Ray Kurzweil was seated next to a window in Boston‘s Four Seasons Hotel and held up a sheet of paper that outlined the constant increase in the amount of natural computer power that a penny could purchase over the past 85 years. A steady flow of bright green lines across the page, ascending in the nighttime sky like fireworks.
He claimed that that the Singularity, a long-held time when people may merge with artificial intelligence and supplement themselves with millions of times more computing power than their natural brains currently possess, was a result of that horizontal line. We ca n’t anticipate what it will do, he said while wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.” If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain,” he said.
Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and visionary who built a career on estimates that defy conventional knowledge, made the same claim in his 2005 book,” The Singularity Is Nearby”. He thinks the time is right to repeat his claim now that AI technologies like ChatGPT and current attempts to implant pc chips inside people’s heads have advanced. Last year, he published a movie:” The Singularity Is Closest”.
His estimates now have an added advantage because Kurzweil is 76 years older and moving much slower than he used to. He has long said he plans to experience the Singularity, merge with AI and, in this way, dwell eternally. There is no assurance that he will be alive to witness the Singularity, though he claims it will do so in 2045. ” Perhaps a good 20-year-old may die tomorrow”, he said.
However, his forecast is not quite as outrageous as it appeared in 2005. Some people have made luxurious predictions about the future of AI and how it will affect the course of society as a result of the success of the robot ChatGPT and other similar systems.
Some skeptics warn that luxurious predictions about artificial knowledge may come to an end as the sector struggles to find the resources needed to create AI, including electric power, electric data, mathematics, and computing power.
The great step, of course, is to imagine how a device and human consciousness may converge, and Kurzweil is unable to explain how this would actually happen.
Born in New York City, Kurzweil began programming servers as a student, when servers were roomsize systems. In 1965, as a 17-year-old, he appeared on the CBS broadcast show” I’ve Got a Secret”, performing a music piece composed by a machine that he designed.
At a seminar in the middle of the 1950s, he exchanged letters with Marvin Minsky, one of the computer experts who founded the field of artificial intelligence. He was however a student at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens. Shortly after, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to examine under Minsky.
As a group of researchers at the University of Toronto began to explore a technology known as a neural system, AI started to gain speed in the 2010s. By analysing large amounts of data, this quantitative system could study skills. It may learn to identify a cat by analysing dozens of cat photos.
Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto who contributed to the development of neural network technology and is believed to be in charge of it more than any other researcher, when refuted Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would outnumber humans by the end of the decade. Then, he believes it was incisive. ” His prediction no longer looks so silly”, said Hinton, who until just worked at Google, where Kurzweil has led a study group since 2012.
Hinton is one of the AI researchers who thinks chatbot technologies like ChatGPT may be harmful or even endanger humanity.
But Kurzweil is positive. He has long predicted that improvements in AI and nano will counteract the inevitability of death by altering the micro mechanisms that govern how our bodies react and the conditions that affect them. Soon, he said, these technologies may expand lives at a faster rate than people period, finally reaching an “escape speed” that allows people to expand their lives continuously. ” By the early 2030s, we wo n’t die because of aging”, he said.
