level of intelligence allowed by physics, and there is plenty of room above us.

http://facingthesingularity.com/2011/plenty-of-room-above-us/

"Facing the Singularity" explains the Singularity in an excellent way. There is also a subreddit dedicated to it: r/singularity.

Bill Gates is a 'believer'. Google just recruited Ray Kurzweil. Google, Cisco and Nokia are founders of Singularity University.

I'm very interested in the concept and at the moment I think it's rather likely. What do you think and know about the Technological Singularity?"

TheHamburglurgler:
"Honestly, the singularity scares the shit out of me and at the same time represents a brilliant ray of hope for me. If superhuman technology is used for the benefit of the few, then that would put most humans ( I'd say 90% or more) in the category of ''completely useless and in the way.'' However, if this technology is manages to fall into the right hands, the way everyone lives will be drastically more positive. Either way, the singularity will be the dawn of a new age in humanity."

nukefudge:
"it's a nice scifi thing. it also affects research, obviously.

however, it's pretty clear from the above that consciousness has not been handled adequately. we're not at a point where we can say "oh that? yeah we sorted that out, let's just build the computer already". and that is why i choose to call this "scifi" rather than anything else.

in other words, there are conceptual problems afoot. but really, that's been the case since the linguistic turn (before that too, obviously, but that whole computer fest kinda started there, i think)."

wuhwuhwolves:
"One thing at a time. Before we can create true artificial intelligence, we need to understand exactly what intelligence actually is. I think that is one of the things holding A.I. development back, isn't it?"

vitaminsandmineral:
"We'll see. If you're a peak oil type you probably believe the machine will suffer a thermodynamic decay before the singularity happens. It would be great though. If all past can be recreated in perfect similtude and be available to all consciousnesses I wouldn't mind seeing the concert on the first Nirvana tour I passed up because, "...I've never heard of them before and I have to go into work"...to wash dishes at a shitty chain restaurant."

EvilTony:
"Sometimes I think that if the singularity does come it will be like not being able to tell the difference between dreaming and being awake. Or maybe we'll all become like schizophrenics not being able to tell what's real or imagined..."

Polycephal_Lee:
"It's extremely exciting. We are on the verge (next half-century) of being able to create consciousnesses, and even edit our own. That makes philosophy enormously important.

Imagine being able to create a being that can experience only pain and loneliness. Of course there will never be an experimental verification of consciousnesses other than our own, but this is a scary proposition. On the other side, imagine technology that lets you experience pure bliss, a multiplication of all the great things we can feel, heroin * orgasm * love * etc. The capability to write our own experiences is frightening, even when it's positive.

Imagine being restricted by the speed of light. Eventually, our minds will move so quickly, that we will get bored extremely fast. You'll be able to consume the wealth of knowledge from everywhere almost instantaneously, and you'll have to just wait for more information to come in at the speed of light. Proximity will become a much more important factor in communication when we can digest things at the speed of light.

There are so many possibilities.

If you are interested in philosophy and AI, I highly recommend all the papers here: http://singularity.org/research/ especially this one by the genius Eliezer Yudkowsky: http://singularity.org/files/ComplexValues.pdf."

thehappyheathen:
"I just took a course on Heidegger and Technology this Fall, and this was a major topic of discussion. One thing I think has to be addressed is that these target dates are largely the product of Ray Kurzweil's imagination. While he may be brilliant, he is also fallible and obsessed with eternal life and resurrecting his dead father via technology (seriously, he wants AI to make him a new virtual daddy). Just because something grows exponentially for 10 years, or even 30, doesn't mean it will always grow exponentially. Population curves are a great example of exponential growth that tapers off and asymptotically approaches carrying capacity.

Maybe what looks like an exponential growth explosion that will never end is actually just the "population" curve of technology. Technology is proliferating and growing in power and penetration globally because it's just getting started. While I don't actually believe this, I just think it's worth noting that predicting the future is a fuzzy business, and if the weatherman can't be sure it will snow next week, why should I believe machines will be self-aware in 30 years?

Another thing that I think is worth noting is that if we were to gain the ability to edit ourselves, what would we become? If an alcoholic erased their desire to drink, would they be better off? It's tempting to say yes, but what has this conflict contributed to their identity? In fact, if you were to delete your vices, what's to say the process would not become repetitive? First you delete your insomnia, then you notice you're overweight, so you edit your appetite. Now, getting a full night's rest and being slim, you adjust your testosterone levels and augment your desire to work out. Who's to say that editting yourself wouldn't necessarily delete memories? Maybe you're overweight and have trouble sleeping because of your childhood. Delete insomnia, edit appetite and you delete parts of your childhood too. Even worse, you're not you anymore. An old friend might not even recognize you, your habits have changed due to self-editting, but is it self-improvement?

Finally, why wouldn't AI's delete their resident humans? If AI's have access to their software, and your consciousness is in there, why not delete the human and use those resources for storing more data and optimizing performance? It's nice to think we could live forever in machines, but we would be tenants of a consciousness that we may never be able to understand, and we would have nowhere to go if they decided to give us the boot."

stingray85:
"I will re-post my comment from your same submission in r/philosophyofscience:

The problem I have with the idea is the unbounded, and often mystical optimism of "singularists". While the possibility of intelligent machines or new artificial systems of intelligence isn't particularly controversial, the claims of exponentiality are much harder to take seriously. Many (most? ALL?) natural phenomenon that appear exponential are only so in the short term - after a while it turns out we were just on the up-slope of a bell curve-like sigmoid. Natural growth peaks and then flattens out because of hard limits - not enough space or resources. The same would almost certainly be true of technological growth- there are physical limits we cannot get around, like the speed of light, or the microscopic scale at which materials become too weak or disordered to be useful. We may be closer to these hard physical limits than we like to think; perhaps we are approaching an age not of hyper-growth in intelligence, but of stagnation. Few singularists consider this, or even seem aware of the possibility, and I have not heard a reason why they might be correct about the continued exponentiality of technological growth as opposed to this alternative."

RedundantPurpose:
"I have been interested in transhumanism and the singularity since the early 1990's. If none of the religions are correct in explaining reality then we will most definitely see a technological singularity in the future. The evidence for exponential growth in information is too apparent to dismiss.

It is extremely scary and also exciting at the same time. Hopefully we don't end up destroying ourselves if and when it happens."

pimpbot:
"Intelligence and consciousness are modes of relating to specific environments. It is a fallacy IMO to think that such things can be measured in a linear way with some things at the top of some imaginary scale and other things underneath. You think you are "more intelligent" than a shark? Try to think your way out of the middle of the Atlantic.

Furthermore, much of the claims of this movement are inherently suspect and possibly even meaningless. For example, take the claim that computers 'as powerful as a human brain' will be available in 2030. This is based purely on computations per second metric. Now, IF I believed that intelligence and/or consciousness were purely a function of computations per second, this would be an interesting comparison. However, why would I believe that? Why, in particular, should I be so willing to discount the influence of culture, politics and society in the development of human intelligence? All things that are not functions of computational speed.

So I see a lot of wishful thinking and people clamoring for a new belief system to replace the gap that religion once filled. I'm not saying it is wrong, I'm just saying I don't see near enough critical skepticism being expressed."