Technological Singularity

WHAT IS TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY?

The technological singularity is a hypothetical event related to the advent of genuine artificial general intelligence. It  was an idea that came from Ray Kurzweil,  a world leading inventor and futurist. Looking at the graph below, we can see the linear progression of humans and the exponential growth technology or machines

RAY KURZWEIL

Ray Kurzweil has a 30 year track record of correctly predicting the future. He was the principal inventor of the  of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray Kurzweil received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for his works in the field of music technology. He has written 5 national best selling books, including New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near. 

VERNOR VINGE

Vernor Vinge, like  Ray Kurzweil, believes that Singularity will occur within a short time frame. Vernor Vinge was a San Diego State Professor who is also an author of science-fiction books. Vernor Vinge believes that the path to follow to get to singularity is not through artificial intelligence but through intelligence amplification. Intelligence amplification is the effective use of information technology in augmenting human intelligence. His view is that singularity will occur, but humans will go along in that process. He believes that humans will be parts of the robots and the robots are just there to withhold information for them.

Predictions on when Technological Singularity will happen?

Ray Kurzweil made the prediction that in 2045, technology with take control of all humans. On the other hand many other people believe that technological singularity is not near. For example, Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, believes that Technological Singularity will not occur for much more time than the predicted time of 2045. Paul Allen believes that the progression that is needed for singularity to occur by 2045 is almost impossible. He believes that in the fields of neurology, cancer research, and nuclear fusion, that we know to little now for the robots or machines to be able to take control by 2045. He also believes that with the technology that we will obtain between now and 2045, we will not be able to replicate the brain to work the same in the robots or machines.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

What is Artificial Intelligence?

- the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, believes that exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence is going to be threatening to the human race. 

Many other people including Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates fear the growth in Artificial Intelligence as well. 

Facebook has also put a lot of research into AI to help people who are blind see posts to facebook. 

Here is a video showing how

The growth of Artificial Intelligence is starting to affect peoples everyday lives. 

Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Life

Many different Artificial Intelligence aspects benefit peoples lives and stop them from doing basic and annoying tasks. 

Roomba Vacuum Cleaner- A vacuum cleaner that vacuums the floor automatically and knows where to move by sensors

•  Siri
• Cleverbot- Cleverbot is a chatterbox that is modeled after human behavior and is able to withhold human conversation.
• Reverse Camera for Cars- The camera and sensors notify the driver if the car is close to hitting anything. 
• IBM Watson- Waston is an artificially intelligent application developed by IBM and used in different fields such as finance, engagement and healthcare to help users make their decisions. Waston is a Siri-like application in the idea of understanding the natural human language and come up with an answer; However, Waston store more than 200 million pages of data including the whole text of Wikipedia. In the healthcare field for example, Waston will suggests different types of treatment to doctors based on different criteria like medical history and hereditary history.

DARWIN THE ROBOT

Darwin is one of the first robots that was able to teach itself how to walk. Darwin was Developed by Pieter abbeel and his team at UC Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab, the neural network that allows Darwin to learn is not programmed to perform any specific functions, like walking or climbing stairs. The team is using what's called "reinforcement learning" to try and make robots adapt to situations as a human child would. 

Video of Darwin  

My Summary and Predictions

The graph below shows the major technological advances that have occurred from the 1900 to today. As we can see the graph grows exponentially, which means it growing much more that the linear graph of humans. Once humans are able to make a robot that can successfully live in everyday life, then the human race will almost become pointless. All the jobs will be filled by robots, and eventually they will realize that the use of humans is not necessary to their lives. They will look back on humans as their ancestors. Robots will fill the earth, because at some point they will be able to do anything a human can. It is impressing how technology has grown over the last 100-150 years. Hearing stories from my grandparents about how there wasn't any cellphones or laptops back when they were children. We can already see the uses of technology in our everyday life. Factories are becoming fully automated now, which means their are less jobs for people. We can already see the increased use of technology, as children and adults stay buried in their phones for hours at a time.  As long as there is this interest in technology from people, the more likely technological singularity is going to happen. 

Sources:

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/04/a-baby-step-on-way-to-robots-learning-every-human-thing.html

http://aidreams.co.uk/forum/index.php?page=Artificial_Intelligence_in_Everyday_Life#.VnN4TWQrL-Z

http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ding/history/470_670_fall_2013/homework/hwk1_AI_Applications.html

http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-biography