The world is experiencing a leap in the technology, taking the humans to the next step of evolution as the singularity by moving to the advanced level of intelligence. The complex computational systems are being developed like the blue brain with as many connections as in human brain and networking pattern designed to imitate the human brain. These systems are obviously much faster than the brain as the human brain is limited by its biological metabolism. The singularity is bound to come in existence, and according to some of the experts, it is just thirty years away or earlier than that.
It has all started already with an industrial revolution. The machines started doing jobs efficiently and took responsibility for producing almost everything (non-biological) since then. But the tendency of mankind to progress constantly has taken some unpredicted turns. Machines are becoming more intelligent and are used for commercial purposes. Giants like Walmart, Amazon, and Alibaba are such massive powerhouses that they threaten to drive out all competitors. In coming years in future, one company like Amazon can achieve monopoly position in the market and end up being the only platform for buying and selling. This can be developed further with advanced technology into a single system taking care of all business operations and human communications throughout the world.
Emergence of Singularity
Biological life emerged from chemical evolution around 3.5 billion years ago and a random combination of simple, lifeless elements kick-started the explosion of various life forms that exist on the earth. Something of a comparable magnitude may happen as soon as by 2030 giving rise to the emergence of singularity.
Stephen Hawking has commented in one of the interviews that – “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.”
The future holds true for a single machine that isn’t just smarter than humans but can compute as much data as all human brains put together. Human race with its pigmy brains will be so dumb that it can be reduced to the level of pets compared to these smart machines unless the action is taken now to incorporate an indispensable human element hardwired in constructing artificial intelligence. Singularity then would be just an extension of the collective intelligence of all humans and will be in control.
Neural Networks
Machines have learned to read, write, and learn from the actions they take every moment. The search engines are enabling themselves to learn more every day from more than four and a half billion web pages on the internet, and millions of documents and automation techniques. Experts predict that the applications of these will be absurd to such an extent that systems will act proactively to solve the problems that may arise in future. Everything will be connected to the internet, revolutionizing the ways of human interaction.
These assistants are learning languages and general understanding of the world through Deep Learning. They are everywhere, operating in a networked system and not confined to any device. Google can find millions of web pages within half a second and shows the most relevant results on the first page itself. Google assistant can know the users’ lifestyle and location history. The artificial intelligence and neural networks are advancing at the fast rate.
Hybrid Thinking
Humans always boast of having intuitions and the ability to comprehend a poem or a painting but very soon it will be done with the help of Artificial Intelligence capable of self-learning. It’s not that these devices will work with intuition, but humans are going to think and respond by getting help in real time. An era is arriving soon, combining nanotechnology with Artificial Intelligence. Humans will not be using them externally, but internally. The Nano-robots will be working with human brains and influence human interaction. Humans will respond by analyzing thousands of search results shown by these Nano-robots, and combining these results with thoughts generated to come up with responses.
Hybrid Thinking is the phenomenon of joining human thinking ability with that of the machines. In the near future, humans will not be the organic species thinking and developing eventually but will be super-machines combining biological and non-biological intelligence. The way humanity adjusts the social structure and economy is going to matter the most. Humans will truly get integrated with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems and will have non-biological bodies. The glory of mankind is to explore and develop at such an exponential level that they are creating intelligent machines as their own extensions.
Singularity – Non-Biological Artificial General Intelligence
