Singularity

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2013

Technological Singularity

Technological singularity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

This article uses bare URLs for citations, which may be threatened by link rot.Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable.Several templates and the Reflinks tool are available to assist in formatting. (Reflinks documentation) (August 2013)

The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence that will "radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself."^[1] Since the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which—from the perspective of the present—the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable.
The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. Neumann in the mid-1950s spoke of "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue".^[2] The term was popularized by science fiction writerVernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, orbrain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity.^[3] Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann's use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann's classicThe Computer and the Brain./.../