Adam Ford on The Technological Singularity

 The Singularity  

In a very interesting talk at the Beijing Humanity+ Conference, Adam Ford presented a talk on how dramatic the technological singularity could be.

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.

In a very interesting talk at the Beijing Humanity+ Conference, Adam Ford presented a talk on how dramatic the technological singularity could be.

Ford is a director on the board of Humanity+, and is founder and president of H+ Australia. He is also organised the first Singularity Summit apart from the main ones done by the Singularity Institute. He has organized numerous conferences around science and technology, aimed at shaping the likelihood of a favorable future. He has a blossoming youtube channel with over 500 videos of interviews and lectures.

Ford hopes to be able to accelerate progress towards completing these goals as he gets closer and closer to towards the Singularity – but by then they probably won’t make much difference.

Related articles Vernor Vinge, David Brin, and Others Debate The Singularity  David Wood on the Lead Up to the Singularity  D-Wave's Geordie Rose Says Machine Learning is Progressing Faster Than You Think

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 in Black Holes) 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. von 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."

The term was popularized 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. Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann's use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann's classic The Computer and the Brain.

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

Ford's next conference ‘Science, Technology & the Future’ will be held in Melbourne, Australia on Nov 30 – Dec 1st 2013.


SOURCE  Adam Ford

By 33rd Square

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