What is Singularity ???
The Singularity is the hypothetical future creation of super-intelligent machines. Super-intelligence is defined as a technologically-created cognitive capacity far beyond that possible for humans. Should the Singularity occur, technology will advance beyond our ability to foresee or control its outcomes and the world will be transformed beyond recognition by the application of super-intelligence to humans and/or human problems, including poverty, disease and mortality.
Lev Grossman explains the prospective exponential gains in capacity enabled by superintelligent machines in an article in Time:
“Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks...”
Proposed mechanisms for adding super-intelligence to humans include brain-computer interfaces, biological alteration of the brain, artificial intelligence (AI) brain implants and genetic engineering. Post-singularity, humanity and the world would be quite different. A human could potentially scan his consciousness into a computer and live eternally in virtual reality or as a sentient robot. Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil (author of The Singularity is Near) have predicted that in a post-Singularity world, humans would typically live much of the time in virtual reality -- which would be virtually indistinguishable from normal reality. Kurzweil predicts, based on mathematical calculations of exponential technological development, that the Singularity will come to pass by 2045.
Science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge first used the term the Singularity in this context in the 1980s, when he used it in reference to the British mathematician I.J. Good’s concept of an “intelligence explosion” brought about by the advent of super-intelligent machines. The term is borrowed from physics; in that context a singularity is a point where the known physical laws cease to apply.
Lev Grossman explains the prospective exponential gains in capacity enabled by superintelligent machines in an article in Time:
“Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks...”
Science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge first used the term the Singularity in this context in the 1980s, when he used it in reference to the British mathematician I.J. Good’s concept of an “intelligence explosion” brought about by the advent of super-intelligent machines. The term is borrowed from physics; in that context a singularity is a point where the known physical laws cease to apply.
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