Sunday 27 April 2014

About Singularity and its temporal proximity

I just read about the Singularity concept. Although it really agrees with my predictions that the discovery of real artificial intelligence will be an unblocker for several things in the nature of human intelligence that holds as back
(namely the fact that even great minds have to die and humanity starts from scratch and the fact that we are bound to our biological limits/capacities in terms of memory, neuron branching, connectedness of individual brains etc.)
it was kinda daunting the postulation that all those events have a high chance of occuring within my lifetime. I always thought that our  evolutional offspring (let's call their species machina sapiens :) would rise after many, many generations.
The prediction that the mean date for this occurence is just around 2040, the fact that Moore's law will have produced by then the necessary hardware to house the amount of complexity neeeded to simulate a human brain, and the fact that Noesis Theory can be a catalyst for all this by providing the algorithim foundation for this construct make the likelihood of this actually occurring in our lifetime certainly not zero. Another interesting potential for Noesis Theory is that it not only unlocks the capability of building true AI, but it also enables us to understand how the algorithm that produces intelligence is made of and thus unlocks Seed AI and recursive self-improvements.

Nevertheless, if I was asked to guess for my own estimate about the necessary time to achieve the Singularity, I would see many more steps in this process... Namely:
- 2-3 years to produce a workable vesion of the Theory,
- 3-5 years to make it known and start actively working on its practical implementation
- 10-12 years to produce a real intelligence
- At least 20-30 years to allow it to grow up and flourish (you have to let it become adult to give it time to realize its full potential and see the actual limits)
- Another 20 years to finetune the intelligence and bring it on par with the best human levels of intelligence
- 30-40 years more to escape the regulations and artificial barriers that humans will set upon their machinistic siblings for fear of being overshadowed by evolution.
- 5-10 years for the AIs to reach a Singularity-level of sophistication
So I'd say we would be looking at a good 100 years more before we're able to pass on to the next level of intelligence/complexity in this pale blue dot.

Of couse, I have not factored the networking effect that could be possible with artificial brains (which can certainly be short-sighted of me, but it's a bit more complicated to analyze) and which has the potential of shortening this temporal distance.

In any case, the times ahead of us seem pretty exciting. Time will tell.


1 comment:

  1. By the way, on the topic of the AI box, how is this different from a simulated universe that we may be living in right now?

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