14 DAY TRIAL // Our current culture and world could be coming to an end, say experts who are monitoring the development of science and technologies – and especially in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence development.
Within a few decades, humankind may reach a level of intellectual and scientific development that would enable it to create creatures of extreme intelligence and creativity. Another possibility is that we could devise the means to turn ourselves into such creatures.
Beyond the point in time when this happens – a moment called the Singularity – there is no possible way of knowing what will happen, with individuals or with the human race altogether. Trying to create models of such a world is literally impossible before the threshold is passed.
John von Neumann, one of the pioneers of digital computation and an expert in quantum mechanics – was the first to propose the concept of such a Singularity.
His idea was expanded upon by futurist Ray Kurzweil and famous science-fiction writer and San Diego State University (SDSU) mathematics professor Vernor Vinge.
“It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event – such a singularity – are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm,” Vinge wrote, quoted by Daily Galaxy.
Despite the different definitions that people have for this event, most seem to agree that it will be triggered by the rise of artificial intelligence. All that is needed is for some robotics expert to produce a machine capable of learning faster than we do.
When this happens, we will be rendered obsolete as a species, at least from an evolutionary perspective. How this will impact the world is anyone's guess. Some believe that the entire human race will be killed off by emerging robot rulers, while others prefer a more optimistic scenario.
The latter say that a future in which our consciousnesses are uploaded into a virtual reality is conceivable. But, like the Rapture depicted in the Christian Scriptures, verifying what actually happened can never be carried out by the living.
A couple of decades ago, researchers had different visions of how the world will evolve. These visions were also heavily influenced by technologies that existed at the time, and which have now been replaced by more advanced ones.
“One day soon, maybe twenty or thirty years into the twenty- first century, computers and robots will be able to construct copies of themselves, and these copies will be a little better than the originals because of intelligent software,” MIT expert Marvin Minsky was saying in the early 1980s.
“The second generation of robots will then make a third, but it will take less time, because of the improvements over the first generation,” he used to add.
“The process will repeat. Successive generations will be ever smarter and will appear ever faster. People might think they’re in control, until one fine day the rate of robot improvement ramps up so quickly that superintelligent robots will suddenly rule the Earth,” he always concluded.