Singularity

One of my first blog entries was on singularity. If the enthusiasm seen in the net is any indication this concept has gained wide attention and now there is a singularity institute (1) and even a singularity university (2). Check out the many blogs (3) for more fascinating news on this.

Singularity refers to a technological development that will forever change the fate of the human race. A line from 2001: A space odyssey comes to my mind: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (his third law). Its appeal to science fiction literate geeks is obvious. I belong to this category and have been following the evolution of the idea for sometime now.

Among the paths proposed towards singularity are the creation of an artificial intelligence or the creation of a superior human brain using genetics and symbiotic electronics (like in a cyborg) or a combination of both with feedback resulting in resonance. I have no idea about the second path, but the first one is familiar. My research is related and I have read some of the scientific literature in the area since it is my personal goal too. It is with that knowledge that I make this daring statement "we don't yet have the technology to do this".

That might not sound surprising to many, but I will still go ahead and clarify. We have methods that show promise in very limited applications. But not much has been done to tie these methods together. Reinforcement learning, genetic programming, Godel machines are keywords that will return related results on google (also). But I couldn't find any evidence of work done to create intelligence. May be the old AI idea of coding everything can help. There is so much work done in the field on the separate methods I feel its time we started doing extensive research on creating a true meta-learner. This is where all the singularity enthusiasts can help, they can provide a framework that might in the future be the base from which to develop true AI.

So the university and institute have a lot of work to do and I wish them all the success. I must say that the community also seems to have a lot of nut cases. Some of them see this as a shot at immortality, they will upload their brains to a machine and when possible download it to a cloned brain. Ha! And just imagine the impact immortality will have on our society.