it's already beyond my comprehension, i've not lived very long but in the time i have i've never seen any technology develop so rapidly and at such a rapidly increasing pace. I assume this is what it must have felt like during the dawn of the age of computing.
It makes you wonder if those singularity proponents don't have a point, and it all depends on whether it keeps accelerating or whether it will slow down again. I hope for the latter and I fear for the former. Even if it does slow down eventually a long enough period of such change is going to make the industrial revolution (whose negative effects we are still coming to terms with today!) like a walk in the park.
Reality is biased towards the fast-moving scenario, so long as we aren’t running into the bounds of physics, which as far as I can tell we’re not. Kurzweil was much more right than he was wrong. The opposite is true of people who strongly disagreed with him and called him a quack.
The transhumanist movement has more than its fair share of quacks, but I think Kurzweil is enough of a scientist to take his arguments a bit more serious. That said, I'm getting pretty tired of all the mind uploading, eternal life and other afterlife nonsense. That to me is just religion in a new jacket.
Ya there isn’t enough talk of the more medium-term, practical uses of AI. I don’t care about mind uploading or AI doom risk. Will AI make stuff cheaper and better? Will it incrementally improve my life? I think the answers are yes and yes. That’s where the focus should be. Where and how can AI can help in construction, finance, medicine, etc…
A so-called singularity would require accelerated development for many more technological spheres, not just semiconductor fabrication, and related information computation and AI advances. Logistics, supply chains, mining, farming, manufacturing, energy, biotechnology. While the former may continue to accelerate development in the latter categories, the scale of such impact is purely speculative. I don't believe the advances will be proportional in these harder spheres, as their physicality cannot be as readily manipulated as information.
Advances in the harder spheres will come. It’s just a matter of time. Their transformation will happen in a step-wise fashion, unlike the curvy exponential growth you’re seeing in pure software.
AI cannot safely and cheaply be used to drive trucks. But as soon as it can with one truck, it can with millions of trucks. All at once.
AI and robots haven’t advanced enough to replace construction workers for fluid, dexterous tasks, but as soon as they do, robots can replace millions of construction workers and surpass them in sophistication and speed.
This will happen in our lifetime, and the change will be extremely transformative.
