Concept
Technological singularity
Overview
The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.
Prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity and associated artificial intelligence "explosion", including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, Gordon Moore, and Roger Penrose. One claim is that artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones. Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig observe that in the history of technology, improvement in a particular area tends to follow an S curve: it begins with accelerating improvement, then levels off without continuing upward into a hyperbolic singularity.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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We must therefore have managed to extract resemblances from nature, which enable us to anticipate the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, have made use of the law of causality. Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in our mind, the more it takes the form of a _mechanical_ causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it expresses a more…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Technological singularity is.
Though it is called Activity or Energy, the Activity knew no change, the energy did nothing. It was the activity of an army forever marking time and never going anywhere. From this contrast of the permanent with the transient arise other features which mark off the Ultimate Reality from the imperfect realities of practical life. Where there is change, there is of necessity numerical plurality, multiplicity, and from…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
States what Technological singularity is.
On the other hand, the new facts have brought new powers; man's physical control over natural forces has been increasing with unexampled rapidity, and promises to increase in the future beyond all easily assignable limits. Thus alongside of despair as regards ultimate theory there is an immense optimism as regards practice: what man can _do_ seems almost boundless. The old fixed limits of human power, such as death…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
States what Technological singularity is.
Philosophers who discussed Technological singularity
Related ideas
- The Independent
- John Gray (philosopher)
- BBC News
- Artificial intelligence
- Alan Turing
- Genetic engineering
- Industrial Revolution
- Integrated circuit
- John von Neumann
- Immortality
- Life extension
- Autonomy
- Exponential growth
- The Guardian
- Stephen Hawking
- Marvin Minsky
- Neuron
- Nanotechnology
- President of the United States
- Paradigm shift
- Ray Kurzweil
- Roger Penrose
- Relay
- Science fiction
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of artificial intelligence.
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