The Singularity
From the SL4 Lexicon:
Singularity:
The transition in human history marked by the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence; the end of the era of "strictly human intelligence" that has characterized the last fifty thousand years. If one were to draw a single line, dividing into two parts the history of Earth-originating intelligent life, the line would be drawn at the Singularity. See "What is the Singularity". See also neurohacking, Recursive Self-Improvement, seed AI.
There are several senses of the word 'singularity' that are relevant to the concept of "The Singularity". One comes from mathematics. When a mathematical function, such as 1/x as x approaches zero, rapidly approaches infinity and then becomes undefined, is a mathematical singularity. In physics, as you approach the center of a black hole, gravity approaches
infinite strength, and its strength is undefined at the exact center - a gravitational singularity. The "technological
singularity" is approached when technological change becomes extremely rapid, then approaches infinitely fast.
Assume that the rate of technological change is more or less proportional to total brainpower. Another way of stating this is that inventiveness is approximately constant. The accelerating pace of technology change in the past can then be explained as the result of population increase. Population increase, in turn, is in part due to inventions in areas such as agriculture and medicine. Thus there is a positive feedback loop in operation: better technology -> more population -> better technology faster. Population and technology growth would be expected to show an exponential or hyperbolic trend, which is about what we observe.
Projecting into the future, at some point artificial intelligence will add significantly to the human brainpower in operation. Total brainpower can then increase at a speed limted by how fast you can build the AIs, rather than how fast you can raise and train humans. If the AIs are used to a significant extent to improve the hardware and software of future AIs, then the positive feedback loop can operate very quickly, and the rate of technology change can become very rapid.
In physics we have an 'event horizon' beyond which light can no longer reach us, thus we have no information about the region beyond (it's what makes black holes black - no light). The event horizon and the singularity are not the same place in black holes. Similarly, there is a time horizon beyond which we cannot make useful predictions about the future. At that point there would be so much presently unknown technology and its societal impacts that we can't extrapolate any further from what we know today. The time horizon does not have to be at the same time as the technological singularity. As a rough measure, the totality of human history amounts to about 1.2 trillion person-years. We expect about this much more life to occur in the 21st century (~12 billion average population x 100 years), and the quality of thinking should be much higher in the future than in the past. This is due to higher literacy, longer average lifetimes to accumulate experience, a much larger knowledge base to work with, etc. So we should expect that the society of 2100 A.D. would have more changes than we have seen so far in all of human history. So even neglecting AIs, we would have a time horizon of around a century in the future.
Assuming computers can continue to improve by doubling in power every 18 months, then the time horizon moves to something like 40-50 years, by which point the computer thinking will have added up to more than all the human thinking to that point.
If there is an upper bound to technology set by the physical constants of our universe, then we can have another meaning for singularity. In this case there will be a time of fastest technology change, followed by a slowdown as we approach the universal limits. That time of fastest change would be a one time, singular, event in history.
Definitions:
- The occurrence of unprecedented technical change, caused by the technological development of smarter-than-human intelligence, which in turn causes an unprecedented limitation—a predictive horizon—on how well we may understand the future. (This is the original definition by Vernor Vinge.)
- A horizon of unpredictability that recedes as time passes, though is never reached.
- The period in time when the rate of technical progress becomes near-infinite, caused by the continually accelerated and interrelated development of numerous technologies. (I believe this is the version most often expressed by Ray Kurzweil.)
- The period in time when an uploaded human or AI begins self-improving its design, which in turn may improve its overall intelligence, which in turn may allow for more self-improvements, which in turn may accelerate this recursive process, which in turn may eventually lead to open-ended self-improvement in General Intelligence, which in turn may quickly lead to human-surpassing General Intelligence. (I believe Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Hard Takeoff" concept was the first expression of this definition.)
-- Anand
See also What is the Singularity, and Wiki Interview With Eliezer/The Singularity.
- This scenario is currently inactive - it is currently not happening.
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