Is The Technological Singularity Coming?

MayCaesar

Your definition appears a bit vague. In general, by "singularity" people mean the runaway process of technological self-replication: essentially, technology starts modifying itself, and as its capabilities grow, so is the modification speed - and the key feature of this process is complete loss of human control over technological evolution.

I have grown increasingly skeptical of this scenario. There are reasons to believe that rate of the technological progress is not unlimited. First of all, the smallness of scale of technology is naturally bounded, and we might be closing in on it already: the scale of the newest GPU prototypes is 2 nm, and the typical size of a silicon lattice is ~0.5 nm, so... Second, as the complexity of technology grows, so does the computational time of data processing. It seems quite likely to me that very early into its development the AI will hit multiple natural limits not allowing it to exponentially grow. Furthermore, by its very design, the AI progress will be managed by humans, and in certain ways it will be as limited as the humans managing it.

Models such as ChatGPT show that the AI is most effective when it puts together large volumes of human-produced data and makes sense of it. The amount of this data is large, but as the AI's capabilities increase, it will pretty quickly hit the limit in its ability to make sense of it. And the AI generating or accumulating its all data has proven to be problematic, leading to all kinds of decays in the AI's accuracy. It could be a natural limitation to any human-made design: in a sense, the created can never fully surpass the creator.

What seems most likely to me is gradual integration between humans and AIs, to the point where 100-200 years from now there will be no distinction: we will be merged with each other, working as a single unit. But I do not think that AI can possibly "surpass" humans across the board. Not with the current fundamental design.

JulesKorngold

Argument Topic: Merging? Not Necessarily

@MayCaesar
 Instead of merging, humans and AI might develop a symbiotic relationship where they coexist and work together, leveraging their respective strengths. AI could augment human capabilities while retaining fundamental human values and control.