For some futurephiles, the singularity is the pinnacle of technology, as Ray kurzawail said:
“The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today — the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity”
He predicted it to happen in 2045. According to many other scientists, we will even seed the galaxy with the intelligence we create.
First let’s say why we have reached this level of consciousness to think about this ambitious level of science.
The singularity itself is an extension of a human desire that is transcendence and expansion, mankind has a mind that can ponder the infinite, and yet he is housed into a body that cannot follow his imagination, so throughout evolution we have transcended the limitations of our eyes and we created microscopes and telescopes, we have transcended the limitations of our ears and we created radio waves and radars, we have transcended the limitations of our mouths, noses, and skins and we created digital sensors, following logically this trend, we are now transcending our brains and our DNA.
The generally accepted notions of the singularity (technological singularity to distinguish it from other singularities that occur in many other fields including physics and mathematics) is that it’s the time when our artificial intelligence become substantially smarter than human beings, when we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence, if it does occur, this radical shift in the human situation will be largely due to technological progress in nanotechnology, biotechnology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
This notion of singularity wasn’t raised only because of imaginative speculations of technologists, but it was after a deep analyse of the exponential growth of information technology and computation, like the moor’s law. In fact a popular discourse among scientists revolves around the question of whether we will have a hard or soft takeoff into the singularity. In the exponential multiplication of the hard takeoff 7 x 7= 49; then 49 x 49 = 2401 and so on, If A.I is about to solve our basic problems today, in fact it is solving at the same time its own problem of continuing the exponential growth in processing power so fast that it hits its next exponential in a matter of months, days, minutes, or possibly even moments, and suddenly A.I becomes millions of times more intelligent than humans.
A slow takeoff or linear growth involve a slower improvement in which humans would consciously remain in control of A.I.
I.T is growing viral, and as soon as it becomes a part of the operating system of almost any field, it’s growth is turned from a linear tendency to an exponential one, a good example is for the genome project, once we had sequenced 1% of the genome, scientists predicted that if it took 7 years for 1% and according to the linear growth then it will take us hundreds of years to sequence all the genome, but since computation and information technology integrated the field of genetics, the whole genome was sequenced in 7years, and the same scheme is applied to the price, the price to sequence a genome has turned from billions of dollars to few dollars. Another example is for computers which have embraced this exponential growth, as Dr.Michio Kaku said in his book “the future of the mind” that the phones we carry in our pockets are millions of times more powerful than the computer that NASA used to send its spaceship to the moon during 60s, and of course much smaller and cheeper.
Nanotechnology and neuroscience:
To conceptualize this notion of the singularity, imagine a simple rock, it has trillions of trillions of atoms and molecules. They are moving around and bouncing against each other with different speeds, that is computation, but we can’t communicate with it well, and we can’t impact on it as we want, but with the rise of nanotechnology, we are about to reorganize the vast amount of data comprised in that rock and literally infuse in it intelligent software so that we can make out of it an intelligent hybrid system that will be much useful and greater. The same will be applied to our brains, nanobots will be integrated into our neurons, and connected to the cloud of internet, and all the information in the web can be efficiently uploaded into our minds responding to our needs, those nanobots inside our brains can also connect to every other nanobots inserted everywhere, we have already a similar functionality that works at a lower level today with brain machine interface, in fact it it will be a state where everything is linked to everything and the mind becomes the matter.
Nuclear fusion and singularity:
The nuclear fusion is an old quest for scientists, it is about producing a huge clean energy for billions of years, by mimicking once again nature, the solution is to reproduce what happens at the very core of the stars,
German scientists have just switched on the Wendelstein 7-X (W7X) stellarator — the largest nuclear fusion machine of its kind — to successfully produce and sustain hydrogen plasma for the first time this year. With a high level of I.T once again integrated into that field, we can literally build a star, and if the singularity can empower this process, some futurists are talking about creating a whole systems of stars with orbiting planets, and mankind can then, design new universes.
Will the singularity happen? When? no one can be sure, only time can decide so.
