I is for IA
It is believed that in the next 10 to 20 years, there will be people who are smarter than we are today, and the comparison will be so drastic, that the rest of us will be seen as intelligent as a goldfish or a chimpanzee. Provided we manage not to destroy civilization, it has been suggested by computer scientist Vernor Vinge, that we are headed towards the Singularity, a hypothetical point in the future where the pace of technological development becomes so rapid that it leads to the creation of a never-ending feedback loop where intelligent systems breed more intelligent systems, resulting in a world where there’s super-human intelligent critters running around. Considering that university students are buying and selling prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin not to get high, but to get higher grades, a tomorrow-now future where the brain becomes real estate doesn’t sound so trippy. According to science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, instead of the psychedelic revolution we will enter the cognitive revolution, and once there’s a combination of computer science and a real understanding of how neurons work, our mental processes will become retail items, able to be changed for $8, or $3 or 30 cents. In addition to human-enhanced intelligence, the goal of the newly-formed Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is smarter-than-human intelligence, as their objective is the development of recursively self-improving machines that are able to automatically implement upgrades to their own functionality. The negative side, of course, is that these critters might not like us very much, whereas the hope is that if we program them to value humanity and consider us as their ancestors, they will. And while many readers may be thinking of HAL’s behavior in 2001 or shaking your head doubting this will ever occur in your lifetime, the fact is that one of the many advisors of SIAI includes venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and beyond being the founder of PayPal, he was also one of the first investors of Facebook. And if the rumors about the Indigo Children are true, and there is a set of children on the Earth who have been born with paranormal powers, well then, we are surely in store for a world transformed. The Singularity is Near.