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Humans created computers, not vice versa. The question singularity raises is whether or not computers might someday return the favor.
to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” The truth is, the notion of singularity isn’t something new – it’s almost 50 years old. Back in 1965, a precocious high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared on a game show called I’ve Got A Secret, where he played a short musical composition on a piano for the game show panelists. Unbeknownst to the panelists, the music was composed by a computer. Wait a minute! Computers can’t compose music, only humans can compose music, right? Forty-six years later, Kurzweil is convinced that computers will become more intelligent than humans. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is roughly 35 years away. On that happy note, let me launch into a rant I call The Importance of Being Human. Granted, there’s no reason to believe that computers will stop getting more powerful, or to doubt that they will continue to develop until they are far more intelligent than us mere mortals. In fact, at some point they will probably take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Computers probably won’t even take breaks to play, well, computer games! Back to my rant. Before I acquiesce my existence to superintelligent immortal cyborgs, there are a couple of things I’d like to point out: We humans are thinking, feeling organisms. Can a computer give birth to another computer? Can a computer teach a 3-year-old how to ride a bike? Can a computer share a first kiss with another computer? Can a computer comfort another computer when the computer that birthed it dies? To the first two questions, Kurzweil might answer, “yes.” The third question, he might argue, is irrelevant. As to the fourth question, Kurzweil might suggest that death, as we know it, may indeed die with us. What if computer technology were to show us
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how to manipulate our bodies at the molecular level? Would we, as Kurzweilian futurists hypothesize, “ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution?” Would we simply swap our aging bodies for immortal robots? Recently, a star-studded panel of scientists gathered at the World Science Festival in New York City to discuss the heady topic, “What does it mean to be human?” Marvin Minsky, an artificial intelligence pioneer, offered, “We do something other species can’t: we remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.” Anthropologist Ian Tattersall noted, “It’s not ‘what is human,’ but what is unique: our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition.” Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett mused, “We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. The planet has grown a nervous system.” If all of this is making you nervous, it should. We’re talking here about whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of our organic brains. My take is this: Humans created computers, not vice versa. The question singularity raises is whether or not computers might someday return the favor. The truth is, singularity is hiding in plain sight. Who would have dreamed a few short years ago that half a billion humans would be living out their social lives on something called Facebook? Who could have guessed that humans would be addicted to handheld digital devices called iPhones? Singularity suggests some interesting scenarios, not the least of which are: Maybe artificial intelligence will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Or maybe computers will simply turn on humanity and annihilate us. Save this date – 2046. That’s when Kurzweil believes computers will surpass the brainpower equivalent to that of all human brains combined. Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?