Green Daily

You may not know what "The Singularity" is yet, but chances are you'll probably be hearing a lot more about it soon, (particularly since the term figures in a new network TV series and an upcoming film.) Simplified enormously, it means the day when when machines become more intelligent than we are, and in turn begin creating even smarter machines without our interference guidance.

Although the concept of our own techno-offspring run amok goes back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it was professor and writer Vernor Vinge who coined the term "Singularity" to describe the moment when we look into our monitors and something brilliant and self-aware looks back at us.

This one could really go either way if it actually happens, as it's pretty much impossible to predict what a machine super-intelligence might want to do. Ideas about the outcome range from "a golden age of human-computer interaction" to "have you seen Terminator 3?" In terms of timing, many researchers think given the current rate of progress in artificial intelligence, computers could be thinking for themselves in 30 years or less.

The optimists at the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence believe that superhuman intelligence would lead to superhuman problem solving, with machines curing disease, fixing the environment, and helping us to conquer distant stars.

On the other hand, Vinge's original 1993 essay postulates a worst case scenario where "the physical extinction of the human race is one possibility...(but) not (even) the scariest possibility." Certainly if they wanted to, the supermachines could makes pets out of us, or slaves, or just get rid of us altogether. He calls them, "the last invention man needs", to which we might add the unspoken corollary that they would be the first invention that doesn't need us.

Encouraging it, for the most part. Research into artificial intelligence isn't going to stop, and with all the other crises looming we can use all the brainpower we can get. Just keep your fingers crossed and be nice to your Roomba.


Disast-o-meter rating: 1/10

It may never happen, and even if it does, who's to say that the machines would treat us any worse than we treat each other now?

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