Why Singularity is a good thing

A lot of people are uneasy about the supposed moment in the future where machines become smarter than human.

There are some problems with such view.

First, what does it mean by “smarter than human”? In terms of IQ? It is now widely agreed among scientists that IQ score is not a good measure of intelligence. Human cognitive ability is such a complicated and multifaceted phenomena that I doubt can ever be reduced to a few numbers.

Sure, machines can beat human in certain tasks that seems to be the traditional indicator of human intellectual ability, such as chess playing and winning some quiz show. But with such brute force data processing it is actually not surprising. The problem is not outsmarting human with huge computational resources, but to outsmart human with the efficiency that human brain excels at.

Second, we could harness the power of AI to help solve problems human are facing right now or in the near future, such as global warming, energy crisis, economic meltdown etc. After all, if human cannot solve these problems, we better hope someone much capable than us can come up with solutions!

Third, even if in future some AI system might threaten the existence of mankind, we could easily develop another AI system to help us counter it. So to counter the possible bad consequences of Singularity we would, paradoxically, need Singularity to neutralise it.