RAY KURZWEIL – „EPOCA MAȘINILOR SPIRITUALE”

„Prepare to evolve. Singularity is near ! ”

             

Ray Kurzweil - „Epoca mașinilor spirituale”

(The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, 1999)

Traducere din limba engleză de Bogdan Chircea.

                         Volum în pregătire la editura Paralela 45.

„In his 1988 book Mind Children, computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec generalizes Moore's law to make predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard, in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030-2040.

In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, published in 1998, Moravec further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence, generalizing Moore's law to technologies predating the integrated circuit, and speculating about a coming "mind fire" of rapidly expanding superintelligence, similar to Vinge's ideas.”

                                           

„In his 1999 book  Kurzweil proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially. He gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which proposed an extension of Moore's Law

 to a wide variety of technologies, and used this to argue in favor of Vernor Vinge's

concept of a technological singularity”.

„The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood.”

„Proponents of the singularity typically state that an "intelligence explosion” where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.”

„The term technological singularity was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. The specific term "singularity" as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration causing an eventual unpredictable outcome in society was used by mathematician and physicist Stanislaw Ulam as early as 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the "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.”

„Presumably, a technological singularity would lead to rapid development of a Kardashev Type I civilization, one that has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet. Michio Kaku suggested that humans may attain Type I status in about 100–200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years.”

„We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between ... so that the world remains intelligible.” - Vernor Vinge