TheSingularity/Talk

Comment by JimboWales: I think that this is likely to happen within my own natural lifespan. I'm 34 now, and so in 2031, I will be 54. If I take care of myself, I should be able to live to 74-104, even given today's technology.

It strikes me as a virtual certainty that we will have massively cheap machine intelligence by then. And that's going to be, for better or worse, the most amazing thing that has ever happened on EartH.

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While we're firing off personal opinions. It's an open question exactly how powerful a computer one would need to support consciousness (heck, that possibility is still somewhat open). A friend of mine, though, suggested this possibility: you need basically as many connections as an ape brain has. In our vacuum datarum I would go with this, since it's obvious and fits with consciousness arising evolutionarily when it did.

In that case, we have a long ways to go, since most of our computers are about as powerful as worms. Good at different things, of course, but I don't see them helping too much. So don't wait up...well, I guess you should if you can, but that's a different matter. :)

Btw, never extrapolate trends too far! Technology can't surpass physical limits, which strongly seem to exist. So its growth should be logistic rather than exponential, and we're far enough away from the limits we know of that it makes sense we can't yet tell the two apart. -- JoshuaGrosse