subject: Can Humans Keep Up With Computers? Technological Singularity [print this page] Simply put, technological singularity is a prediction that technology will progress at an incredibly rapid pace, so rapid that the future will be unimaginable, unpredictable, and totally different than the way things are today. Of course there is much more to it, but this set of articles is just an introduction.
In his book "The Singularity is Near," Ray Kurzweil states that technological evolution follows a pattern of exponential growth. This means that technological growth is multiplied, rather than simply added. In a nutshell, exponential growth means that progress starts out slowly, then slowly gets faster. The progress gets multiplied by further progress, which hurls advancement into an extremely fast pace. The more time that goes by, the faster things change.
History shows us a key lesson about exponential growth. The economy more or less doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution after some sort of technological innovation. After this, agricultural economy started to double every 900 years. In today's day and age, after the technology that came with the Industrial Revolution, the world's economic output doubles every fifteen years.
That's a remarkable increase! If you just think about it for a minute, it's hard not to agree with exponential growth. Think about how much technology accelerates in a year today, and compare that to how much technology accelerated in any year in the 1950's.
Yet although technology seems to be getting faster and faster, humans can't seem to keep up. After all, although the human brain has evolved, it hasn't changed in any major way for millennia. Keeping in mind the increasing power of technologies and computers, it no longer seems so far fetched that a machine could be built that is smarter than human beings. In theory, if it were possible for humans to construct a machine that had better problem solving skills than humans, and was more intelligent, then this machine could take it upon itself to design an even smarter machine. Then if this smarter machine was built, it could design a machine even smarter than itself, and so forth and so on. To be continued in the next article of this set, "How Could Humans Build A Computer That Is Smarter Than Them?
