My view, and that of the majority of my colleagues in AI, is that it’ll be at least half a century before we see computers matching humans....
My view, and that of the majority of my colleagues in AI, is that it’ll be at least half a century before we see computers matching humans. Given that various breakthroughs are needed, and it’s very hard to predict when breakthroughs will happen, it might even be a century or more. If that’s the case, you don’t need to lose too much sleep tonight.
The technological singularity
One reason for believing that machines will get to human-level or even superhuman-level intelligence quickly is the dangerously seductive idea of the technological singularity. This idea can be traced back to a number of people over fifty years ago: John von Neumann, one of the fathers of computing, and the mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptographer IJ Good. More recently, it’s an idea that has been popularised by the science-fiction author Vernor Vinge and the futurist Ray Kurzweil.
The singularity is the anticipated point in humankind’s history when we have developed a machine so intelligent that it can recursively redesign itself to be even more intelligent. The idea is that this would be a tipping point, and machine intelligence would suddenly start to improve exponentially, quickly exceeding human intelligence by orders of magnitude.
Once we reach the technological singularity, we will...
