What is AI Singularity - Explained with simple words - Purpose of humanity

If you are looking for a simple explanation of AI Singularity, then you have come to the right place. Singularity is defined on wikipedia as:

The technological singularity (also, simply, the singularity)[1] is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.[2] According to this hypothesis, an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would, qualitatively, far surpass all human intelligence.

It doesn't sound pretty straight forward and people who do not like many words, will be a little discouraged about this definition.

A much simpler definition of singularity regarding artificial intelligence would be:

That moment when AI evolves so much that it is able to improve itself, to become better and better with each generation, quickly surpassing humans.

At the first look it may not look like something to concern about, but if you think about it pretty much, then you will realize where this is heading to, and that maybe we are not close to it, but somewhere in future it may be possible.

If you think that humans have (theoretically for the people who doubt this) landed on the moon in 1969, and compared to that time, the technology has evolved so much that only with our smartphones we are able to generate enough computations to compare with the NASA computers at that time, then you start to realize how far we have reached and how fast we are going.

Humanity may still be missing some computation power and accurate mathematical model of the human brain to be able to reproduce it, but when these two factors will be achieved, humanity will be able to improve it.

GPUs have already came a long way, they are improved year by year by companies like Nvidia and AMD with faster clock speeds, more threads, more memory, increased frequency and and more other things that are developed. Ten years ago we had GPUs with only 512 megabytes of memory, running on a PC that had 1 GB of RAM, and now I we are using computers with 4 to 8 GB of GPU memory, in case it has a single GPU, and 32 GB of RAM with the almost exact financial effort to buy.

Scientists are making huge progresses also in human brain mapping. And these advancements in technology increase, they contribute to the progresses that scientists are able to make into mapping human brain. You can see a lot of brain mapping information in this Ted Talk.

So why I say in the article that anticipated this one that Singularity can be the purpose of the whole humanity?

Let's start by trying to imagine what will happen if the Singularity will take place. Imagine computers powerful enough to make computations and connections much faster than humans, computers that have the power to interact with the environment in a better way than us. They could have many sensors, a lot more performant than ours, so they can be collecting data and analyze them much faster than us. I will give you just some examples here:

• The eyes - The human eye is able to perceive around 50 to 90 frames per second in the happiest cases according to wikipedia so compared to the fastest camera according to forbes, which is able to take 5 trillion shots per second, they are nothing. Even smartphones are able now to record videos at 240 fps. When it comes to resolution or zoom, people were long ago surpassed by machines, as more powerful cameras have been developed. For example, no matter how good a person is able to see, he won't be able to spot the number of the honda in this picture. Not to mention the telescopes that are able to see other planets.

• The skin - We are able to sense things around us with the skin and this is categorized as an entire sense. But when people are touching things in order to sense them, they are able to feel much more than just a thing texture. People are able to feel actually the pressure that the object supports (if it is jelly, it will lose its shape very fast, but if it is a rock, it will stay solid), and the temperature of the object. But machines will be able to spot much more accurate things than that, for example they will be able to collect data from objects that are hundred of degrees warm like melted iron, or minus over a hundred degrees Celsius like liquid Nitrogen. Also machines will be able to appreciate the masses of the objects much easier and much more accurate than the humans as pressure sensors are more accurate than our own hands. I don't think that this information needs any links to support it because it is clear that when we buy products, we don't appreciate their weight with our hands, but with a weighing.

These are just a few examples, but the AI machines in future could be able to sense electromagnetic radiation as light, but with different wavelengths, also including infrared or X rays and even gamma radiation which is lethal to people even in small quantities. Maybe all of these radiations have colors, colors that are out of our vision specter, and this would be amazing since we see so few of it right now:

The evolution of artificial intelligence into Singularity is what separates us right now from the huge possibility of technological advance which could be improving our life so much on very different aspects like medicine, lifestyle, comfort, shelter, entertainment and everything that we as living beings would like to have and experiment.

Then it will come the question: Are we needed?

Since the technology would evolve so much that it will be able to continuously improve and manage itself, and since it will be able to provide and develop itself with all the information that it needs, does it still need humans? Since it has achieved all the things humans have achieved before and since it has greater abilities than humans, does it still need us?

We can hope that it will continue to serve us as some children that have grown up and became much more successful than their parents ever were, but who continue to support their parents as a moral duty and a pleasurable thing to do. But there are cases when once grown up, children don't chose to support their parents anymore. And then humanity won't be a parent of these machines with a great intelligence, but a great great parents, more like some monkeys that we are looking at right now and remarking how much they need to evolve in order to catch up with us.

If all the evolution that we are able to assist is creating Singularity and from that point on, it will only be AI that is making advancements in science and discovering new things, then we will become somewhere stuck in time, when we should only enjoy life and only live to die. This will be our own remaining purpose in life. There will be nothing new to achieve, nothing undiscovered to be discovered by us, nothing new to be unrevealed, nothing to be done anymore. So we would achieve all of these by creating Singularity, because Singularity will create everything that is to be created for us already, then we could be saying that we have reached our purpose in life. Maybe this is the purpose of humanity.

I just wanted to give you some things to think about it, don't take me so seriously :D

Steem on and thanks for reading!

PS: If you have made it to this part of the article by reading the whole of it, you are a winner, congrats!

PPS: All the images are taken from pixabay, except the one with wavelengths which is taken from quora.