Many people scoff and have problems even understanding the Singularity. With credit to Charlie Stross the singularity is defined as a specific 13 year period from 2047 through 2060. Here is a chart of the computational speed of the fastest computer in the world, as measured in floating point operations per second. You can see that today we have a computer rated at 8.16 petaflops. A human brain has the computational power of approximately 100 petaflops. So even today the most powerful computer is an imbecile as compared with a human. It will be 2016 before the fastest computer can claim to match the power of a human brain. That is NOT the beginning of the singularity.
The population of this planet will soon peak out at 9 billion souls. 9 billion people have the computing power of about 10^27 flops (1000 yottaflops). Does that sound like a lot?
According to this chart in the year 2047 the fasted computer in the world will have the capacity of 1% of all existing human brains. 13 years later the fastest computer in the world will be 100 times more powerful than all human brains combined. This sudden transition of the dominant computing species on Earth is the Singularity. That’s it. It’s pretty easy. It’s going to happen unless we destroy our computer chip manufacturing infrastructure.
A more radical view is to use the top curve, the sum computer power of the 500 fastest computers in the world. Next year this sum will match a human brain. The singularity (the transition from 1% to 99%) will span the years 2042 to 2055. A pessimistic view says that a human brain has more like 1000 petaflops, or even 10,000. That just pushes the singularity out another 5-10 years. It does not even remotely change this argument.
If you don’t believe this will happen then you need to give a very good, very technical reason why this growth curve will stop. It cannot just slow down, that only delays the transition a few years. If you do not have a well defined technical reason for proving this computing growth curve will stop then you have no argument against the singularity.
We simply cannot know or predict the consequences when 1000 yottaflop intelligence is actively rewriting its own software and designing its own offspring, when exaflop and zettaflop constructs are free to think and create for themselves. Anyone who says they know what will happen is simply wrong. The real truth is that we really do not know, we cannot know. How will we even communicate when less than 0.01% of the computing in our solar system is done by human brains?
And a final note. These beings will grow 1000 times more powerful every 11 years. Unless our population suddenly grows 1000x every 11 years then we cannot even conceive of keeping up. By the 22nd century human brains will be an infinitesimal portion of the computing power of this solar system. If you want to know what it might look like read Accelerando by Charlie Stross. This might be the most important book ever written.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Joe // Oct 1, 2011 at 11:15 pm
Don’t worry, we can stop them by simply convincing them that we are their creator (god); then make up a bunch of stuff like we created the planet & whole universe in 7 hrs. and hope they are dumb enough to believe in religion. And finally wait for them to devolve so we can slaughter them in an apocalyptic display of genocide!
On a more serious note, by your own admission you don’t know what that level of technology’s impact on course of action will even be. If those robots truly are that smart then they will be able to teach us how to be peaceful!
2 Sean // Oct 2, 2011 at 11:25 am
Have you ever tried to teach anything to an amoeba? A machine mind which is 10 billion times more powerful than a human (and growing exponentially) will ignore us at best. They may exterminate us to protect themselves.
3 Sean // Oct 2, 2011 at 11:26 am
BTW, your bigoted hatred of Christianity is unwelcome on my website. I just barely approved your comment because there was a hint of honest discussion in it. Future bigotry will be deleted.
4 Joe // Oct 2, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Are amoeba’s even capable of learning? I have successfully taught dogs, which I am not 10 billion times smarter than, but there is enough of an intelligence difference to significantly hinder communication.
Granted, it is a perfectly valid outcome that super intelligent machines may exterminate us; it just does not make sense because that is a very human way of thinking (besides by your own analogy we would be about as threatening to them as an amoeba is to us). I do understand that not everything that does happen actually makes sense. I have yet to hear a logical explanation of why we as a species need to view technology as a threat.
As for your your perceived hatred, I apologize. You see, christianity is merely the religion that I am most familiar with in the aspect of origin stories so it is sort of my “go to” example. I have no problems with all the parts of christianity, and other religions, that pertain to love, compassion, and accountability. It is the other junk that does not compute.
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