What is the technological singularity?
No worthwhile technological prophet would miss the chance to proclaim that the Technological Singularity is upon us and that it will bring the end of humanity with itself.
But if it threatens my existence (and that of Netflix), then I’d like to know what it actually is.
In mathematics and natural sciences, singularity (broadly) refers to a point where a particular metric is undefined or “infinite”. A gravitational singularity is a point in space where gravity is “infinite”: for example, in a black hole, according to some theories. The function 1/x has a singularity at zero, because getting closer to it yields larger and larger results (1/1 = 1, 1/0.1 = 10, 1/0.01 = 100, 1/0.0000001=10000000, and so on).
So what’s a technological singularity? Imagine that we, humans, ever create a program (let’s call it Program 0) that has human-level intelligence. Since that program was created by human-level intelligence, Program 0 would be capable of creating itself. In fact, Program 0 could improve its own program code to create an ever so slightly more intelligent program, Program 1.
Program 1 is, then, slightly above human-level intelligence. In fact, since it’s above human-level intelligence, it could further improve its own program code to create an even more intelligent program, Program 2. But this Program 2 is even more intelligent, so clearly it could create Program 3. This self-improving process would accelerate more and more and thus would abruptly yield an “intelligence explosion”.
This is what some futurists (Ray Kurzweil, in particular) call the technological singularity, since (according to their theory) a particular point in time (the appearance of Program 0) would result in a sudden and unbounded intelligence growth, with unfathomable consequences to humanity. (They don’t say what it’s called when the publication of a non-sensical theory yields a sudden and unbounded unintelligence growth.) Since phrases like “technological singularity” and “unfathomable consequences” are exciting to the broader population, and computer scientists tend to like theoretical concepts and tend not to like how reality works, this theory became quite popular.
What their theory is based on (spoiler alert: not much) is another question.
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