Artificial intelligence helps Silicon Valley usher in a "singularity" moment? In 2045, human intelligence can be increased by 1 million times

Focus:

1. Many experts believe that the huge progress made in artificial intelligence is helping Silicon Valley usher in a singularity moment, and we are about to usher in drastic, exponential, and irreversible changes.
2. Kurzweil, the biggest proponent of the singularity theory, predicts that by 2030, computer systems will pass the Turing test and be indistinguishable from humans. Fifteen years from now, the real singularity will come, when "computing will become part of us and our intelligence will increase by a million times."
3. Opposition critics argue that even the astounding progress of large language models is a far cry from the immortal, long run of world wisdom promised by the singularity theory.

Image credit: Generated by Unbounded AI tools

For years, Silicon Valley has been waiting for a new technology to emerge and change everything. It will combine humans and machines into a higher intelligence and draw a line for history. This milestone moment is known as the "singularity."

It can happen in a number of ways. One risk is that people could add the processing power of a PC to their own innate intelligence, turning them into super mutants of themselves. Or, computer systems may grow so complex that they may actually assume, creating a world mind.

In both cases, the ensuing changes can be drastic, exponential, and irreversible. A superhuman machine with self-awareness might design its own enhancements faster than any group of scientists, triggering an intelligence explosion. Centuries of progress may be accomplished in years or even months.

Artificial intelligence is making unprecedented waves in technology, business, and politics. Heed the hyperbolic claims and wild predictions from Silicon Valley, it seems that the long-promised digital paradise is finally within reach.

Sundar Pichai, the usually low-key Google chief executive, said the impact of artificial intelligence is "much deeper than fire, electricity or anything we've done before".

"The ability to make constructive change on this planet is about to get a major boost like never before," said billionaire investor Reid Hoffman.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (Invoice Gates) declared that artificial intelligence "will change the way people work, learn, travel, and get health care and the best way to communicate with each other."

However, there is a dark twist here. It’s as if tech companies released self-driving cars and warned that they could blow up on your way to Walmart.

**Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk said in an interview last month: "The emergence of general artificial intelligence is called the singularity because it is difficult to predict what will happen after that." But He said he believed "an era of abundance" would come, but that AGI also "has the potential to destroy humanity". **

In the tech world, the biggest proponent of artificial intelligence is Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the startup whose chatbot ChatGPT sparked the current craze. Altman said that AI may well be "the best financial empowerment and enrichment of many people that we've ever seen." However, he also said that Musk may be right. Musk is critical of artificial intelligence and has also created organizations dedicated to developing brain-computer interfaces.

Last month, Altman signed an open letter sponsored by the nonprofit Center for Artificial Intelligence Safety, which stated that "mitigating the risk of AI extinction should be a global priority" and that it should be linked to "pandemics and Nuclear War". Other signers include Altman's OpenAI colleagues, as well as scientists from Microsoft and Google.

The topic of "the end of the world" has become familiar in Silicon Valley, and it is even an area that many people are keen to discuss. A few years ago, it seemed like every big tech guy had a well-stocked doomsday bunker in a remote but still accessible place. In 2016, Altman said he was collecting "weapons, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks, and an area of Big Sur that can be reached by plane." Let these people feel that what they are doing is the right thing to do. Now, they are preparing for the arrival of the singularity.

The Roots of the Singularity

The roots of the idea of the singularity can be traced to John von Neumann, a pioneering computer scientist who, in the 1950s, spoke of how "the ever-accelerating progress of technology" would produce " Some of the most important singularities in human history".

British mathematician Irving John Good, who helped break the German Enigma code system at Bletchley Park during World War II, was also a proponent of the singularity theory. "The survival of humanity will depend on the early development of superintelligent machines," he wrote in 1964. Director Stanley Kubrick consulted on the artificial intelligence HAL in "2001: A House Odyssey" Goode, this is an early example of the blurred lines between computer science and science fiction.

Hans Moravec, an adjunct professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, believes that artificial intelligence is not only a great boon for humans, but inanimate things can also be recycled in the singularity. In Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, he writes: "We will have the opportunity to recreate the past and interact with it in a real and immediate way. .”

Entrepreneur and inventor Ray Kurzweil has always been the biggest proponent of the singularity theory. He has written many books on the singularity, including "The Age of Intelligent Machines" published in 1990, "The Singularity Is Near" in 2005, and is currently writing "The Singularity Is Closer".

**Kurzweil predicts that by 2030, computer systems will pass the Turing test and be indistinguishable from humans. Fifteen years from now, he estimates, the true singularity will arrive, when "computing will become part of us and our intelligence will increase by a million times." By then, Kurzweil may be 97 years old. With the help of nutritional vitamins and dietary supplements, he hopes to continue to see what's next. **

To some critics of the singularity theory, replicating perceptual systems in the field of software programming is an intellectually dubious attempt. Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: "They all want to live forever without the inconvenience of believing in a god."

The innovation currently driving the singularity debate is the emergence of large language models, the kind of artificial intelligence systems that power chatbots. In the process of talking to these large language models, it may come up with solutions quickly and coherently.

"When you ask a question, these models explain what it means, determine It's supposed to give a response, and then translate it into words. If that's not natural intelligence what is?"

Kaplan said he is skeptical of much-hyped miracles like self-driving cars and cryptocurrencies. He has similar misgivings about the latest artificial intelligence growth, but says he has been persuaded. "If this isn't a 'singularity,' it's certainly a revolutionary technological explosion that will broadly accelerate a whole host of arts, sciences, and human knowledge, while also creating a host of questions," he said.

Critics counter that even the astonishing progress of large language models is a far cry from the immortal, long run of world wisdom promised by the singularity theory. The downside of accurately separating hype from reality is that the engine that drives this technology is hidden. OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit leveraging open source and is now a for-profit business, has been successful in becoming a black box, critics say. Google and Microsoft also offer limited visibility.

Most of the AI analysis is done by companies, and there is a lot to be gained from the results. Researchers at Microsoft, which invested $13 billion in OpenAI, concluded in a paper published in April that OpenAI's latest models "exhibit many characteristics of intelligence," including "abstraction, comprehension, vision, encoding." and "understanding of human motivation and emotion".

Rylan Schaeffer, a Ph.D. scholar in computer science at Stanford University, says some AI researchers have mischaracterized how these large language models exhibit "emerging talent," unexplained abilities in smaller variants. is not obvious.

Schafer, along with two Stanford colleagues, Brando Miranda and Sanmi Koyejo, investigated the question in an analytical paper published last month. They concluded that the emerging boom was a "mirage" caused by measurement errors. In IMPACT, researchers saw what they expected to see.

Eternal Life and Eternal Profit

In Washington, London and Brussels, lawmakers are discussing AI alternatives and problems and starting to talk about regulation. Altman is now on a global tour, hoping to deflect early criticism and pitch OpenAI as the shepherd of the singularity.

This includes being open to regulation, although there is still no clear framework for how. Silicon Valley often argues that governments are moving too slowly to oversee rapid technological development. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent interview that no one in government can get this right and that he believes AI should regulate itself.

AI, akin to the singularity, has been described as an irreversible technological trend. "Stopping it would require something akin to a global regulatory regime, and even that is not guaranteed to work," Altman and several of his colleagues wrote last month, adding that if Silicon Valley can't do it, perhaps elsewhere. success.

Even less mentioned is the huge income from this trend. For all the talk about artificial intelligence being a giant wealth-creating machine, the only people who get rich are those who are already rich. Microsoft's market value has soared $500 billion this year. Nvidia is considered one of the most popular public companies in the U.S. thanks to surging demand for artificial intelligence chips.

"AI is the technology the world has always wanted," Altman tweeted. Indeed, it's definitely the technology the tech world has been wanting all along, arriving at the absolute best of times. Last year, Silicon Valley was hit by layoffs and rising interest rates, with the earlier growth cryptocurrency space mired in fraud and disappointment.

Charles Stross is a co-author of the novel "Nerd Mania," a comedy dealing with the singularity. "The real promise here is that companies will have the ability to swap out their flawed, expensive, sluggish, manual information-processing sub-models for certain software programs that help solve problems and reduce overhead," he said.

The singularity has always been imagined as a great "cosmic moment" that is exciting. However, the reason why people are discussing the singularity at present may be mainly because American companies want to reduce manpower and are obsessed with increasing profits. To put it in hyperbolic terms, even (unattainable) paradise can wait forever when you (referring to entrepreneurs) are sprinting to increase your market cap by trillions of dollars. (Text / Jinlu)

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