Artificiele intelligentie zal menselijke intelligentie evenaren na 2020

13 May 2007 2 min read

In may 1997 Deep Blue won from Kasparov. This was mainly because of the processingpower of the computer. But nowadays Artificial Intelligence is making it's way more and more into society. This makes some people to start talking again about technological singurality. Technological singurality means the following (from wikipedia and Vinge):

the timeperiod with such a fast change of technological change and progres that human intelligence cannot understand society anymore (because of the role of technology in this)
the timeperiod where all exponential trends in life will come together and will go through the ceiling
the timeperiod where all creatures created with A.I. will take their devellopment in their own hands.

I think this is a very scary image of the future. And the American mathematic scientist Vernor Vinge truly believes in it. Just recently, he again expressed his conviction of the fact that technological singularity is at the doorstep.

Within 30 years from now, we'll posess the technological capabilities to create intelligence that goes beyond human capacity.

According to Vinge, the rapid development towards technological singularity is caused by the current combination of technology, communications and the human factor. Contrary to today's visibly present computers, singularity will be less visible or maybe even totally unvisible. It will be fully integrated with our human environment. The fact that the Pentagon deploys over 5000 robots for the war in Iraque illustrates how far he process has evolved already. The next step is to equip these robots with intelligence to have a totally different world arise.

Let's define an ultra-intelligent machine as a device that's far more intelligent than all intelligent activity of a human being, no matter how smart he or she is. Since the design of machines represents an intelligent activity as such, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better devices; this would cause an 'explosion of intelligence' that would leave human intelligence far behind. Actually one could say that the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last discovery mankind will ever need.