What do you think is the likelihood of a technological singularity happening in the next three years?
I'm sure it sounds crazy but Vernor Vinge (professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego) claimed just that in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity:
https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
The more I think of it, the more it seems like a possible scenario. It's obvious that technological progress is an exponential process and history shows that humans are incapable of comprehending exponential growth. Ask most people if they would prefer a million dollars right now or a penny doubled every day for a month and most people would choose the former. The initially exponential logistic curve of COVID-19 cases took many countries and governments by surprise. And even as recently in 2015, most people were saying that computers wouldn't defeat human experts at Go for at least another decade because of the historically slow rate of progress in this field. Now new versions of AlphaGo are beating the original AlphaGo 100 games to 0.
I'm sure it sounds crazy but Vernor Vinge (professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego) claimed just that in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity:
https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
The more I think of it, the more it seems like a possible scenario. It's obvious that technological progress is an exponential process and history shows that humans are incapable of comprehending exponential growth. Ask most people if they would prefer a million dollars right now or a penny doubled every day for a month and most people would choose the former. The initially exponential logistic curve of COVID-19 cases took many countries and governments by surprise. And even as recently in 2015, most people were saying that computers wouldn't defeat human experts at Go for at least another decade because of the historically slow rate of progress in this field. Now new versions of AlphaGo are beating the original AlphaGo 100 games to 0.
