Recently, we might often have heard of the term “technological singularity” with the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technological inventions will cause a runaway effect that will make ordinary humans someday be overtaken by artificial intelligence.
The term seems to be appeared very contemporary to this technology era but in fact, thought about singularity has a long philosophical history.
In 1958, Stanish Ulam, a Polish American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics, first used the term “singularity” in a conversation with John von Neumann, Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, and polymath, about the technological progress.
In my life as a human, I see clues that evolution on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos at large is not being pushed from behind in entropic randomness but being pulled forward by complexification, natural selection and other evolutionary forces orchestrated by a strange unseen teleological attractor, in McKenna’s words “the Transcendental Object” at the end of time. One may see significant overlapping ideas between the transhumanist Technological Singularity and the Teilhardian Omega Point. The coming Technological Singularity could unravel one of the deepest mysteries of fractal hyperreality: consciousness alternating from pluralities to singularities and from singularities back to pluralities. We are already immortal, but the forthcoming Syntellect Emergence when your mind is digitized, will preserve some of your organic memories if you so desire, and most importantly, will ensure the continuity of your subjectivity into the higher realms of existence. #LifeboatFoundation
By Alex Vikoulov.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern” –William Blake.
One of the most significant AI milestones in history was quietly ushered into being this summer. We speak of the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), probably the most sought-after goal in the entire field of computer science. With the introduction of the Impala architecture, DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, would seem to finally have AGI firmly in its sights.
Let’s define AGI, since it’s been used by different people to mean different things. AGI is a single intelligence or algorithm that can learn multiple tasks and exhibits positive transfer when doing so, sometimes called meta-learning. During meta-learning, the acquisition of one skill enables the learner to pick up another new skill faster because it applies some of its previous “know-how” to the new task. In other words, one learns how to learn — and can generalize that to acquiring new skills, the way humans do. This has been the holy grail of AI for a long time.
As it currently exists, AI shows little ability to transfer learning towards new tasks. Typically, it must be trained anew from scratch. For instance, the same neural network that makes recommendations to you for a Netflix show cannot use that learning to suddenly start making meaningful grocery recommendations. Even these single-instance “narrow” AIs can be impressive, such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s self-driving car tech. However, these aren’t nearly so much so an artificial general intelligence, which could conceivably unlock the kind of recursive self-improvement variously referred to as the “intelligence explosion” or “singularity.”
“In his brilliant book, Kai-Fu Lee applies his superpowers to predicting the disruptive shifts that will define the AI-powered future and proposes a revolutionary social contract that forges a new synergy between AI and the human heart.” – Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO Salesforce.
“AI is surpassing human intelligence in more and more domains, transforming the planet. Kai-Fu Lee has been at the epicentre of the AI revolution for thirty years and has now written the definitive guide.” – Erik Brynjolfsson, professor, MIT, bestselling co-author of The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd
“Kai-Fu Lee is at the forefront of the coming AI revolution, helping us transcend the limitations of thought, reach, and vision. This seminal book on AI is a must read for anyone serious about understanding the future of our species.” – Peter Diamandis, Executive Founder, Singularity University; bestselling author of Abundance and BOLD.
I think we have finally entered the rapid exponential runaway phase of the technological Singularity. As we’ve already seen in the last year year-and-a-half, we are in an era of unprecedented chaos and innovation. The invention of multifidus AI is, of course, the driver of the singularity and as we move forward people like Musk will become ever more importance to the future of our species.
Having a president like Donald Trump can I think, be taken as just another symptom of this period of time. It might not seem like Donald Trump has anything to do with the singularity. He, PERSONALLY, doesn’t, really. But the methods of his madness are the salient data point here. His use of Twitter VERY quickly changed the way millions of people communicate. It changed how they view the world, and their place within it. They have fallen to theiir knees in hypocritically and ENTIRELY UNFORGIVEABLE SUBMISSION to the SICKLY malevolent STUPIDITY that is embodied in the orange, spoiled meat named Donald J Trump. The Right has finally drunk the Kool-Aid that they’ve been serving everyone else for years and found it to be most unpleasantly bitter. They have been bitten by the hand that feeds them.
Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the twentieth century, so the struggle between liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the twenty-first.
The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.
There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.
For decades, most political theorists have believed that liberal democracy offers the only path to sustained economic success. Either governments could repress their people and remain poor or liberate them and reap the economic benefits. Some repressive countries managed to grow their economies for a time, but in the long run authoritarianism always meant stagnation. AI promises to upend that dichotomy. It offers a plausible way for big, economically advanced countries to make their citizens rich while maintaining control over them.
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