Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, who posited that accelerating technological change would inevitably lead to machine intelligence that would match and then surpass human intelligence. Coined the term “singularity” in 1993.
Technological Singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial super-intelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.
“The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” is a non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (2006). The book builds on the ideas introduced in Kurzweil’s previous books. He describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Once the singularity has been reached, Kurzweil writes that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards he predicts intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe. Ray Kurzweil claims that AI will outstrip human capabilities by 2045.
Ray’s predictions are a byproduct of his understanding of the power of Moore’s Law, more specifically Ray’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” and of exponential technologies. These technologies follow an exponential growth curve based on the principle that the computing power that enables them doubles every two years. [Moore’s Law was coined by Gordon Moore, who was considered to be a pioneer of silicon valley (1965) that observed information technologies as following an exponential growth curve based on the principle that the computing power that enables them doubles every two years.] As humans, we are biased to think linearly. However, entrepreneurs think exponentially. Peter Diamandis talks about the 6D’s of exponential thinking in writing that most of us cannot see the things Ray sees because the initial growth stages of exponential; digitized technologies are deceptive. Before people know it, they are disruptive—for example, the massive companies that have been disrupted by technological advances in AI, virtual reality, robotics, internet technology, mobile phones, OCR, translation software, and voice control technology. Each of these technologies de-materialized, demonetized, and democratized access to services and products that used to be linear and non-scalable. Now, these technologies power multi-billion dollar companies and affect billions of lives.
John Markoff wrote “When is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime.” He writes that the idea of singularity is a misconception. He thinks that computers will not outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes, and that humans won’t be obsolete for a long time, if ever.
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