Is Technological Singularity near? - 1/2
Before answering the title, I will need to define the term Technological Singularity because, in my limited experience, the percentage of the population familiar with this term is less than 1.
What is Technological Singularity?
Technological Singularity is a point in time when there is a merger of human technology with human intelligence. Right now, you are reading this article on a device that’s separate from you. And that is what one would call Technological Plurality because you (the experiencer) and the technological medium (the computer) are separated.
When the experiencer and the medium of experience integrate to become one, that would be called Technological Singularity.
In the human body, the five senses come "pre-installed." Parents do not purchase a camera from the hospital to enable the sense of vision in their new-born. But we do buy computers. Whenever the Singularity happens in the future, you will still purchase the "computer," but that computation capability will not be outside your physical body. That computer (as nano-bots or maybe pico-bots) will be injected into the human body. You and your computer will, instead, become one.
In some regard, we could argue that in a primitive form, Singularity has already started manifesting in this world. Overly enthusiastic owners have had the fobs of their Tesla implanted in their hands. The person and the keys of the car are not separate. When the fob is injected, the person is the key.
It would not be Singularity if the car were unlocked by authenticating the user through, for example, a fingerprint or an iris scan, as the human is still separate from the tech in that case.
The technological singularity is a hypothetical point in time when the development of artificial general intelligence will make human civilization obsolete.
Even more interesting is the immediate result of The First Singularity event:
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According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I.J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
The Predicted Timeline for Technological Singularity
The thing about making predictions, especially for the technology, is that the variables are just too many. We are still unable to forecast the weather accurately. That does not prevent us from making predictions, in any case.
One is almost guaranteed to be hilariously wrong in his predictions. Hey, it doesn’t matter if we are wrong. At least we would be hilarious.
There is a dedicated section on the Wikipedia page of Technological Singularity that lists all the predictions made about the timeline.
Retired Computer Science professor and author Vernor Vinge said that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. At least he got the lower end correct because it is 2023 and the Singularity has yet to happen.
National Medal of Technology winner computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who authored the 2005 non-fiction book ‘The Singularity is Near,’ predicts the singularity to happen by 2045.
Not a computer scientist, no medal winner, and not a futurist, one of my favorites, Bill Burr, has an entirely different concern on singularity. Listen to his two-minute-long video on his version of Technological Singularity for yourself. Pause your reading and open the video. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Part - 2 is here.