The Coming Technological Singularity

This article was originally written for my college magazine.

The age of humanity as we know it is coming to an end.
We all remember the scary monotone voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the Terminator series. And how does one forget the menacing “agents” from the Matrix? These are fictional artificial beings with superhuman abilities coming from a world where humans have been replaced by machines as the dominant race. This happens shortly after a technological singularity. While the possibility of machines dominating our planet one day is an entertaining notion for us, and an especially profitable one for filmmakers, it has over the years evolved into a very serious academic research area. The advances brought out on the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and nanotechnology bring the possibility of a technological singularity ever closer. And it might be sooner than you think. The creation of the first true artificial intelligence, which analysts put some time after 2040, will supposedly usher in an unprecedented age in human history. And this point in time will be known as "the singularity" or as critics derisively call it - "the rapture of the nerds".


One of the defining principles of the coming singularity is the law of accelerating returns, which states that technological progress happens not in a linear fashion, but in an exponential manner. Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you get two apples today and four apples tomorrow, then how many do you expect to get the day after? Six? Right, as long as you prefer thinking linearly. But there is another option: eight. How? Instead of adding two to the previous number, try multiplying two to it. Then you will get eight instead of six as the third number in the series. What you get here is an exponential series of the form 2^x which will give you a billion digit number within a few iterations! You can try this on your friends and get the “linear” response 90% of the time. So what does this show? The human mind is conditioned out of everyday experience to assume that all growth patterns are linear while in fact many like those seen in the technology industry are in fact exponential. Take for example Moore’s law, coined in 1965 which states that integrated circuits will double in performance every 18 months. This single accelerating principle, which still holds to this day, is the reason behind the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phones. Almost everything you can imagine in this world has been affected by this law. Similar patterns are seen in the Biotech industry with ever faster and cheaper sequencing of DNA and in the Nanotech industry with its super-small machines that are approaching the size of a molecule. The day when smarter than human intelligence is invented, may come sooner than you think as intelligence at its base is nothing but computation.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the effects that the singularity will have on the human race. The negative singularity school with proponents like Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems believes that such an event would be catastrophic to humanity with the machines eventually dominating us with their superior mental ability just as much as we dominate chimpanzees and monkeys today. After all, would you listen to your dog or cat to decide what is best for you? The positive singularity school however is more optimistic. Its proponents like the inventor, Ray Kurzweil [pic above right] envision the emergence of AI that is truly beneficial to humanity. They hope for a world where human misery and suffering will be ended by the rapid technological and scientific advancement brought by super smart machines. They also advocate the gradual merging of humans and machines to ensure that humans after the singularity still stay relevant, albeit in a way that we simply cannot imagine right now.

Singularity used to be a fringe science and technology area had been entirely under the domain of science fiction writers until the past decade. Then the concept began to get closer academic scrutiny and today it is a legitimate field of research on its own. The Singularity University was started inside the NASA Ames research center last month by Kurzweil with help from Larry Page of Google, NASA and several Nobel Prize winners. Here graduate students and executives learn everything from nanotechnology, genetics to artificial intelligence, to prepare for a world that will see unprecedented economic growth just as the ushering in of the industrial age saw the total economic output of the world double every 15 years (60 times as fast as the previous agricultural era). The momentum has also built up over the last couple of years for the development of safe and beneficial artificial intelligence.
The age of the machines has dawned.