The Singularity Event
According to Ray Kurzweil, “Singularity is a future period in which technology change will be so rapid and its impact so profound, that every aspect of human life will be irreversibly transformed; there won’t be a clear distinction between the humans and the machines”. He predicts that the computers will not remain as we see them today. They will become a part of human bodies and brains in the years to come until we become the hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence and its components.
If we humans look back into our civilization, as it existed and progressed a few thousand years back, it, in no way, compares with the speed at which we are progressing now. A few thousand years before, we barely existed, let alone, progress. A few thousand years ago, a span of 100 years meant a tiny bit of progress, but now, in the past 2 decades itself, the progress has been so rapid that even for us, old school chaps, it feels too fast. It feels like we are going obsolete. It is as if the technological progress feeds on itself to grow faster and faster. Ray Kurzweil predicts that in a couple of decades the rate of technological progress will be too fast for humans to make sense of it. Humans will have to merge with the A.I to enhance their own intelligence to make themselves ‘not obsolete’ and take the progress in technology, heads-on. This transformation/transcendence from a human entity to the superhuman by merging with A.I, will be known as “The Singularity Event”.
To understand why the Singularity event will occur, let us have a look at the following two pictures.
The first one tells you about the biological evolution and the second one tells you about the technological evolution. The time required for the biological evolution of a super-being will be too huge if we go by the timescales shown in the picture above, but if we look at the pace of the technological evolution, it is bound to break all boundaries in less than a century.
In a few years from now, the biological and technological evolution will start merging. Sometime in the next decade or so both the hardware and software that will be required to achieve the simulation of human intelligence, will become commonplace. That is when the A.I may pass the Turing test, indicating that A.I will equal or even crossover the human intelligence levels. Eventually, the humans will have to merge with A.I to survive!
Imagine, if the Singularity event does occur, humans, with the help of built-in A.I, shall be able to access memories spread worldwide through internet, instantly, share their memories and learnings at speeds never imagined before, come-up with gazillion facts precisely at any instant, download skillsets and information from anywhere they are connected to, recognize knowledge/event patterns at lightning speed and instantly learn from them, and so much more. Imagine a billion beings learning and communicating at the speed of light, and imagine the kind of progress that this human-machine(A.I) civilization will make. Once the humans merge with machines on both A.I and physical levels, they will transcend biological limitations, causing them to become super-beings. The acceleration in technological evolution can then cause an acceleration in biological evolution as well, once the genetic processes under our biology are decoded fully. The human-machine intelligence will be vastly more capable to decipher and redesign/re-engineer all of our organs and bodily processes to suit our needs. Thus, the cycle of the human-machine biology will evolve faster than ever before. Nanotechnology, Genome sequencing, Quantum computing etc., will be the main contributors to the kick-start of this unstoppable chain reaction! Waiting to see if these events turn-up in our lifetime!