Technological Singularity: A Look At The Future

The technological singularity is the point at which artificial intelligence would evolve at such a pace that future predictions become impossible.



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The name was gotten from blackhole where laws of physics no longer hold. The advances in almost every sphere of science are growing at an astronomical rate. A century ago the Wright Brothers created a flying machine. It has an "incredible" flight time of 59 seconds flying over a distance of 852 feet.



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Today we have jets capable of lifting armored tanks and trains, for instance, the Soviet Union's Antonov An-225 Mriya with a maximum payload of up to 551,150 lb or 249997.435 kg and travels 4000km on the maximum payload.

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Today there is much much scientific interest in the possible colonization of Mars since it is the planet that has the nearest characteristics of Earth. Mars contains water and has the closest surface conditions to that of Earth. Elon Musk's Space X project is working towards colonization of Mars as he plans to do that by offering transportation services

One of Elon Musk's stated goals for his company SpaceX is to make such colonization possible by providing transportation.

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From SpaceX Web Page you can see this objective clearly stated:

SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.

Half a century ago, if you compare the processor power then to now, it is 1 billion times more advanced. Similarly, transistors shrunk from 10,000 nanometers to just 10 nanometers.

If today’s 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor had been manufactured using 1971-era technology, it would be the size of a conference room.

Using the 1971-era technology, today's 2nd generation Intel Core processor would be the size of a conference room measuring at least 23ft by 10ft!

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil, an American computer scientist, inventor, author, and futurist. He is a man with twenty-one honorary degrees including three honors from three different USA presidents. He had an 86% successful prediction rate and he strongly believed by next twenty-eight years (2045), that the computing power of future computers could enable them to be artificially intelligent.


Brain Vs Computer


The human brain simulation needs about 1 exaFLOP, billion billion calculation per second

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As of today, the world's fastest supercomputer is Chinese Sunway TaihuLight which has a speed of 125 PFLOPS at peak.

A petaFLOP(PLFLOP) is a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating point calculations per second.

In contrast, the human brain operates at 1 exaFLOP (an estimate as it is a difficult subject to calculate), which is equivalent to a billion billion calculations per second.

It is only a matter of time till a supercomputer capable of more calculation than our brain is produced. Then the next challenge would be to simulate the human intelligence. The human brain executes processes in a method quite different from today's computers.

When we discuss computers, we are referring to meticulously designed machines that are based on logic, reproducibility, predictability, and math. The human brain, on the other hand, is a tangled, seemingly random mess of neurons that do not behave in a predictable manner.

The computer scientists are up for an uphill task which many futurists are optimistic about achieving this technological singularity. What are your thoughts on this?
Let me know in the comment section below.

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