The Guardian
Singularity: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
KB, you have an expertise in broadcasting, I have an expertise in history, what would happen if we could combine the knowledge we both have instantaneously?
FUTURISM
3. 3. 17 by ROEY TZEZANA
Singularity: Explain It to Me Like I’m 5-Years-Old
Here’s how to understand the merger of humans and robots.
/ Artificial Intelligence/ Artificial Intelligence/ Ray Kurzweil/ Singularity
Here’s an experiment that fits all ages: approach your mother and father and ask them about that time before you were born, and whether they dared think at that time that one day everybody will post and share their images on a social network called “Facebook”.
Or that they will receive answers to every question from a mysterious entity called “Google”. Or enjoy the services of a digital adviser that guides you everywhere on the road.
The truth is that very few thought, in those olden days of yore, that technologies like supercomputers, wireless network or artificial intelligence would make their way to the general public in the future.
Even those who figured that these technologies would become cheaper and more widespread, failed in imagining the uses they will be put to, and how they would change society.
History is full of cases in which a new and groundbreaking technology, or a collection of such technologies, completely changes people’s lives.
The change is often so dramatic that people who’ve lived before the technological leap have a very hard time understanding how the subsequent generations think. To the people before the change, the new generation may as well be aliens in their way of thinking and seeing the world.
These kinds of dramatic shifts in thinking are called Singularity – a phrase that is originally derived from mathematics and describes a point which we are incapable of deciphering its exact properties. It’s that place where the equations basically go nuts and make no sense any longer.
The singularity has risen to fame in the last two decades largely because of two thinkers. The first is the scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who wrote in 1993 that –
“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
The other prominent prophet of the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil basically agrees with Vinge but believes the later has been too optimistic in his view of technological progress.
Kurzweil believes that by the year 2045 we will experience the greatest technological singularity in the history of mankind: the kind that could, in just a few years, overturn the institutes and pillars of society and completely change the way we view ourselves as human beings.
Just like Vinge, Kurzweil believes that we’ll get to the Singularity by creating a super-human artificial intelligence (AI). An AI of that level could conceive of ideas that no human being has thought about in the past and will invent technological tools that will be more sophisticated and advanced than anything we have today.
Since one of the roles of this AI would be to improve itself and perform better, it seems obvious that once we have a super-intelligent AI, it will be able to create a better version of itself.
And guess what the new generation of AI would then do? That’s right – improve itself even further.
This kind of a race would lead to an intelligence explosion and will leave old poor us – simple, biological machines that we are – far behind.
If this notion scares you, you’re in good company. A few of the most widely regarded scientists, thinkers and inventors, like Steven Hawking and Elon Musk, have already expressed their concerns that super-intelligent AI could escape our control and move against us.
Others focus on the great opportunities that such a singularity holds for us. They believe that a super-intelligent AI, if kept on a tight leash, could analyze and expose many of the wonders of the world for us.
Einstein, after all, was a remarkable genius who has revolutionized our understanding of physics. Well, how would the world change if we enjoyed tens, hundreds and millions of ‘Einsteins’ that could analyze every problem and find a solution for it?
Similarly, how would things look like if each of us could enjoy his very own “Doctor House”, that constantly analyzed our medical state and provided ongoing recommendations?
And which new ideas and revelations would those super-intelligences come up with, when they go over humanity’s history and holy books?
Already we see how AI is starting to change the ways in which we think about ourselves. The computer “Deep Blue” managed to beat Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997.
Today, after nearly twenty years of further development, human chess masters can no longer beat, on their own, even an AI running on a laptop computer. But after his defeat, Kasparov has created a new kind of chess contests: ones in which humanoid and computerized players collaborate, and together reach greater successes and accomplishments than each would’ve gotten on their own. In this sort of a collaboration, the computer provides rapid computations of possible moves, and suggests several to the human player. Its human compatriot needs to pick the best option, to understand their opponents and to throw them off balance.
Together, the two create a centaur: a mythical creature that combines the best traits of two different species. We see, then that AI has already forced chess players to reconsider their humanity and their game.
In the next few decades we can expect a similar singularity to occur in many other games, professions and other fields that were previously conserved for human beings only.
Some humans will struggle against the AI. Others will ignore it. Both these approaches will prove disastrous, since when the AI will become capable than human beings, both the strugglers and the ignorant will remain behind.
Others will realize that the only way to success lies in collaboration with the computers. They will help computers learn and will direct their growth and learning. Those people will be the centaurs of the future.
And this realization – that man can no longer rely only on himself and his brain, but instead must collaborate and unite with sophisticated computers to beat tomorrow’s challenges – well, isn’t that a singularity all by itself?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a4938/4337160/
The Singularity Is Coming—Now What?
Technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), put it this way: “Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it.”
Even before we reach that point, Kurzweil and his peers foresee breathtaking advances. Scientists in Israel have developed tiny robots to crawl through blood vessels attacking cancers, and labs in the United States are working on similar technology.
These robots will grow smaller and more capable. One day, intelligent nanorobots may be integrated into our bodies to clear arteries and rebuild failing organs, communicating with each other and the outside world via a “cloud” network.
Tiny bots might attach themselves to neurons in the brain and add their processing power–and that of other computers in the cloud–to ours, giving us mental resources that would dwarf anything available now.
By stimulating the optic, auditory or tactile nerves, such nanobots might be able to simulate vision, hearing or touch, providing “augmented reality” overlays identifying street names, helping with face recognition or telling us how to repair things we’ve never seen before.
If scientists can integrate tiny robots into the human body, then they can build tiny robots into, well, everything, ushering in an era of “smart matter.” Nanobots may be able to build products molecule-by-molecule, making the material world look a lot like the computer world–with just about everything becoming smart, cheap and networked to pretty much everything else, including your brain.
It’s almost impossibly futuristic-sounding stuff. But even that scenario is just the precursor to the Singularity itself, the moment when, in Kurzweil’s words, “nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle.”
Imagine computers so advanced that they can design and build new, even better computers, with subsequent generations emerging so quickly they soon leave human engineers the equivalent of centuries behind. That’s the Singularity–and given the exponential acceleration of technological change, it could come by midcentury.
So, who is this guy Ray Kurzweil?
It’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins and dietary supplements?
With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living forever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”).
Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to St. Louis.
They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.
But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognize a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.
And now? Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live forever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google’s director of engineering.
That’s right folks, Director of Engineering at Google!
The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularized of “the singularity” – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.
But it’s what came next that puts this into context. It’s since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.
Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find.
It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an “undisclosed” but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2 billion on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind.
And those are just the big deals. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNN Research.
It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who’s probably the world’s leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was “a Manhattan project of AI”.
If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, “this will be the team”. The future, in ways we can’t even begin to imagine, will be Google’s.
There are no “ifs” in Ray Kurzweil’s vocabulary. Kurzweil does not do ifs, or doubt, and he most especially doesn’t do self-doubt. Though he’s bemused about the fact that “for the first time in my life I have a job” and has moved from the east coast where his wife, Sonya, still lives, to take it.
Bill Gates calls him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”. He’s received 19 honorary doctorates, and he’s been widely recognized as a genius.
He’s been making predictions about the future for years, ever since he realized that one of the key things about inventing successful new products was inventing them at the right moment, and “so, as an engineer, I collected a lot of data”.
In 1990, he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.
He predicted the explosion of the world wide web at a time when it was only being used by a few academics and he predicted dozens and dozens of other things that have largely come true, or that will soon, such as that by the year 2000, robotic leg prostheses would allow paraplegics to walk
(the US military is currently testing an “Iron Man” suit) and “cybernetic chauffeurs” would be able to drive cars (which Google has more or less cracked).
Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth.
So far, so sci-fi. Except that Kurzweil’s new home isn’t some futuristic MegaCorp intent on world domination. Kurzweil now works for Google and has worked with Google’s co-founder Larry Page on special projects over several years.
Kurzweil stated, “And I’d been having ongoing conversations with him about artificial intelligence and what Google is doing and what I was trying to do. And basically, he said, ‘Do it here. We’ll give you the independence you’ve had with your own company, but you’ll have these Google-scale resources.'”
And it’s the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google every single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global “brain”. Can it learn? Can it think? It’s what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.
Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, said recently that the company employs “less than 50% but certainly more than 5%” of the world’s leading experts on machine learning.
And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it’s in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet. Of what machine learning might look like when the machines have learned to make their own decisions. Or gained, what we humans call, “consciousness”.
It was the Singularity University’s own robotics faculty member Dan Barry who sounded a note of alarm about what the technology might mean: “I don’t see any end point here,” he said when talking about the use of military robots. “At some point humans aren’t going to be fast enough. So what you do is that you make them autonomous.
And the woman who headed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the secretive US military agency that funded the development of BigDog? Regina Dugan. Guess where she works now?
Kurzweil’s job description consists of a one-line brief. “I don’t have a 20-page packet of instructions,” he says. “I have a one-sentence spec. Which is to help bring natural language understanding to Google. And how they do that is up to me.”
Language, he believes, is the key to everything. “And my project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means. When you write an article you’re not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world’s information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that.
So, we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions.”
Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.
Once the computers can read their own instructions, well… gaining domination over the rest of the universe will surely be easy pickings.
So, what is driving all this? In a word, immortality.
If these new computers can map the human mind, it is only a matter of time that your brain can be digitized and downloaded to a microchip, much like the one in your cell phone.
When your cell phone wears out, what you you do? You go to your phone shop, buy a new phone, and install the chip from your previous phone with all of your information on it.
Take that concept and now think of humans and robots. When your body wears out, it may be as simple as downloading your brain and installing it in a new robotic body.
Hard for us to comprehend? Impossible you say? Maybe not for Artificial Intelligence.