I don’t believe the singularity event has taken place but we have reached a stage where computers run nearly every facet of our lives. But these computer programs are just executing the direct commands of their programmers and forming a globally efficient free-market communications, services, financial, etc network that rules the world.

But AI is now coming to a point where it can do many, many tasks better than humans through GANs and genetic algorithms that we see in the new computer-generated images of photorealistic human faces and AI beating humans at an incredibly complex game Starcraft II, so I think it will not be long before AI comes to rule our world.

What’s interesting, though, is that while computers (and soon AI) now rule free market capitalist organizations and fast-moving technology which dominates our lives, such as the internet, startups, and much more, computers have yet to be widely used in our governance (and I’m not just talking about elections). This was pursued in an interesting fashion by Isaac Asimov in his short story The Evitable Conflict, which imagines a world where AIs eventually peacefully and quietly take over and become the rulers of our world through gradual integration into governance. Asimov actually gets a lot of things right about how AI runs today even though no such thing was even close to existing in his time.

One problem with AI as a whole right now is that it really isn’t AI. We are nowhere near an actual artificial general intelligence and to reach that it will likely require a total change in direction by the AI research community toward some new technology not yet discovered, based on my moderate knowledge of AI and artificial intelligence (built my own neural network to recognize numbers) and keeping up with the progress in the field.

So I guess we’re not really at the singularity as many would describe it until a while in the future. Until then, humans will have to build their own AIs to comlete specific tasks... but we might see some sort of singularity that does not exist as a single network or AI but maybe as an AI that can create AIs or an emergent cluster of neural networks. We shall see what the future may hold.