What?
The technological singularity, the moment when computers become inimitable smart.
Where seen?
In science fiction movie transcendence (2014) a computer becomes so intelligent that it solves, among other things, the climate and energy problem in one fell swoop.
How close are we?
It can be tough. One minute you’ve got artificial intelligences making semi-creative drawings or already recommending dot-commend or coolblueend products to us, the next they’ve become so smart that our souped-up monkey brains can’t follow them at all.
Suddenly, the scientific and technological breakthroughs begin to pile up at such a rapid rate that it will profoundly and permanently transform the world into… something that is impossible to predict.
People like the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil believe that the point where our artificial intelligences will surpass us is almost upon us. And not only that, they also think that all the breakthroughs that that will bring will finally make humanity immortal.
Is your flesh-and-blood body in danger of reaching its expiration date? Oh well, then you just transfer your mind to the computer where you can continue to exist as a collection of zeros and ones for days on end? The fact that uploading your brain could turn out to be fundamentally impossible even with the most powerful and smartest computers in the world is something that singularity optimists conveniently ignore.
The idea for the technological singularity starts, among other things, with Moore’s Law, an apparent law that predicts that computer chips become roughly twice as fast every two years. Although that was indeed the case for a long time, this development has really leveled off in the last ten years or so.
At the time when Kurzweil wrote his most famous book – The Singularity is Near from 2005 – it seemed that computers would have the estimated computing power of a human brain around 2025 to 2030. Although that will not work, and the original Moore-like growth rate in computing power is demonstrably flattening, it is obvious that we will reach that point at some point. The only question is: is having the computing power of a human brain enough? Or are you missing a crucial ingredient?
After all, making a smart brain, whether artificial or human, is not that easy. Just ask the people behind the Human Brain Project. They also failed to simulate a rudimentary human brain after more than a decade of tinkering. Not because their computers were not fast enough, but because the job turned out to be simply too difficult from a scientific point of view (yet?).
Even if computers will soon become smarter than humans, who’s to say that those ultra-intelligent creatures want to get involved with our stupid lumps of meat at all? For the same money, they prefer to withdraw into their virtual private utopia. And then the technological singularity may turn out to be nothing more than the moment the Amazon algorithm says to you: ‘So, and from now on you can find out for yourself which book you want to read later.’