Ever since the movie Transcendence came out, it seems like the idea of the ‘technological singularity‘ has been in the air. Maybe it’s because I run in an unorthodox circle of deep thinkers, but over the past couple months, I’ve been roped into three conversations related to this topic. The conversations usually end with some version of “ah shucks, machine learning is developing at a fast rate, so we are all doomed. And have you seen those deep learning videos? Computers are learning to play 35 year old video games?! Put this on an exponential trend and we are D00M3d!”
So what is the technological singularity? My personal translation is: are we on the verge of narcissistic flesh-eating robots stealing our lunch money while we commute to the ‘special school for slow sapiens’?
This is an especially hyperbolic view, and I want to be clear to distinguish ‘machine learning‘ from ‘artificial consciousness.’ The former seems poised for explosive growth but the latter seems to require breakthroughs in our understanding of the fundamental science. The two concepts are often equated when defining the singularity, or even artificial intelligence, but I think it’s important to distinguish these two concepts. Without distinguishing them, people sometimes make the faulty association: machine_learning_progress=>AI_progress=>artificial_consciousness_progress.
To read more, click here.