By Kate Gill
A.I. robot Sophia is getting a software upgrade, one that will inch her ー and perhaps A.I. ー even closer to humanity. According to her creator, not only will Sophia earn her citizenship in Malta, she will reach a level of advancement equal to human beings in roughly five to 10 years.
“In the long run, I think the broader implications are pretty clear,” Dr. Ben Goertzel, the CEO of SingularityNET and chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, told Cheddar Friday.
When the Technological Singularity arrives, you can’t even imagine what the future will hold afterwards. Just ask author Vernor Vinge.
A five-time Hugo Award-winning author (among various other awards and accolades), Vernor Vinge has been writing and speculating about AI and intelligence amplification for over half a century. As part of his storied career, an interesting anecdote concerns a rejection letter he received from legendary science fiction editor and publisher John W. Campbell, Jr.
Early in his career, Vinge had proposed a story about a human being with amplified intelligence and (as Vinge relates in his short story collection) Campbell wrote him back with the comment, “Sorry — you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.” Jump forward a few decades, and Vinge delivered a paper to NASA entitled The Coming Technological Singularity in which he foresaw a moment when artificial intelligence will develop exponentially until it reached a point that surpasses humanity’s ability to comprehend. It is intelligence so far superior that we can’t even imagine what it would be like. And then what?
The accelerating investment in artificial intelligence has vast implications for economic and cognitive development globally. However, AI is currently dominated by an oligopoly of centralized mega-corporations, who focus on the interests of their stakeholders. There is a now universal need for AI services by businesses who lack access to capital to develop their own AI services, and independent AI developers lack visibility and a source of revenue. This uneven playing field has a high potential to lead to inequitable circumstances with negative implications for humanity. Furthermore, the potential of AI is hindered by the lack of interoperability standards. The authors herein propose an alternative path for the development of AI: a distributed, decentralized, and democratized market for AIs run on distributed ledger technology. We describe the features and ethical advantages of such a system using SingularityNET, a watershed project being developed by Ben Goertzel and colleagues, as a case study. We argue that decentralizing AI opens the doors for a more equitable development of AI and AGIt will also create the infrastructure for coordinated action between AIs that will significantly facilitate the evolution of AI into true AGI that is both highly capable and beneficial for humanity and beyond.
There have been some who have complained about the seeming lack of acceleration or slower than some have expected development of societal technology.
Richard Jones talks about lack of specific progress to diamondoid molecular nanotechnology or the appearance that we might not be on track to a technological singularity.
If you think you’ve got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. That’s equivalent to fully circling the globe 16 times.
Halamka is chief information officer at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing emergency physician. In a talk at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine last week, Halamka shared what he sees as the biggest healthcare problems the world is facing, and the most promising technological solutions from a systems perspective.
“In traveling 400,000 miles you get to see lots of different cultures and lots of different people,” he said. “And the problems are really the same all over the world. Maybe the cultural context is different or the infrastructure is different, but the problems are very similar.”
Artificial intelligence: the singularity as the road to dystopia
