These scientists had just spent an entire year transcribing a mere one ten-thousandth of the genome. consider the biochemists who, in 1990, were skeptical of the goal of transcribing the entire human genome in a mere fifteen years.

Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later. the acceleration of progress and growth applies to each of them.Ĭonsider Gary Kasparov, who scorned the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. You can examine the data in different ways, on different timescales, and for a wide variety of technologies, ranging from electronic to biological. As a result, even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, typically extrapolate the current pace of change over the next ten years or one hundred years to determine their expectations.īut a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technological change is exponential. From the mathematician's perspective, the reason for this is that an exponential curve looks like a straight line when examined for only a brief duratio. Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace of change increases, over time, unexamined intuition leaves one with the impression that change occurs at the same rate that we have experienced most recently. People intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. Kurzweil says that people don't expect the Singularity because they don't realize that technological progress is largely exponential, not linear: What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Though earlier users of the term 'technological Singularity' used it to refer to the arrival of machine superintelligence (an event beyond which our ability to predict the future breaks down), Kurzweil's Singularity is more vaguely defined: If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.Ray Kurzweil's writings are the best-known expression of Singularity memes, so I figured it's about time I read his 2005 best-seller The Singularity is Near. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) Futurist predicts humans will be immortal, identical to AI by 2045 - The Jerusalem Post

Ray kurzweil the singularity