Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel, the global juggernaut of microchips, said that although current chip technologies have reached their limits, a new paradigm always allows advances to continue.
"In some sense, in silicon gate CMOS [the current technology found in microchips], Moore's Law ended last year," Rattner told delegates of the Singularity Summit in October 2008 in San Jose, California.
"One of the founding laws of accelerating returns ended. But there are a lot of smart people at Intel and they were able to reinvent the CMOS transistor using new materials." Intel is now looking at harnessing photons and quantum properties, such as the spin of an electron, as a way of increasing processing power beyond 2020. "The arc of Moore's Law brings the singularity ever closer," he says.
In February 2009, Kurzweil announced the establishment of a prestige summer school to prepare for the coming revolution. Dubbed the Singularity University, it has backing from NASA and Google and will be based at NASA's Ames Research Centre in the area known as Silicon Valley, California (just across the road from Google's headquarters) with plans to teach up to 120 students a year.
It aims to educate and inspire the next generation of science, engineering and business leaders who will make the singularity a reality, according to reports. Its list of academics include George Smoot, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006, among other luminaries.
"It's a first-of-a-kind curriculum, designed to provide future leaders with an understanding of what is possible today as well as an understanding of where the real opportunities exist for innovation that might spring from converging technologies," says co-founder Peter Diamandis, the man credited with fuelling private space travel with the creation of the X Prize competition. "We expect the next generation of multibillion-dollar companies to come out of this university."
The British physicist Stephen Hawking – whose work centres on the more famous singularity, black holes – is fascinated by the idea of a technological singularity. He believes the rise of intelligent computers is not an absurdity. "At the moment, computers show no sign of intelligence. This is not surprising, because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm," he says.
"But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent, they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence."
He may be right. And so may the singularitarians, sometimes also called transhumanists, who fervently insist this golden age is just around the corner. But how much of it is wishful thinking by men and women keen to avoid ageing and the infirm twilight of their lives? There are many leading thinkers who doubt the singularity will ever occur, and can conjure up many reasons why.
Still, it's true that biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics are already starting to blur the lines between man and machine, from cochlear implants and pacemakers to nanotech sunscreens and prosthetic robot arms. But could we really be just decades away from a revolution of staggering proportions? The real answer is anyone's guess.
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Wilson da Silva is the editor of Cosmos and does not expect to still be around to upload his consciousness to a computer.
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'?