So what is the Singularity?
Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like “The Matrix”), “experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.
And that’s the Singularity?
No, that’s just the precursor.
Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.When will that occur?
I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as
2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.
Why is this called the Singularity?
The term “Singularity” in my book is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community.
Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing? Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity. That’s what I’ve tried to do in this book.
Okay, let’s break this down. It seems a key part of your thesis is that we will be able to capture the intelligence of our brains in a machine.
Indeed.
So how are we going to achieve that?
We can break this down further into hardware and software requirements. In the book, I show how we need about
10 quadrillion (10^16) calculations per second (cps) to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. Some estimates are lower than this by a factor of 100.
Supercomputers are already at 100 trillion (10^14) cps, and will hit 10^16 cps around the end of this decade. Several supercomputers with 1 quadrillion cps are already on the drawing board, with two Japanese efforts targeting 10 quadrillion cps around the end of the decade. By 2020, 10 quadrillion cps will be available for around $1,000. Achieving the hardware requirement was controversial when my last book on this topic, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out in 1999, but is now pretty much of a mainstream view among informed observers. Now the controversy is focused on the algorithms.
And how will we recreate the algorithms of human intelligence?
To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here, progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal (time) resolution of brain scanning is also progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year, like most everything else having to do with information. Just recently,
scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections, and watch them fire in real time. Already, we have mathematical models and simulations of a couple dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons in the brain.
IBM is now creating a simulation of about 10,000 cortical neurons, including tens of millions of connections. The first version will simulate the electrical activity, and a future version will also simulate the relevant chemical activity. By the mid 2020s, it’s conservative to conclude that we will have effective models for all of the brain.
So at that point we’ll just copy a human brain into a supercomputer?
I would rather put it this way: At that point, we’ll have a full understanding of the methods of the human brain. One benefit will be a deep understanding of ourselves, but the key implication is that it will expand the toolkit of techniques we can apply to create artificial intelligence. We will then be able to
create nonbiological systems that match human intelligence in the ways that humans are now superior, for example, our pattern-recognition abilities. These superintelligent computers will be able to do things we are not able to do, such as share knowledge and skills at electronic speeds.
By 2030, a thousand dollars of computation will be about a thousand times more powerful than a human brain. Keep in mind also that computers will not be organized as discrete objects as they are today. There will be a web of computing deeply integrated into the environment, our bodies and brains.
...
Where does God fit into the Singularity?
Although the different religious traditions have somewhat different conceptions of God, the common thread is that
God represents unlimited—infinite—levels of intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and love. As systems evolve—through biology and technology—we find that they become more complex, more intelligent and more knowledgeable. They become more intricate and more beautiful, more capable of higher emotions such as love. So
they grow exponentially in intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and love, all of the qualities people ascribe to God without limit. Although evolution does not reach a literally infinite level of these attributes, it does accelerate towards ever greater levels, so we can view
evolution as a spiritual process, moving ever closer to this ideal. The Singularity will represent an explosion of these higher values of complexity.
So are you trying to play God?
Actually, I’m trying to play a human. I’m trying to do what humans do well, which is solve problems.
But will we still be human after all these changes?
That depends on how you define human. Some observers define human based on our limitations. I prefer to define us as the species that seeks—and succeeds—in going beyond our limitations.Many observers point out how science has thrown us off our pedestal, showing us that we’re not as central as we thought, that the stars don’t circle around the Earth, that we’re not descended from the Gods but rather from monkeys, and before that earthworms.
All of that is true, but it turns out that we are central after all. Our ability to create models—virtual realities—in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, are enabling us to expand our horizons without limit.
http://www.singularity.com/qanda.htmlThe Singularity is Near
http://www.singularity.comSinularity University
http://singularityu.orgSingularity Institute
http://singinst.org超人类主义（transhumanism）
http://zonghe.17xie.com/book/10515292/Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday
By ASHLEE VANCE
June 11, 2010
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html?ref=ashlee_vanceThe Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era
1993 by Vernor Vinge
Department of Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.htmlAbstract: Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Transcendent Human (movie)
http://transcendentman.com
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