A few days ago I posted a thread to ask you what you thought about 'I, Robot'.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/528.339772-Was-I-Robot-correct-in-its-portrayal-of-the-future

And most people agreed that the idea wasn't that far-fetched. That's great, because realizing that that idea isn't that far-fetched means you'll understand the Singularity.

The basic idea of the Singularity is that progress keeps accelerating.
On a dead planet, not much stuff happens. But when you finally have good replicating organisms, much more progress can happen. And every new improvement in this progress can be used to.. accelerate progress.
And the amazing thing is that this happens on a roughly exponential scale.
If you are not familiar with the logarithmic graphs, a short Wikipedia explanation;

A simple example is a chart whose vertical axis increments are labeled 1, 10, 100, 1000, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4. Each unit increase on the logarithmic scale thus represents an exponential increase in the underlying quantity for the given base (10, in this case).
Presentation of data on a logarithmic scale can be helpful when the data covers a large range of values. The use of the logarithms of the values rather than the actual values reduces a wide range to a more manageable size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale

If you plot those key events on a logarithmic graph, you get a quite straight line;

A straight line through a logarithmic graphs indicates exponential growth.

You may think that Kurzweil, one of the biggest promoters of this idea, just cherry-picked those events.
Nope.

It's hard to truly understand how long a period of thousand million years is, certainly on a logarithmic scale, so here the same 'countdown' on a normal graph;

Many of you, certainly PC gamers, are familiar with "Moore's Law". It's about the yearly doubling of the power of hardware. It explains why...
-you need to upgrade your PC so often
-why tablets and smartphones[1] are getting smaller and cheaper
-the PS3 is so much more powerful than the PS2.

8GB of RAM isn't extraordinary anymore.
The Nintendo 64 had 4MB of RAM.
And as far as I know the PS2 only had 32MB of RAM.
4 MB - 32 MB - 8000 MB. Seriously.
This is a forum with a lot of young people, and I'm certain that nearly everyone who reads this was alive when the Nintendo 64 was launched in 1997. You were alive when we progressed from 4 to 4000MB. In a very short time.

So, Kurzweil's idea is that we'll continue to develop exponentially. What this will result in can be best described by himself in his book The Singularity Is Near.

Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today's rate of progress; its
achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We'll make another
twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express
this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will
witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today's rate of progress), or about
one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century

This may sound strange to you... but... I knew my mother's grandmother. She was born in 1909.
Would she have believed you if you told her that she'll experience the...
-First World War
-Second World War
-the invention of airplanes
-the invention of rockets
-the moon landing
-the invention of television
-the invention of color television

And that she'll be able to use some kind of supercalculator[2] that enabled her to talk with people in Japan or search through an ENORMOUS library called the internet - instantly?
Or that she would live more than twice as long as the average life expectancy during her birth (46, and that's in Germany, not the whole world)?

This extraordinary progress can be achieved by 'creating' and 'copying' intelligence.
Intelligence is one of the most powerful tools in the universe.
The last few centuries we have changed the world by replacing human labor with 'machine labor'; we call it the 'Industrial Revolution'.
Look at what happened...

There is nearly no true physical labor left in the West, and maybe even in the world.
Could you present to me one example of significant work that has to be done by human physical strength? There is still a lot to be done left for humans, but this is not because of their strength, this is because of their brain. 'We' don't need your muscles or your body, but we do need your head. [3]

In this century, the 21th century, we're gonna replace 'mental labor' by 'machines'.
Arguing about the possibility that we will get this intelligent machines should be done in the 'I, Robot' thread.
But the results... if we do create these machines...

• When they achieve this level of development, computers will be able to combine the traditional strengths of
human intelligence with the strengths of machine intelligence.
• The traditional strengths of human intelligence include a formidable ability to recognize patterns. The massively
parallel and self-organizing nature of the human brain is an ideal architecture for recognizing patterns that are
based on subtle, invariant properties. Humans are also capable of learning new knowledge by applying insights
and inferring principles from experience, including information gathered through language. A key capability of
human intelligence is the ability to create mental models of reality and to conduct mental "what-if" experiments
by varying aspects of these models.
• The traditional strengths of machine intelligence include the ability to remember billions of facts precisely and
recall them instantly.
• Another advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that once a skill is mastered by a machine, it can be
performed repeatedly at high speed, at optimal accuracy, and without tiring.
• Perhaps most important, machines can share their knowledge at extremely high speed, compared to the very
slow speed of human knowledge-sharing through language.
• Nonbiological intelligence will be able to download skills and knowledge from other machines, eventually also
from humans.
• Machines will process and switch signals at close to the speed of light (about three hundred million meters per
second), compared to about one hundred meters per second for the electrochemical signals used in biological
mammalian brains.31 This speed ratio is at least three million to one.
• Machines will have access via the Internet to all the knowledge of our human-machine civilization and will be
able to master all of this knowledge.
• The combination of these traditional strengths (the pattern-recognition ability of biological human intelligence
and the speed, memory capacity and accuracy, and knowledge and skill-sharing abilities of nonbiological
intelligence) will be formidable.
• Machine intelligence will have complete freedom of design and architecture (that is, they won't be constrained
by biological limitations, such as the slow switching speed of our interneuronal connections or a fixed skull size)
as well as consistent performance at all times.
• Once nonbiological intelligence combines the traditional strengths of both humans and machines, the
nonbiological portion of our civilization's intelligence will then continue to benefit from the double exponential
growth of machine price-performance, speed, and capacity.
• Once machines achieve the ability to design and engineer technology as humans do, only at far higher speeds
and capacities, they will have access to their own designs (source code) and the ability to manipulate them.
Humans are now accomplishing something similar through biotechnology (changing the genetic and other
information processes underlying our biology), but in a much slower and far more limited way than what
machines will be able to achieve by modifying their own programs.
• Biology has inherent limitations. For example, every living organism must be built from proteins that are folded
from one-dimensional strings of amino acids. Protein-based mechanisms are lacking in strength and speed. We
will be able to reengineer all of the organs and systems in our biological bodies and brains to be vastly more
capable.
• As we will discuss in chapter 4, human intelligence does have a certain amount of plasticity (ability to change its
structure), more so than had previously been understood. But the architecture of the human brain is nonetheless
profoundly limited. For example, there is room for only about one hundred trillion interneuronal connections in
each of our skulls. A key genetic change that allowed for the greater cognitive ability of humans compared to
that of our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of
increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the
very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent limit to the brain's capacity. Machines
will be able to reformulate their own designs and augment their own capacities without limit. By using
nanotechnology-based designs, their capabilities will be far greater than biological brains without increased size
or energy consumption.

The rate of technological change will not be limited to human mental speeds. Machine intelligence will improve
its own abilities in a feedback cycle that unaided human intelligence will not be able to follow.
• This cycle of machine intelligence's iteratively improving its own design will become faster and faster. This is in
fact exactly what is predicted by the formula for continued acceleration of the rate of paradigm shift. One of the
objections that has been raised to the continuation of the acceleration of paradigm shift is that it ultimately
becomes much too fast for humans to follow, and so therefore, it's argued, it cannot happen. However, the shift
from biological to nonbiological intelligence will enable the trend to continue.

TL;DR: You remembers those monks in medieval times? They wrote on parchment. Parchment is made from skin.
So to copy the Bible, you need hundreds of dead animals and you need a monk to dedicate multiple years of their life to accurately copying a Bible.
That's circa 1400.
Now it's 2012. If I want to copy the Bible...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Ready. Took me a second.

This is the future of intelligence.
Now we spend decades to educate a person. They can work for a few decades and than we'll have to pay for their retirement.
In the future, we'll just be able to Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and KABAM, another great scientist. And this scientist will...
-operate a light speed instead of slow electro-chemical brainspeed.
-be a combination of Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Google, Wikipedia that understands all information ever created by mankind.

Kurzweil think this will all happen before 2050. So when you're below 40, you can be quite sure that you'll live to experience this.

Oh, and this graph.

This is what happens if you extrapolate Moore's law in the 21th century.

EDIT (21 March, is it spring now?);
Ahum. NEWS!

PRESS RELEASE: Researchers from Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg have shown that nanocellulose stimulates the formation of neural networks. This is the first step toward creating a three-dimensional model of the brain.

When the nerve cells finally attached to the scaffold they began to develop and generate contacts with one another, so-called synapses. A neural network of hundreds of cells was produced. The researchers can now use electrical impulses and chemical signal substances to generate nerve impulses, that spread through the network in much the same way as they do in the brain. They can also study how nerve cells react with other molecules, such as pharmaceuticals.

The researchers are trying to develop ‟artificial brains", which may open entirely new possibilities in brain research and health care, and eventually may lead to the development of biocomputers.
http://www.chalmers.se/SiteCollectionImages/Nya%20bilder/Nyhetsartiklar%201/NeuralNetwork-690-X-330-px.jpg

For Esotera; the epic music I was listening (randomly, had been listening to my iTunes playlist for a while) while reading the news.

Lilani:
'Kay, so...what are we supposed discuss? So far I've gotten:

-Stuff's improved and innovated pretty quickly
-Stuff's going to continue improving and innovating pretty quickly
-There are a few people out there so concerned about the possibilities that lie beyond what we can see that they've made scary charts based on exponents to get others worried about it, too.

I say one thing at a time. Tomorrow will come one way or another, and we humans have been taking on tomorrows for several thousands of years now. Sometimes tomorrow has brought us joy and wonder, other times it's brought despair and destruction. But we've made it this far, and as you've pointed out we've gone through a lot of radical changes along the way. So I think as long as tomorrows keep coming, we'll find a way to deal with it, one way or another. And it's not inherently a bad thing to worry about a tomorrow that's still a few tomorrows away, but we can't get too fixated on that far in the future, either. Anybody who's lived a long life will tell you that life doesn't always like to follow a neat little chart.

And I feel like this is somewhat relevant.

...Ah, but one more thing:

Kurzweil think this will all happen before 2050.

Ha! Funny man, that Kurzweil. Thinking in less than 40 years we will not only understand technology and the brain so much that we can turn functioning memories into binary information and back into functioning memories again in a completely different brain with a completely different set of neurons and understanding of the world, but also that we as a society will actually be ready to consider phasing a HUGE portion of the workforce and the economy out of existence.

Epic XKCD. Gonna embed here, makes it easier to see for everyone.

Well, the epic thing is that life has actually followed that neat little chart for a century, during WOI, the Big Depression, WOII...

And the point is not 'stuff has improved pretty quickly and will improve pretty quickly', but 'stuff is improving exponentially more quickly'.

And a lot of people tend to worry about the problems of tomorrow. While mindfulness and living in the present is important, a lot of problems seem inevitable and a lot of ideas are focused on dealing with the future, both political and individual.

Creating artificial intelligence is one of the most important tasks for humanity the coming decades.

Allen articulates what I describe in my book as the "scientist's pessimism." Scientists working on the next generation are invariably struggling with that next set of challenges, so if someone describes what the technology will look like in 10 generations, their eyes glaze over. One of the pioneers of integrated circuits was describing to me recently the struggles to go from 10 micron (10,000-nanometer) feature sizes to five-micron (5,000 nanometers) features over 30 years ago. They were cautiously confident of this goal, but when people predicted that someday we would actually have circuitry with feature sizes under one micron (1,000 nanometers), most of the scientists struggling to get to five microns thought that was too wild to contemplate. Objections were made on the fragility of circuitry at that level of precision, thermal effects, and so on. Well, today, Intel is starting to use chips with 22-nanometer gate lengths.

We saw the same pessimism with the genome project. Halfway through the 15-year project, only 1 percent of the genome had been collected, and critics were proposing basic limits on how quickly the genome could be sequenced without destroying the delicate genetic structures. But the exponential growth in both capacity and price performance continued (both roughly doubling every year), and the project was finished seven years later. The project to reverse-engineer the human brain is making similar progress. It is only recently, for example, that we have reached a threshold with noninvasive scanning techniques that we can see individual interneuronal connections forming and firing in real time.

Allen's "complexity brake" confuses the forest with the trees. If you want to understand, model, simulate, and re-create a pancreas, you don't need to re-create or simulate every organelle in every pancreatic Islet cell. You would want, instead, to fully understand one Islet cell, then abstract its basic functionality, and then extend that to a large group of such cells. This algorithm is well understood with regard to Islet cells. There are now artificial pancreases that utilize this functional model being tested. Although there is certainly far more intricacy and variation in the brain than in the massively repeated Islet cells of the pancreas, there is nonetheless massive repetition of functions.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/27263/

Lilani:

Danyal:
Creating artificial intelligence is one of the most important tasks for humanity the coming decades.

Is that so? See, I would have put bringing third world countries up to speed by helping them establish proper governments, functioning economies, and helping them solve their hunger and disease problems among the most important tasks for humanity in the coming decades. I mean AI, instant-knowledge, and first contact would be cool and all, but how impressed do you think whatever aliens we find out there would be if we've got all this technology and all these resources, but there are still millions out there walking miles a day for buckets of dirty water and dying of diseases we cured decades ago?

Again, tomorrow is nice, but only today is going to get us there. If you start skipping steps you begin to lose perspective of the real problems in the world.

Kurzweil about the rich-poor divide;

The Criticism from the Rich-Poor Divide
Another concern expressed by Jaron Lanier and others is the "terrifying" possibility that through these technologies the
rich may gain certain advantages and opportunities to which the rest of humankind does not have access.39 Such
inequality, of course, would be nothing new, but with regard to this issue the law of accelerating returns has an
important and beneficial impact. Because of the ongoing exponential growth of price-performance, all of these
technologies quickly become so inexpensive as to become almost free.
Look at the extraordinary amount of high-quality information available at no cost on the Web today that did not
exist at all just a few years ago. And if one wants to point out that only a fraction of the world today has Web access,
keep in mind that the explosion of the Web is still in its infancy, and access is growing exponentially. Even in the
poorest countries of Africa, Web access is expanding rapidly.
Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and
that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely
expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The
cell phone, for example, is somewhere between these last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a
movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both.
Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two
decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example,
Asian societies, including rural areas of China). This lag from very expensive early adopters to very inexpensive,
ubiquitous adoption now takes about a decade. But in keeping with the doubling of the paradigm-shift rate each
decade, this lag will be only five years a decade from now. In twenty years, the lag will be only two to three years (see
chapter 2).
The rich-poor divide remains a critical issue, and at each point in time there is more that can and should be done.
It is tragic, for example, that the developed nations were not more proactive in sharing AIDS drugs with poor countries
in Africa and elsewhere, with millions of lives lost as a result. But the exponential improvement in the priceperformance
of information technologies is rapidly mitigating this divide. Drugs are essentially an information
technology, and we see the same doubling of price-performance each year as we do with other forms of information
technology such as computers, communications, and DNA base-pair sequencing. AIDS drugs started out not working
very well and costing tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year. Today these drugs work reasonably well and are
approaching one hundred dollars per patient per year in poor countries such as those in Africa.
In chapter 2 I cited the World Bank report for 2004 of higher economic growth in the developing world (over 6
percent) compared to the world average (of 4 percent), and an overall reduction in poverty (for example, a reduction of
43 percent in extreme poverty in the East Asian and Pacific region since 1990). Moreover, economist Xavier Sala-i-
Martin examined eight measures of global inequality among individuals, and found that all were declining over the
past quarter century.40

Every step we take closer to the Singularity helps the developing world. Already, modern technology helps the developing world in amazing ways.

Helping the developing countries can be done by sending them food[1], sending them money[2] and sending the army there to establish proper governments [3].
Or using the principle of "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime", you can help them by teaching them how to use modern technologies. Mobile phones and certainly the internet are great ways to help them.

Lilani:
I mean AI, instant-knowledge, and first contact would be cool and all, but how impressed do you think whatever aliens we find out there would be if we've got all this technology and all these resources, but there are still millions out there walking miles a day for buckets of dirty water and dying of diseases we cured decades ago

Oh and by the way...

Danyal:

Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today's rate of progress; its
achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We'll make another
twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express
this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will
witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today's rate of progress), or about
one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS. I think no human being expects African to still be poor in the year 22,000. There's just no way for the 'developed world' to live in the year 22,012 while leaving Africa behind in the undeveloped form of 2012.

Lilani:

Danyal:
TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS. I think no human being expects African to still be poor in the year 22,000. There's just no way for the 'developed world' to live in the year 22,012 while leaving Africa behind in the undeveloped form of 2012.

Yeah, it's always someone else's problem to solve, isn't it? We don't have to do anything, 'cause someone else will eventually, right? Yeah. Somebody will.

Come on, why should we force those people to wait up to 20,000 years for what we have right now? There is not a single person on this earth that deserves a day of what they go through. If we keep on waiting for somebody to rise up and help them, nobody is going to. Because who can guarantee somebody else will eventually stand up? The only way we can guarantee that happens is if we stand up together and decide to do it ourselves.

1.) We're going to get those 20,000 years of progress - in this century.
2.) I'm not advocating and end to all help for the developing world. Helping the poor, the sick and the hungry is always a good cause. But in the first half of the 21th century, we should certainly invest in creating good Artificial Intelligence.
20,000 years of progress means you'll solve all diseases. And you'll solve aging itself. We are all terminal patients awaiting a cure! Seriously, the divide between the West and Africa is waaaay smaller than the divide between pre- and post-Singularity.

3. Your whole argument can be directed to the Singularity as well.
Come on, why shouldn't we research the Singularity? There is not a single person on this earth that deserves to be poor, diseased or to die. If we keep on waiting for somebody to rise up and do those inventions, nobody is going to. Because who can guarantee somebody else will eventually do the scientific work? The only way we can guarantee that happens is if we stand up together and decide to do it ourselves.

Esotera:
Sleepover by Alaistair Reynolds is very relevant to your xkcd comic, if you have an opportunity to read it, try.

Standard counter-argument followed by points I agree with:

- The technological singularity is more equivalent to a black hole's event horizon; the point at which it's impossible to see what's happening. Futurism as a whole is so unpredictable because of the exponential factor; if the accuracy in how we measure progress is off by even a very small amount, then this will have a large effect on our prediction of the future. This is analogous to the butterfly effect, basically it's impossible to know what will happen after about 2050 from Kurzweil's model.

Kurzweil;

How does our use of "singularity" in human history compare to its use in physics? The word was borrowed from
mathematics by physics, which has always shown a penchant for anthropomorphic terms (such as "charm" and "strange" for names of quarks). In physics "singularity" theoretically refers to a point of zero size with infinite density
of mass and therefore infinite gravity.
But because of quantum uncertainty there is no actual point of infinite density, and indeed quantum mechanics
disallows infinite values.
Just like the Singularity as I have discussed it in this book, a singularity in physics denotes unimaginably large
values. And the area of interest in physics is not actually zero in size but rather is an event horizon around the
theoretical singularity point inside a black hole (which is not even black). Inside the event horizon particles and
energy, such as light, cannot escape because gravity is too strong. Thus from outside the event horizon, we cannot see
easily inside the event horizon with certainty.
However, there does appear to be a way to see inside a black hole, because black holes give off a shower of
particles. Particle-antiparticle pairs are created near the event horizon (as happens everywhere in space), and for some
of these pairs, one of the pair is pulled into the black hole while the other manages to escape. These escaping particles
form a glow called Hawking radiation, named after its discoverer, Stephen Hawking. The current thinking is that this
radiation does reflect (in a coded fashion, and as a result of a form of quantum entanglement with the particles inside)
what is happening inside the black hole. Hawking initially resisted this explanation but now appears to agree.
So, we find our use of the term "Singularity" in this book to be no less appropriate than the deployment of this
term by the physics community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it
difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our brains each limited to 1016
to 1019 cps, imagine what our future civilization in 2099 with its 1060 cps will be capable of thinking and doing?
Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking,
despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into
the implications of the Singularity. That's what I've tried to do in this book.

- The curve could quite easily be sigmoidal (increases in technology may quickly decrease for some reason such as little demand for more computing power, less resources, nuclear war, robot apocalypse, etc etc)

Not 'easily' ;) The exponential growth has been a very steady trend, not disturbed by the World Wars of the last century.

Work on "exa-scale" supercomputing capability in India is well under way, under a Rs5,000-crore project, under the 12th 5-year plan, according to eminent scientist Vijay Bhatkar.

Talking to DNA from Bhubaneswar (Orissa) on Tuesday, Bhatkar admitted that despite being a superpower in information technology, India had been lagging in this field. The US, Japan, some European nations and even China had developed such computers to help them in advancing technology.

"Exa-scale computers can perform several million-trillion mathematical operations per second, which would be 1,000 times faster than current peta-scale supercomputers in India," Bhatkar explained.

Such high-power computing prowess is required for acurate prediction of the monsoon, natural disaster mitigation, for new discovery of drugs and many other such technologically competitive fields, he added.

"But now we are all ready to create exa-scale computers, which will help us to take huge leaps in technology and other fields," the scientist said.
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_india-gears-up-for-exa-scale-supercomputing_1633885

There is a lot of competition. If we're lucky, we'll end in some kind of arms race/space race but now geared towards achieving the Singularity.
With China also joining the competition... well, I don't think we're just going to suddenly stop evolving technologically.

generals3:

While OT i have little desire to help them as long as they keep in screwing themselves over. Pumping children isn't how you get out of poverty and if anything starvation and disease is one of nature's way of saying: you're too much. Very cruel to say, but the global problem of overpopulation is more important. first they need to get their birth rate down and than i'll be compassionate.

Well, to phrase it a little nicer, think of the movie Defiance.
When you safe a life, you have to take responsibility for it.

4 children are born, 2 children die.
You can go to a community and make sure all 4 children survive, but doing this for the entire community will double the amount of people they have to feed.

But... let's not go completely off-topic by discussing developing nations and focus on the Singularity.

Kurzweil is a freaking kook, and I say that as someone to whom Transhumanist ideals are extremely appealing.

The entire point of the Singularity concept is that what lies beyond it cannot be predicted, to the point that even conclusions drawn from existing trends are meaningless. We could pass into the Singularity and find ourselves at the limit of technological endeavour within a year, or we might find that we switch from an exponential to a linear progression, or we might all find it more rewarding to exist in the form of cheese.

Besides that, I find that the concept of Singularity is actually a detriment to Transhumanist thought as a whole. So many people who are attracted to the concept have swallowed Kurzweil&Co's babbling about super-human AI, that they're ignoring other possibilities, even dismissing them outright.

Finally, I don't trust Kurzweil, because I find it quite interesting that his prediction for the arrival of the Singularity is perfectly timed so as to make flogging these bullshit "neutraceuticals" potions he's invested in to those who are alive today easier. Afterall, if he predicted the Singularity would occur in 2100, odds are anyone over 20 has no chance at all of seeing it happen; but if it's going to happen in 2050 well, all you have to do is send a cheque for $19.99 made payable to Kurzweil Industries, and you could gain the extra few years of life you need to make it to immortality! >:/

You get bonus points for using one of the coolest scientists alive, Hans Rosling, but those points are deducted because you tried to use him and his immaculately researched and presented statistics in support of a crackpot who'd be more at home on some hippie cult reservation in the wilds of California.

Esotera:

Not sure if arms race is the best way to describe it, as this would be a really bad way for it to go down, but yeah, we're likely to see countries compete technologically, with each being good at a few different sectors. Something like we have now.

Arms suck, that's why an arms race sucks. But GNR technology is epic, thus, an Singularity-race is epic :D
And with countries like China and India joining 'the race'...!

Mr.Mattress:
Uhhh... One problem I have with Robots: When Robots become smarter then even us, what's to stop them from thinking "Since we're Smarter then these creatures, what keeps us from being their masters?" And if that race act's like a swarm instead of individuals, that makes it worse! Think of those Robots from Dr. Who, or the Cyborgs from Star Trek, or the Qiraji/Silithids from WarCraft.

Heck, forget the thought that they would enslave us! The thought that they would destroy us makes it worse! If they have a swarm mind, they might think of things with individual minds (Including Robots who came before the Swarm Mind technology) as inferior and thus should be eliminated, leaving the Earth to Robots and bugs.

No, the best we can do is one robot at a time (No mass Production or anything), with Individual minds that grow and mature just as humans do (Not necessarily physically), and no swarm minds (Swarm minds are scary).

Or... we apply the Three Laws of Robotics.

The Three Laws are:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Rocklobster93:
Just on Moore's law: you can't necessarily extrapolate it past a certain point for the simple reason that it's limited by physics. Transistors keep getting smaller and smaller, to the point that we are approaching now where they will eventually be made of graphene - a single layer of atoms as transistors as opposed to being made of silicon. Past the atomic level, we cannot really go much smaller (as far as we know now).

Kurzweil's response;

So isn't there a comparable limit to the exponential trends that we are witnessing for information technologies?
The answer is yes, but not before the profound transformations described throughout this book take place. As I
discussed in chapter 3, the amount of matter and energy required to compute or transmit one bit is vanishingly small.
By using reversible logic gates, the input of energy is required only to transmit results and to correct errors. Otherwise,
the heat released from each computation is immediately recycled to fuel the next computation.
As I discussed in chapter 5, nanotechnology-based designs for virtually all applications-computation,
communication, manufacturing, and transportation-will require substantially less energy than they do today.
Nanotechnology will also facilitate capturing renewable energy sources such as sunlight. We could meet all of our
projected energy needs of thirty trillion watts in 2030 with solar power if we captured only 0.03 percent (three tenthousandths)
of the sun's energy as it hit the Earth. This will be feasible with extremely inexpensive, lightweight, and
efficient nanoengineered solar panels together with nano-fuel cells to store and distribute the captured energy.
A Virtually Unlimited Limit. As I discussed in chapter 3 an optimally organized 2.2-pound computer using
reversible logic gates has about 1025 atoms and can store about 1027 bits. Just considering electromagnetic interactions
between the particles, there are at least 1015 state changes per bit per second that can be harnessed for computation,
resulting in about 1042 calculations per second in the ultimate "cold" 2.2-pound computer. This is about 1016 times
more powerful than all biological brains today. If we allow our ultimate computer to get hot, we can increase this
further by as much as 108-fold. And we obviously won't restrict our computational resources to one kilogram of matter
but will ultimately deploy a significant fraction of the matter and energy on the Earth and in the solar system and then
spread out from there.
Specific paradigms do reach limits. We expect that Moore's Law (concerning the shrinking of the size of
transistors on a flat integrated circuit) will hit a limit over the next two decades. The date for the demise of Moore's
Law keeps getting pushed back. The first estimates predicted 2002, but now Intel says it won't take place until 2022.
But as I discussed in chapter 2, every time a specific computing paradigm was seen to approach its limit, research
interest and pressure increased to create the next paradigm. This has already happened four times in the century-long
history of exponential growth in computation (from electromagnetic calculators to relay-based computers to vacuum
tubes to discrete transistors to integrated circuits). We have already achieved many important milestones toward the
next (sixth) paradigm of computing: three-dimensional self-organizing circuits at the molecular level. So the
impending end of a given paradigm does not represent a true limit.
There are limits to the power of information technology, but these limits are vast. I estimated the capacity of the
matter and energy in our solar system to support computation to be at least 1070 cps (see chapter 6). Given that there
are at least 1020 stars in the universe, we get about 1090 cps for it, which matches Seth Lloyd's independent analysis. So
yes, there are limits, but they're not very limiting.

I hope you think that's a good answer?

Mr.Mattress:

But there's also a problem with that: This basically makes the Robot a Human Slave. Why give them a comprehending mind if all their gonna do is be slaves? "Hey! We just created Tin-Skinned Humans! Let's put them in chains and warp their thinking to make them work for us for free!" And there will eventually be Robot Sympathizers, and then there will be Cyborgs and Robot/Human Marriages, and Robots who think they're humans and humans who think they're robots... It get's complicated if you involve these laws into Robots (Although, it's complicated with or without the Robots).

Well, I am sure we'll figure this out in the future.
We should first analyse the AI before we 'give them a body', I think.

Mr.Mattress:

But there are already Smart Robots that we can make our slaves... They're called People, and from what I heard, Enslaving people isn't a good thing. So why would it be a good thing to enslave smart (or Smarter) robots?

Humans are essentially copies of each other.
Robots can be specified.

You're not going to create a fully conscious, emotional robot to do slave labor in a Chinese factory...

Esotera:

Why not?

This model might be much more suited to do labour, because it could be asked to do much more diverse work than just a car factory robot, meaning in the long-term it costs less. It'd also have the ability to resolve unforeseen problems. The Laws of Robotics also don't apply, because they're a work of fiction.

Creating a robot that doesn't like to do what it's master demands and suffers if he has to heavy, long, tedious and boring work...
..and than forcing it to listen to it's master and do heavy, long, tedious and boring work.

That doesn't seem intelligent.

Danyal:

Esotera:

Creating a robot that doesn't like to do what it's master demands and suffers if he has to heavy, long, tedious and boring work...
..and than forcing it to listen to it's master and do heavy, long, tedious and boring work.

That doesn't seem intelligent.

Whether it's an intelligent thing to do or not wasn't my point - I was trying to say that no matter how stupid something is, someone somewhere on this Earth will do it.

Still, why should it not like doing what its masters demand? Theoretically it should be possible to create livestock that don't feel pain; it shouldn't be that hard to make a robot enjoy menial work, especially if it's designed entirely from scratch.

That's certainly possible and that is what we should do! You're right. When I said 'fully conscious, fully emotional' I meant a robot like normal humans, that get bored and tired. But I didn't word it very well.