Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster ”” that is, the rate at which they’re getting faster is increasing.
True? True.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness ”” not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.
If you can swallow that idea, and [Raymond] Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.
It wouldn’t need coffee breaks, lunch breaks, time off to go to the dentist. It wouldn’t need to go to meetings. Whatever
news the head computer had to tell the worker computers could be zapped to their memory instantly without having to leave their stations. Likewise no time lost for training. And certainly no time lost to office romances.
why would anyone think TIME will still exist in 2045? It’s on its last legs now….
Transhumanism is evil.
On a more practical level, I wonder if those bright souls have considered that unless every cyborg is shielded, one good nuke/EMP device could kill millions with no on-the-ground blast.
Yea, but when are the jetpacks and hovercars arriving…
Anyone who has ever worked in IT realizes that only a journalist could write such a story. Computers are stupid with a mineral stupidity. They do only what they are told, and no more. They are not enough smart enough to recognize when their human masters tell them to do something really stupid. A single typing error in a program (bug) can bring the program to a grinding halt, or worse, produce results that seem to make sense, but will eventually be shown to be wrong. And the computer will gladly return the wrong answer just as if it were a right one. And a computer is the only thing stupid enough to gladly go into a loop, patiently doing the same thing over and over again for eternity, without ever asking the question whether or not this makes sense, or whether it is accomplishing anything.
(Well, maybe not. Humans also go into loops. It’s called original sin.)
That is truly a boring article, which only serves to remind me why I no longer read Time. And I think the singularity is interesting. Not as interesting as Case Nightmare Green, mind you.
#6 — a Stross fan?
WIlliam Witt (#5). Absolutely. I teach Computer Science, and I’m amazed at how many people swallow Kurzweil’s hyberbolic arguments. He’s been prophesying the “Age of Spiritual Machines” for a long time. He did good work in pattern recognition for natural language software, but doesn’t realize that you can’t just pattern-match your way to intelligence. He has been an advocate of “downloading” consciousness into a computer for years, even though any neuroscientist will tell you that this is nonsense.