The Singularity

The AI hype died out during the COVID19 Pandemic, but now the “Hype” is back. An AI war is starting between companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

But Why?

Because the mega IT companies need to keep growing and make sure they can more money. So they have to start showing off what they are working on behind closed curtains. Maybe dust off some of the old off-the-shelf toys that have been setting in the basement for years.

This has been brewing for decades though.

In the 1950’s, Neuman and Ulam (two scientists) coined the term “singularity” to describe a context related to the acceleration of human technological advancement. The meaning of singularity has changed since then, it now refers to a point in time where technological advancement will become unhinged and reach an escape velocity where it is unstoppable.

Later the singularity concept was used in the context of AI, where if humans created an AI system that is more intelligent than humans any general task, the singularity would be reached.

So did we already reach ultimate machine intelligence?

Now that we know that ChatGPT and others can pass the Turing test, but does it mean that we are close to this singularity?

My current opinion is that it is likely that humans will not even observe that we reached singularity. If it happens, it will be a headline on the news. This news is going to die to two weeks. I believe that the two main reasons for this are:

1. We are not as smart as we think.
2. We have been expecting this for a very long time so when it arrives we will say “we told you so”

What is funny about this logic above is: the singularity may already have happened. But lets not go there today.

So humans are pushing hard forward towards the singularity. But unfortunately all these AI systems are not successful in achieving the singularity as we defined it, today’s AI systems do not work on any problem but only specific ones. The meme below (although not very accurate) explains a version of AI (heuristics), this AI is simply explained as follows:

if this happens, Mr. AI please do this

if this happens then do this, and so on.

You see it now? The generalization problem is the core problem to be solved. If solved the singularity can happen.

The question is, do we even know what would it take to build a system that can achieve AGI?

I believe we do, but the majority of AI researchers are not using the guidebook. I wrote about this last year but here go again.

Here are the features of architecture that needs to be built to achieve human intelligence level and beyond:

1. Real time connected system that senses the real world (vision, sound, touch, smell and more)
2. Continuous learning of real world, new information changes the system
3. System learns and updates based on distributed discrete models
4. A methodology to reach consensus between models to reach and make decisions (for example voting)

These features are crucial to building human like intelligence that humans can communicate with. It is upon scientists and technicians to use these ideas to build out systems that have these features to reach a the true singularity.

So what do you think? Leave me a comment with your thoughts about this.

If you want to dig deeper, here are some further readings and media to check out:

Singularity

Unsolved Problems in Mathematics