[Podcasts That Inspire]
The Singularity of the Current Age Of AI
‘The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. The book builds on the ideas introduced in Kurzweil’s previous books, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). In the book, Kurzweil embraces the term “the singularity”, which was popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity.”‘
You’re already using AI if you’re watching YouTube video’s a lot like I am. If you’re logged in to your YouTube account its artificial intelligence knows what you want to watch by seeing what you’ve watched before and then it presupposes, correctly in my case, what you’ll most likely want to watch in its current almost limitless catalog of user uploaded videos. Like any good friend the AI of YouTube knows your likes and orders off its menu for you.
The concept of The Singularity describes a hypothetical future where technology growth is out of control and irreversible. The idea is that at some point in the near future machine intelligence and human intelligence will become one and will then expand out from the planet and into the universe.
The Singularity emerged as a theory in the 1990’s and has been mentioned a few times on YouTube recently due to AI’s recent commercial availability. I’ve been seeing lots of images on Facebook of art that were constructed by AI from user’s verbal prompts and it’s impressive. But this video discusses AI’s other uses, those that reach far beyond making pretty pictures. These are, as the saying goes, interesting times to live in.
