Is biological life common in the universe, or should we be looking for artificial, robotic intelligence in the search for alien life?
An increasing number of scientists suspect that if we ever do make contact with alien life, we will be communicating with a computer.
This thinking revolves around an event called the singularity. This term, borrowed from mathematics, signifies a point where our knowledge of math and physics breaks down and we can no longer accurately characterize what we're trying to describe. A black hole singularity is a good example of this.
In computer science and technology, the singularity describes the moment when artificial intelligence develops so fast that it results in a superintelligence — an artificial general intelligence, as opposed to the very specific machine-learning algorithms we have today — that experiences runaway growth in computing power and intellectual ability. This superintelligence would grow so far ahead of us, so quickly, that we would lose the ability to understand or explain it.
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