Singularity

A great slam on the TIME article about Singularity.

Independent of whether you believe progress is slowing or not, increases in the speed and performance of computers do not necessarily imply that we will attain strong AI soon.

Very true. In fact I would add the speed limit at which microprocessor runs an operation “linearly” has been reached already – hence the industry’s move to multicore architectures. In other words, we are seeing an exponential rise in the “total” amount of things we process, but we reached the limit on how fast we can execute “2+2”, and that makes a lot of difference for hard AI. As a result we have bunch of silicon “brains” multiplying. But isn’t that like population growth of say.. bugs? Bugs do processing, they multiply.. But did they reach Singularity? No.

I am not saying human intellect can be replicated or not, or if Singularity is impossible. I just think we cannot know for sure right now. Also the way Kurzweil and his followers argue for Singularity just seems wrong.

Aside from that though, the article also had some eternal youth stuff in there, uploading the mind into computers etc.. and I am like “man where did this come from?”. Then couple days later I am watching Tron Legacy, then it made all sense. The TIME article basically takes bunch of unrelated, random ideas from Tron Legacy and throws’em together, creates a weird cocktail.

Seriously, the article is so bad that it is in fact comical. I find the article uninformative, and downright misleading as well.