The Rise of the Machines

A technological singularity - are we heading for a technological ‘black-hole’?

 

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said:

“Nothing endures but change. It is the only constant.”

The rate of change however gets quicker and quicker. Breakthroughs in technology and innovation now expand through the world in years or even weeks rather than centuries. Travel that took years now takes hours. Communication that used to take months happens in seconds. Everywhere we look, change is happening faster and faster.

This evolution of change is of course not new. Modern humans, having emerged a couple of hundred thousand years ago, with tools and language appearing tens of thousands of years ago have progressed faster in the past century than could ever have been conceived. From flying for the first time in 1903 and, standing on the moon less than 70 years later, our rate of development in the past 100 years has been the fastest we have ever experienced.

From computers the size of a room, to PCs, Digital TVs, MP3 players, GPS devices, mobiles, social networks, augmented reality and the seeds of artificial intelligence, one could rightly argue that we have been experiencing an explosion of human development and change.

And this rate of change is set to continue in the future—each new element requiring a fraction of the time required in the previous phase.

As Vernor Vinge has noted, computing power doubles on average every 18 months,  and if it continues to do so, as it has done for the last 50 years then sometime in the 2020s there will be computers that can equal the performance of the human brain.

From there, it is only a small step to a computer that can exceed a human’s cognitive ability. From this point on, there would then be no point in our designing future computers; super-intelligent technology would be able to design better ones, and do so faster than we could ever hope to.

You might be asking “So where is all this leading?“ Vinge suggested we are headed toward a “singularity” - the term given to models of physics that reduce to a point when an equation breaks down and cease to have any useful meaning. A point when the rules change. When something completely different happens.

In the “Terminator” film series the machines enslave man. To them we have outlived our usefulness. Is this likely to happen in real life?   I write this wondering if the work I do, pushing ‘digital thinking’ into service delivery, will unwittingly cause this to happen, or will it lead to the brighter future we all hope for?

Image courtesy of Dunechaser