Future

Justin Rattner on the Singularity

by Socrates
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I have sometimes been confronted by the position that the technological singularity is a crazy sci fi idea that is completely divorced from reality and is created and popularized by science fiction authors such as Vernor Vinge and futurists such as Ray Kurzweil. Well, Justin Rattner is neither a philosopher nor a futurist. He is, however, the chief technology officer at Intel and you can watch the videos below to see what he has to say about the singularity. Just don’t be surprised if he sounds a lot like Ray and Vernor…

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Best of Singularity Blog

by Socrates

Even though it has been only a bit more than a month since the beginning of this blog I am happy to note that there is already a tight group of people who have subscribed to my feed and continue to come back and read my posts on a regular basis. I want to take this opportunity to do 2 things: First and foremost I want to thank you all for the generous gift of your interest, your time and your moral support. I cherish those dearly and promise to do my best to provide you with more interesting, more relevant and better written singularity content during the new 2010. In the end, without you — my readers, both the Singularity Weblog and the Singularity Symposium website will be not only pointless but will cease to exist. It is your [...]

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Dawn of the Kill-Bots: the Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arming of AI (part 5)

by Socrates

Part 5: The Future of (Military) AI — Singularity While being certainly dangerous for humans, especially the ones that are specifically targeted by the kill-bots, arming machines is not on its own a process that can threaten the reign of homo sapiens in general. What can though is the fact that it is occurring within the larger confluent revolutions in Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics (GNR). Combined with exponential growth trends such as Moore’s law we arguably get the right conditions for what is referred to as the Technological Singularity. In 1945 Alan Turing famously predicted that computers would one day play better chess than people. Fifty years later, a computer called Deep Blue defeated the reigning world champion Gary Kasparov. Today, whether it is a mouse with a blue-tooth brain implant that directs the movements of the mouse via laptop, [...]

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