Imagine a future where engineers build a computer with greater-than-human intelligence. This hyper-intelligent being expands its knowledge and brainpower exponentially over days and weeks as it learns how to improve on its own hardware and software design. It starts building 'offspring' even smarter than itself.
The sudden arrival of these offspring – cheap, mass-produced super-intelligent machines – sparks explosive economic growth, triggering a series of cascading events.
We see the rise of accelerated biotechnology that renders most diseases harmless, nanotechnology that allows us to convert any object into any other, while microscopic, self-replicating machines begin to scour the planet, ridding it of toxic waste and repairing the damage done by industrialisation.
Soon, we have the ability to alter and improve our bodies with genetic engineering. And not long after that, we learn how to transfer our memories and thoughts – ourselves – into human-like robots. We become super-intelligent beings with indestructible bodies (thanks to an abundance of cheap spare parts), bodies that can last forever.
Death, famine, disease and environmental degradation become a thing of the past. Human history passes a turning point that makes our progress during the Industrial Revolution look like we were dawdling. We harness extraordinary energies and expand across the Solar System.
It sounds like science fiction; and for now, that's all it is.
But a growing number of respected thinkers are not just saying this is likely: they see it happening in the next 20 to 30 years.
THEY base their predictions on the fact that technology is advancing fast – the processing power of computers doubles every two years. If this continues at current rates, then machines will surpass the processing capacity of the human brain sometime between 2030 and 2040.
Once a computer becomes aware, it will be able to improve on itself faster than any human designer, ushering in advances in a single decade that would have taken humans thousands of years of discovery and experimentation. Technological development will leap off the charts, becoming so rapid that we cannot possibly imagine the results.
It's been called the 'geek rapture' – an allusion to the belief among some Christians that, at the end of the world, they'll be whisked directly to heaven in a process termed 'the rapture'.
Some might consider the concept of a technological singularity a gross extension of humanity's plunder of nature; others a comical event unlikely to come to pass.
Nevertheless, a number of noted scientists and engineers think the scenario is realistic. Even more surprising, some forecast that this nirvana is not hundreds of years away, as one might expect – but mere decades.
A leading proponent is Ray Kurzweil, a computer engineer who made his fortune creating machines that could recognise printed letters, read for the blind and recognise speech. He invented the flatbed scanner and the first true electric piano; he's launched 10 companies and sold five; and he has written five books, including a bestseller, The Singularity is Near, which has been made into a film being released in 2009. Fortune magazine called him "the smartest futurist on Earth".
"The singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history," he says. "Some would say that we cannot comprehend the singularity, at least with our current level of understanding, and that it is impossible, therefore, to look past its 'event horizon' and make sense of what lies beyond."
Tipping Point?
Fascinating article. I hope new technologies will prove to be more gentle and refined than the technologies of the Industrial Age.
Here is a question that will annoy the priests of science but which some believers in reincarnation and the afterlife might ask. If a disembodied soul can enter and bind its consciousness to an organic body, would it be possible for a soul to bind its consciousness into an inorganic body?
It seems that even scientists are looking forward to a new Golden Age along with New Age gurus and other various believers.
Sad geek fairy tale
The idea that taking a calculator, which is all a computer is, and making it more and more "intelligent" by running its clock faster, is like the old apples and oranges thing, isn't it? A real breakthrough in artificial intelligence would have to entail an entirely new architecture, not just running the old architecture in a smaller faster package, wouldn't it? Maybe the architecture of the human brain just can't be improved on, and can only be aped, but can never be duplicated in silicon?
The geek dream of building a brain that's smarter than theirs is like the Garden of Eden story about the serpent telling Adam and Eve that if they eat of the fruit of the prohibited tree they will become as gods, only to get the boot by Jehovah so they could learn to eat dirt and die, along with their new god Da Snake. Forgetting the intelligent design vs. evolution debate, it's like, duh, if computers could reach a point where they could evolve past humans all by themselves, it must have already happened millions or billions of years ago, and his name is Jehovah, and he's getting really mad at ya! :)
computers improving on themselves
"Once a computer becomes aware, it will be able to improve on itself"
Why should it? Would it not be putting itself 'out of business'?