Nice article. It's a white knuckle ride towards the singularity from now on!
On 14/04/07, Bruce Klein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The creation of a superhumanly intelligent AI system could be possible within 10 years, with an "AI Manhattan Project," says Ben Goertzel. Published on KurzweilAI.net April 9, 2007 Is AI Engineering the Shortest Path to a Positive Singularity? The first robots I recall reading about were in Isaac Asimov's novels.1 Though I was quite young when I read them, I recall being perplexed that his robots were so close to humans in their level of intelligence. Surely, it seemed to me, once we could make a machine as smart as a person, we would soon afterwards be able to make one much smarter. It seemed unlikely that the human brain embodied some kind of intrinsic upper limit to evolved or engineered intelligence. And sure enough, after a little more reading I discovered there were plenty of SF writers who thought the same way as me, exploring the implications of superhuman artificial intelligence. I learned that many others before me had reached the conclusion that the creation of machines vastly smarter than humans would lead to a profound discontinuity in the history of mind-on-Earth.2 But what I did not see back in the 1970s when I started plowing through the SF literature, was just how plausible it was that this discontinuous transition would occur during my own lifetime. Back then, my primary plan for radical life extension on a personal level was to figure out how to build a super-fast (probably nuclear powered) spaceship, and fly it away from Earth at relativistic speeds, returning in a few tens of thousands of years when others would have surely solved the problems of curing human aging, creating superhuman thinking machines, and so forth3. I didn't consider it very likely, at that time, that technology would advance so rapidly within my natural human lifespan so as to make the futures envisioned in SF novels seem old-fashioned and unimaginative. Things look very different now!—and not because the menu of possibilities has changed so much, though there are differences in emphasis now (nanotech and quantum computing were not so popular in the 70s, for instance). Rather, things look different because the plausible time-scale for the technological discontinuity associated with the advent of superhuman AI has become so excitingly near-term. There is even a popular label for this discontinuity: the Singularity. A reasonably large number of serious scientists now expect that superhuman AI, general-purpose molecular assemblers, uploading of human minds into software containers, and other amazing science-fictional feats may well be possible within the next century. Vernor Vinge, who originated the use of the term Singularity in this context4, said in 1993 that he expected the event to occur before 2030. Ray Kurzweil, who has become the best-known spokesman for the Singularity idea, estimates 2045 or so5. MORE: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0701.html ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;
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