Can futurists predict the year of occurrence of the technological singularity?

The end of the known world close. And this is good, as is believed by many futurists, predicting the inevitable onset of technological singularity. What is it? Technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, especially in the field of artificial intelligence will reach a tipping point when machines will be exponentially smarter than people. This topic was hotly debated in recent years.

A well-Known futurist and Google engineer ray Kurzweil once again confirmed his bold prediction, according to which the machine will have comparable to human intelligence by 2029. Previously, he says it will happen by 2045, but has since changed his mind.

At the SXSW festival Kurzweil stated that "in fact, the machine feed all of us. They make us smarter. Perhaps they have not yet been inside our bodies, but by 2030-th year, we connect our neocortex, the part of the brain where our thinking to the cloud."

This merger of man and machine — which is sometimes called transhumanism — the same concept that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, discussing the development of neural networks. For the Mask, however, the interface between human brains and computers is vital not to let our mind become outdated when the singularity will occur.

Musk also engaged in Open AI, a non-profit organization with a billion-dollar renovation, intended to provide for the development of General artificial intelligence (AIS). AIS is another term of intelligence at the human level. Today most people refer to as weak AI or narrow artificial intelligence — a machine able to "think" in a very narrow range of concepts or problems.

Futurist Ben Hertzel, who among his many other roles, is a leading scientist in the company's financial forecasting Aidyia Holdings and robotics company Hanson Robotics, believes that they may show up in the time frame Kurzweil. The singularity to predict more difficult — it evaluates the timing of its occurrence somewhere between 2020 and 2100 years.

"Keep in mind that we could achieve human-level AIS, the radical expansion of healthcare and other interesting things long before the singularity, especially if we want to temporarily slow the development of AIS to increase the chances of a favorable singularity," he writes.

Meanwhile, the multinational telecommunications company SoftBank, based in Japan, predicts that Superintelligent robots will surpass humans as the speed and power of thinking by 2047.

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forecast

Kurzweil, Hertzel and others are included in the latest generation of futurists, who have decided that humanity has flocked to a new paradigm of existence, largely due to technological innovations.

There were some hints that philosophers in the 19th century, through the industrial revolution, realized that the human race started to move in a strange direction with gradually increasing speed. And only in the 1950-ies crystallized the current understanding of the singularity.

The Mathematician John von Neumann noted that the accelerating progress of technology hints at approaching some essential singularity in the history of the human race, after which our species will no longer exist in the known form.

In the 1960s, after working with Alan Turing on decrypting Nazi messages, the British mathematician I. D. hood referred to the singularity, without naming it as such.

He wrote: "Let the super-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual actions of any intelligent man. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, a super-intelligent machine could design even better machines. And then happens the "explosion of intelligence" and the human mind will be far behind.

Science fiction Writer and Professor of mathematics Vernor Vinge is considered the Creator of the term "technological singularity". In his essay of 1993, "the Approaching technological singularity: how to survive in the era of the Posthuman", he predicted that technological transcendence will come within 30 years.

Vinge explained in his essay why he thinks the term "singularity" in cosmology this event when space-time collapses and forms a black hole — "This is the point beyond which our models will have to be discarded and a new reality. As we get closer to that point, it will become more and more applicable to all human spheres of activity. And yet, when the singularity comes, it can be a great surprise and a greater unknown".

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Prediction imprecise science

But is it even possible to predict the singularity?

The Database generated by the machine intelligence research Institute (MIRI), a non-profit organization devoted to the social problems associated with AIS, showed 257 predictions of the emergence of AI from 1950 to 2012 in the scientific literature. Of these, 95 contained projections showing the timetable for the development of AI.

"the Projections of occurrence of AI in the database seem to be only slightly better than random guessing," the authors write. For example, researchers found that "there is no evidence that expert forecasts are different from estimates of non-experts". They also found that most of the forecasts on the subject of AI fall into a certain spot, from 15 to 25 years from the date of the forecast.

Others are skeptical that the singularity is achievable in the timeframe established by Kurzweil.

Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft and the Institute of artificial intelligence, wrote that this technological leap will happen very soon.

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Extinction or transcendence?

Futurist Nikola Danylov believes that it is better to ask the question of whether the achievement of singularity, good or bad.

"will it Help us to become extinct, like the dinosaurs, or conquer the Universe? Now unclear".

Danilov argues that the talk about the singularity today is largely ignoring the social upheavals already taking place. The idea that "technology will save us" will not help the poor people and not prolong the person's life, if technological breakthroughs will benefit only those who have money.

"I don't think a singularity in the sense in which we see it, does happen. I think we lose sight of the larger consequences."

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