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Technology: The Coming of the Technological Singularity
It’s called the ‘technological singularity’, or sometimes just the ‘singularity’. It’s the point in the future where machine intelligence has matured so far as to be on par with or superior to human intelligence. It’s an idea that was first talked about by mathematician Vernor Vinge in 1993 and again by Ray Kurzweil in the book ‘The Singularity is Near‘.
If you’ve ever had a ‘conversation’ with Apple’s Siri, you may have given some thought to how far we’ve come with technology being able to emulate human thought. Computers and technology are evolving very rapidly. Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University of New York and futurist, commented that “The chip that sings ‘happy birthday’ in a novelty greetings card contains more technology than was available to the entire allied forces in 1945 — and what do we do with it? We throw it in the trash.”
Kurzweil says that technology is on course to meet the singularity within the next 30 to 40 years — around 2045. By that time he projects that we’ll understand fully how the mind works and be able to recreate the way that our brains think. Kaku writes in his book “Physics of the Future” that “The future of the computer is to disappear and become a utility, sold like electricity and water. Computer chips will gradually disappear as computation is done ‘in the clouds’.”
But Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, philanthropist, and founder of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, disagrees. Not that we might ever reach the point of technological singularity, but he disagrees with the idea that we are anywhere near getting close to understanding human thought and how the brain works. Allen said that “the human brain is hideously complex. And it’s going to take decades and decades of more research to understand it. We are talking about dozens and dozens of Nobel Prizes that have yet to be won to understand how the brain works.”
What do you think, or maybe we should ask Siri?
