Re: Singularity Destruction of Mankind or Blessing to Humanity?

Humberto wrote: " First we must wait until at least 2045 for computer power to catch up with the level of a human mind. By then learning algorithms must be better. 

One interesting fact is that the complexity difference between a chimp and a human is measured In single digits. And the amount of information in DNA seems to be less than on a program like UNIX. 

It would be possible to start with a baby AI and let it mature, and more surprisingly to allow it to write its own programming. With a military machine, all that is needed is a level equivalent to a self driven car. And that technology is 5 years away, at most. 

I am optimistic and I think that the military have nothing to gain in a battle between two robotic armies. Not android soldiers, but drones, tanks and self driven cargo mules. It could be like a destruction derby." 

I would be interested to see what you are basing your calculations on. When you say computer power you are not talking about clock speed obviously since the human brain has about 100 Hz serial speed limit, and most computers are doing 2.5 GHz or better. So we must be talking processing power which also may not be as far away as you think, considering “Deep Rybka 3 on an Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 [processor] has an Elo rating of 3,202 on 2.4 billion floating-point operations per second.”(Swedish Chess Computer Association) Watson I am sure is right up there as well, with tuple operations and cognitive processing. As for self-driving cars Google has one that has driven hundreds of thousands of miles already including the streets of San Francisco. Stanley won the DARPA challenge in 2004, the company I was working for at the time came in second. 

If you consider by 2020 human knowledge will be doubling every 72 hours, and within the next two years chip sizes will be around ~7 nm, it could be a lot sooner. Moore‘s Law will hit the physical limit of silicon somewhere around 2020 but they already have another hybrid material as well as 3D stacking. Also I recently saw an announcement for a simulation control that lets them model ink saturation on printed boards for better accuracy. All this makes me think that it is becoming harder and harder to measure and predict such events, the paradigm is shifting too rapidly. 

By the way in my book MagTech I allude to brain augmentation by nanotechnology first starting around 2026. I think that in twelve years we could easily be there. While that is not necessarily dependent on the Singularity I think it could be a factor in it.