How Might a Positive Singularity Get Launched In 10 Years From Now?
This way of thinking leads to a somewhat different way of thinking about the timing of the Singularity. What if, rather than thinking about it as a predictive exercise (an exercise in objective studying what’s going to happen in the world, as if we were outsiders to the world). What if we thought about it the way an athlete thought about a game when going into it, or the way the Manhattan Project scientists thought at the start of the project, or the way Dantzig thought about his difficult homework problems?
- What if we knew it was possible to create a positive Singularity in ten years?. What if we assumed we were going to win, as a provisional but reasonable hypothesis?
- What if we thought everyone else in the class knew how to do it already?
- What if we were worried the bad guys were going to get there first?
- Under this assumption, how then would we go about trying to create a positive Singularity?
- Following this train of thought, even just a little ways, will lead you along the chain of reasoning that led us to write this book.
- One conclusion that seems fairly evident when taking this perspective is that AI is the natural area of focus.
Look at the futurist technologies at play these days — nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, AI — and ask, “which ones have the most likelihood of bringing us a positive Singularity within the next ten years?”
Nano and bio and robotics are all advancing fast, but they all require a lot of hard engineering work.
AI requires a lot of hard work too, but it’s a softer kind of hard work. Creating AI relies only on human intelligence, not on painstaking and time-consuming experimentation with physical substances and biological organisms.
And how can we get to AI? There are two big possibilities:
- Copy the human brain, or
- Come up with something cleverer
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