May 13th, 2006
The great Singularity debate
Saturday morning at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. All 12 panelists for the day are seated in order of their scheduled presentations, with an audience of at least a thousand seated in the Memorial Auditorium on campus. Very orderly and probably not very comfortable for the panelists who don’t present for hours.
See image gallery for a closer look at event’s participants.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of singularity, here is the elevator pitch:
Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the "Singularity" by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds.—Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The first speaker was Ray Kurzweil (pictured below), the progenitor of the Singularity, who reprised his recent 672-page book, The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology. He whizzed through the charts from the book, showing how law of accelerating returns is leading to the transformation of humanity. Kurzweil has concluded that intelligence will become more nonbiological and increase by the trillions. He writes, "In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem."
Here’s Kurzweil’s take on the impact of accelerating returns:
An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.
By reverse engineering the brain and leveraging pattern recognition, Kurzweil expects to develop artificial intelligence far beyond the human mind in a few decades. "The bulk of human intelligence is based on pattern recognition…it’s the quintessential example of self organization," Kurzweil said. He gave an example of pattern recognition applied to large databases, out symbolic rules, to self discover real-time language translation, which he expects to be available in cell phones in the next few years.
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Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
| 05/15/06
