Singularity

It seems my interest has veered off into computers. Why not? It’s where A.I. and humans meet and compete, in a good way, hopefully. Two items caught my attention this week, one by Musk struggling to produce enough cars and an article about Singularity.

First, with Elon Musk. To speed up his Model 3 assembly line, he did the unthinkable. He’s replacing some of the robots with Humans, because they work better! Amazing. Apparently they work the lines more efficiently. Who would have thunk it? He wasn’t forthcoming but maybe the coding of the robots wasn’t up to par, but it’s still a cautionary tale. Computers are not there yet.

Second, I came across the word: Singularity. It was in my magazine I get seasonally from the University of Wisconsin (where I went to school). In the Summer edition, one of the articles highlighted A.I. expert Bill Hibbard who defined the word: Singularity is when computers would surpass us humans in ability. Perish the thought.

More precisely “It’s the hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change.” In other words singularity is when computers become smarter than us.

What is his best guess when we would reach that point? He defers to the futurist Ray Kurzweil who said, “we get to human-level intelligence by 2029, and we get to singularity by 2045.

Given the slippage of time and trial of twenty years, my estimate observing computer events, it puts it at 2065. Too far off to worry about it now, except for those who chronically over-worry about these things.

Movies have portrayed dystopian versions of machine over man to a good purpose says Hibbard. Because these films focus on the negative it engages people, which needs to be done because we all need to be involved in this. If humans don’t engage, it could lead to A.I. unchecked. This is the potential danger. The answer is to be involved, especially the ethics of machines.

By the way, what is your favorite movie? ExMachina, A.I., 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, The Day Earth Stood Still? I still remember the line in 2001, where the computer asks “What are you doing Dave?”