The Technological Singularity: A New Type of Intelligence
Written By:
Austin Stofer
The term ‘singularity’ was coined by famous mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann in 1958, however Vernor Vinge is accredited with truly establishing the concept and bringing it to the public eye in the early 1990s.
Ever since, the idea has been gaining traction among computer scientists and sci-fi enthusiasts alike. Countless creative works have been conceived with the singularity serving as the central plot device, such as: as: since, the idea has been gaining traction among computer scientists and sci-fi enthusiasts alike. Countless creative works have been conceived with the singularity serving as the central plot device, such as: 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, Terminator, iRobot, Ex Machina, Her, Westworld, and numerous others in the past few years alone. For better or for worse, this has resulted in a wide-spread spike of public interest towards the advancement of artificial intelligence and self-improving machines, so in many regards these stories are both prophetic and self-fulfilling by nature.
Whether this self-accelerated growth is a good thing, however, remains to be seen, as there are quite a few stories that seem to correlate the arrival of artificial intelligence with our extinction.
Some of the consequences of this rapid advancement are already apparent; many workers are already losing jobs to autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles, business and big-data analytics are already run by intelligent systems, and virtually every advertisement that appears on the web these days was chosen by an autonomous ad engine designed to target an individual user and improve itself over time. With all this in mind, one thing is abundantly clear: the technological singularity is both inevitable and imminent. The question now is this: what potential outcomes of this technological advancement might we want to avoid, and what could be the consequences of creating something we don’t yet fully understand in ourselves?
There is much discussion about artificial intelligence going rogue and killing humans, like those in Terminator, for example, however few people consider how dangerous a human would be when in possession of capabilities similar to those of a true singularity. By the state of the world today and the fact that oppression and dysfunction are still as prevalent as they are, it’s pretty obvious that humans are not well equipped to deal with imbalanced power dynamics.
The introduction of upgradable intelligence systems would likely only amplify existing inequalities, and potentially even result in a handful of people dominating over the rest of society due to the nature of their superhuman-intelligence.
This has been countered by the idea that higher levels of intelligence will result in higher moral values, and such a super-intelligence would be capable of devising a solution that is beneficial to everyone and doesn’t result in conflict. This juxtaposition of opposing potential futures resulting from a single initial concept exposes the underlying flaws in our ability to hypothesize with any level of accuracy how an entity of higher intellect would treat us, which is all the more reason for us to be very cautious as we move forward.
While there are many possible results of the technological singularity, the decisions made now and in the coming years will ultimately determine exactly which of these potential futures comes to pass. The measures we put in place to guide this process will be heavily scrutinized once everything is said and done, and future scientists will likely be able to point to the exact decisions that we make which result in cascading transformations of human existence, however until that time comes, the path ahead is unclear at best.
We are accelerating full-throttle toward one of the only aspects of our universe that we are inherently incapable of predicting, and the paradoxical nature of this concept is what allows us to be blissfully ignorant of the consequences we may face. Many of these questions may never find answers, or we as humans may not exist in our current state to receive the answers should they come, but the sweeping changes that technology has yet to bring will undoubtedly be unlike anything we ever imagined them to be.
