Singularity: By 2021 Computers Will Develop Themselves

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Singularity: By 2021 Computers Will Develop Themselves
Filed under Featured, Life.

Will Computers ever reach a state that they will be able to develop and improve themselves? Eliezer S. Yudkowsky thinks it will be as soon as 2021 by the terms of Moore’s Law.

image by surfstyle

The short version of the paper:

If computing speeds double every two years,
what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?

Computing speed doubles every two years.
Computing speed doubles every two years of work.
Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.

Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again.

Six months - three months - 1.5 months … Singularity.

Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers match in: 2021.

But personally, I’d like to do it sooner.

I think the question is not if the computers can think in the same speeds as we do, but if we can program computers to ‘think’ anything like the dynamic power of the human mind. This will be much bigger task than producing yottahertz.

Don’t like where this is heading? Tough Luck

Maybe you don’t want to see humanity replaced by a bunch of “machines” or “mutants”, even superintelligent ones? You love humanity and you don’t want to see it obsoleted? You’re afraid of disturbing the natural course of existence?

Well, tough luck. The Singularity is the natural course of existence. Every species - at least, every species that doesn’t blow itself up - sooner or later comes face-to-face with a full-blown superintelligence. It happens to everyone. It will happen to us. It will even happen to the first-stage transhumans or the initial human-equivalent AIs.

But just because humans become obsolete doesn’t mean you become obsolete. You are not a human. You are an intelligence which, at present, happens to have a mind unfortunately limited to human hardware. That could change. With any luck, all persons on this planet who live to 2035 or 2005 or whenever - and maybe some who don’t - will wind up as Powers.

Transferring a human mind into a computer system is known as “uploading”; turning a mortal into a Power is known as “upgrading”. The archetypal upload is the Moravec Transfer, proposed by Dr. Hans Moravec in the book Mind Children.

What do you mean you aren’t going to upload yourself? I, for one, welcome the new homes for our ‘intelligence’.

Take a read at the Staring into Singularity paper. Do you think all of what the author is talking about will happen? Would you encourage this or discourage it from happening?