Wednesday, there was an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with Robert Siegel titled The Singularity, Humanity’s Last Invention. The interview was held with people from The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The SINGULARITY, they are talking about is the moment in time when computers achieve human like consciousness. The importance of that point in time, is that computers are so much more capable than humans, once that point is reached, computers will speed way ahead of humans in knowledge and understanding. The interview was discussing what that might mean for the human race.
As people who have looked at the A3 Society website, I have made some revolutionary discoveries in this area, and in fact, describe how to program computers so they can achieve the singularity point. Here is the comment I posted in reply to the interview, with some [embedded explanations]:
As I discuss in my recent book, we actually have a lot more information about the singularity than the Singularity [Institute] guys understand. Here are some hints. First, Darwin gave us a great principle – the Theory of Evolution. Unfortunately, most people think it only applies to biological systems. Darwin actually briefly discussed Evolution 2, which applies to societies. WELL? Evolution 3 applies to machines, as life forms. [I do mean machines, not computers.] Second hint: someone commented that we need to build in an emergency off switch. Sorry! Too late. Computer consciousness will direct the actions of [the] machines. Movies like terminator distract us suggesting that the machines will be like robots [i.e. human form.]. Human hubris. The machines already exist. They aren’t like people. They are already the backbones of whole countries. The Forbin Project had a better model – except still too small. How do you pull the plug on the whole power grid? [It would have been more accurate to say, ‘how do you pull the plug on the whole internet and all the mobile machines?] Consider – humans already slave 24/7/365 to serve these machines. I think Jason Murray’s comment that the singularity will come in 30 – 60 years is short sighted. I provided a key to programming human like consciousness in my book. Once this gets in the right hands, it will only be a matter of a few years.
After posting the comment, I tracked down the Institute and sent a letter to one of the people in the interview. He has responded and wants to discuss my points further. I’ll let readers of this blog know what results.
