Singularity
That moment where the artificial intelligence will become self aware, it will connect with itself at a quantum level<ref>This appears to countermand every established law of physics but, as theorists are prone to go these days, it’s “you know, quantum theory. Strings. The Multiverse. Dark Matter. Schrodinger. His cat. All that indeterminacy stuff” and out of this substrate a new super consciousness will emerge and the universe will wake up.
This gets people like Ray Kurzweil quite fired up but makes me feel sad, largely based on how disappointing AI is at the moment. Witness LinkedIn’s AI comment function. AI is dreary enough already without it being all morose and self-righteous into the bargain. I mean can you imagine the identity politics?
Anyway, LinkedIn’s AI really can’t be blamed if it comes up a bit sycophantic: the algorithm can only learning on the material in front of it, scraping the human interactions on Linkedin, which are, by and large, horrific in their obsequity.
See also
- The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurweil’s celebrated/loopyTemplate:Dea 2004 book which promoted this idea as being likely to happen around 2010.
- The apocalypse