My Super Black Technology Empire

Chapter 421 The Singularity of Technology and the Future of Technology

And 500 years ago, it seemed that the invention of the printing press took only about 100 years to be widely used. Today, it only takes a few years for a product such as a mobile phone and the World Wide Web to be invented and widely used. Time will do.

Under such circumstances, not to mention us ordinary people, even scientists often underestimate the powerful power of exponential growth.

For example, the Human Genome Project started in 1990. Some scientists believed that, according to the speed at that time, it would take at least a hundred years to complete that project.

However, the result was unexpectedly fast. In 2003, all the sequencing work had been completed.

As well as the computer field that everyone is very familiar with, everyone may not believe it. After just 50 years, the computing power of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which cost countless money, is not as good as the convenient calculation of more than ten dollars today. strong.

The computing power of an iPhone is hundreds of millions of times that of the Apollo 11 moon landing navigation calculator. Seeing this, do you feel the amazing speed of technological progress?

In the future, it is very likely that because you stay in bed and sleep all day, the world may have developed to the point where you cannot understand the next day.

And Kurzweil believes that the limit of growth will appear in 2045, when the function tangent of technological growth is almost vertical, and every moment of technological progress may exceed all past achievements sum.

Can you imagine what will happen in this world in the hours after the technological singularity arrives? Anyway, I can't imagine it.

And one thing is certain, artificial intelligence will take us to the technological singularity.

So here comes the question again, what technology will lead us to the technological singularity? Some people think it is quantum computer, and some scientists think it is controllable nuclear fusion technology.

But Kurzweil thinks that it is artificial intelligence technology that opens the door, because he believes that future technology will develop to a point that we humans cannot understand.

And artificial intelligence can have a faster thinking speed than human beings, let alone as smart as human beings. In Kurzweil's point of view, the future AI will definitely far exceed the wisdom of human beings today, and truly become omniscient and omnipotent. God.

Of course, this is not just talking about it, and Kurzweil also gave his reasons.

First of all, the technology of artificial intelligence is growing rapidly,

Because the information technology represented by artificial intelligence is the closest to the exponential growth model, and you can improve your knowledge level through endless learning. In a short period of time, you can update several versions of your cognition of the world.

Secondly, their "thinking" speed is also very fast. Machines can process and convert signals at a speed close to the speed of light, while the speed of signal transmission in mammalian brains is 100/S, which is 3 million times slower than machines.

Moreover, artificial intelligence is plastic, that is, it has the ability to change its structure, while the architecture of the human brain has its own biological limitations.

In addition, artificial intelligence can also quickly share resources, which is not known to be much more efficient than human language.

Therefore, after the arrival of the technological singularity, perhaps only artificial intelligence, a top student, can understand knowledge beyond human rationality.

At that time, compared with humans, the intelligence of artificial intelligence was equivalent to that of humans compared with ants. This is why some people said in the end that strong artificial intelligence will be the last invention of human beings, and subsequent civilizations will be created by artificial intelligence. Smart to carry on the continuation.

Although information technology represented by artificial intelligence is one of the keys to the technological singularity, Kurzweil does not think that information technology is the only protagonist in the future.

The protagonist in the future should be the GNR revolution with the triple overlap of G (gene technology), N (nanotechnology) and R (robot technology).

Since you can't beat it, let's join. With the help of these technologies, human beings can transcend the limitations of biology, can be edited like programs, and constantly transform themselves, so as to completely integrate with AI.

Such as brain-computer interface, consciousness uploading and so on are even more easy to achieve, so as to achieve the immortal state of consciousness. At that time, it is to completely liberate our thoughts from the strict restrictions of biological forms. A fundamental spiritual enterprise.

Of course, for us human beings based on carbon-based life, the world after the technological singularity is no longer comprehensible to mere mortals.

Of course, there are still a lot of opposing opinions on the Internet.

25 years from now we will live forever? Artificial intelligence will become our savior out of the flesh? Even if I answer this question and write here, even if I have stepped out of the airport in American, I still have doubts about Kurzweil's theory of technological singularity.

Even if I am dead and nailed to the coffin, I still want to cry out with my rotten vocal cords in the tomb: You are wrong!

Friends who have studied economics may have heard of the Malthus trap, which means that the output of food increases linearly, but the growth of population is exponential. When the population is too large, wars and famines often occur. To weed out those in excess.

And food production is the ceiling of population growth.

Therefore, some economists compare Kurzweil's theory in this way, and believe that technology, like population, cannot develop in the form of exponential explosion, because the intelligence of artificial intelligence has no limit, which means that the energy consumed is also Unlimited, this is very unreasonable.

And maybe the development of technology is not exponential, but y+artanx. We just happen to be in the middle stage of the fastest development.

Some people also believe that the development of science and technology is not as fast as imagined. Even the information technology field mentioned by Kurzweil has encountered a bottleneck in development. If you don’t believe me, you can see how long Moore’s Law has expired. All major chip manufacturers have changed their names to toothpaste factories.

Moreover, human beings do not have a deep enough understanding of neurology, even the principles of the human brain are not understood, and they still want to directly design strong artificial intelligence and upload consciousness?

But in fact, this is not the first time that Kurzweil has engaged in this kind of language about the future. After all, the name of the future scientist is not for nothing.

As early as 1990, Kurzweil made predictions that seemed sensational at the time, such as the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the expansion of the Internet, computers will defeat world champions, translation software can do real-time translation, and can understand human beings. Then the voice assistant will appear (similar to Siri, Xiao Ai, etc.)