Attitudes towards the singularity range from optimism to pessimism and everywhere in between, but one thing most agree on is that it is coming. The question is when. I was reading about a project called The Human Brain Project, and it really hammered home how seriously the singularity is being taken, and how close it is. The Human Brain Project is a 10 year, 1.2 billion euro project designed to create a whole computerized model of the human brain. The benefits of the project are numerous: it would promote medicine and a better understanding of healing and general brain functioning. It would, however, bring us much closer to the singularity. If we can replicate the human brain, it can\u2019t be long before we can improve it and endow artificial entities with one, or at least with something similar. Estimates of how close the singularity is vary fairly widely. I found an article by The Futurist that argues that there is good reason for thinking the singularity will occur in the 2060-2065 plus or minus ten years, and cites a couple of other people who think the same thing, including Ray Kurzweil. What I found most interesting though, was the article\u2019s discussion of the impossibility of knowing what technology will be like even 20 years from now. It said that \u201cit is just as hard to predict the world of 2050 from 2009, as it would have been to predict 2009 from, say, 1200 AD\u201d which I find alarming. The world is truly heading towards a very uncertain future.<\/p>\n
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Attitudes towards the singularity range from optimism to pessimism and everywhere in between, but one thing most agree on is that it is coming. The question is when. I was reading about a project called The Human Brain Project, and … Continue reading