Topic 3: Singularity Destruction of Mankind or Blessing to Humanity?

      A recent posting about Asimov on Goodreads.com that I commented on, got me thinking about the state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) both today and in the near future.  As my bio says I have a background in Software Engineering, and I have worked on commercial projects that incorporated different aspects of AI, and have always been interested in the field.  Unfortunately, like many people who have read a lot of books on real AI as we know it today, it seemed like there was always a lot of promise, but nothing really there yet.  So that being the case, for the last few years I have not really been following its progress as closely as I should, also nanotechnology which at the moment is mainly a hardware based issue distracted me.  You may ask why would a software guy, be interested in a hardware issue and not a software issue.

Perhaps I should explain, when I say AI, I am talking about the old school meaning of cognitive emergence, which is now kinda lumped into the new idea of a Singularity.  Many of the subfields of AI have seen some pretty amazing growth in recent years and as a whole the field has really taken.  However, most in the field would say we are still a ways off from that critical moment when it reaches the goal that was set so many decades ago.  So the simple answer is that apart from the occasional article that talked about a marginal improvement of a small portion of the AI field, there just hasn’t been a lot going on to keep me focus on it.  Nanotechnology, on the other hand is getting closer and closer as we rapidly approach a time were further improvement in chip design will require advancements at the nano-scale.  But that is a topic for another discussion.

All of this leads me to my point, after spending a few days of doing some research I found that a lot of debate has been going on since I last checked in.  The hot button topic seems to be the discussion of a Singularity, and it has two major schools of thought.  On the one hand, there are those who believe that should it occur, mankind will have sufficient safe guards in place to keep it from destroying us and taking over the world.  The other school of thought is that such an entity will rapidly evolve a super-intelligence and as part of its utility function determine that we pose a threat, or are irrelevant and therefore useless to its needs.  They believe that given its supper-intelligence it could easily take over the world and thus destroy mankind.

Given those two opposing views, I would like to start a discussion regarding the possibility of a friendly AI or a destructive AI.