…because the chances that you’ll be able to upload it by 2045 are slim to none, according to Ramez Naam in the essay The Singularity is Further Than it Appears, posted on the Institute for Emerging Ethics & Technology website. He first touches on the hard takeoff described by Vernor Vinge in 1993, that is, the point when smarter-than-human machines can build machines smarter than themselves in an even shorter amount of time than they were created. Then, Naam analyzes our current Kurzweilian notion of singularity through the creation of digital minds. There are three main issues he cites that impede progress:
- No one’s really sure how to do it.
- There’s a huge lack of incentive.
- There are ethical issues.
It’s a lazy Saturday in my part of the world, I just finished watching some silly episodes of Top Gear and I’m poorly suited for deep thoughts, but I’ll be coming back to this later, especially Vinge’s twenty-one year old The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.