By Selwyn Duke
More than a century ago, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the coming Übermensch, or superior man, and the “death” of God. Now Silicon Valley a-theologians predict the Singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intellect. Not only is this development less than a decade away, they say, but what they outline sounds like a science-fiction movie plot:
By 2029, artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intellect. Twenty years later, ultra-intelligent machines become a billion-fold smarter than even the cleverest among us, making the man-AI intellectual chasm like that between a fly and Einstein. That this will happen there is no doubt (barring the end of the world or the onset of some profoundly dark age), but, well, this is where it gets sticky. Does AI become an almost omnipotent, practically omniscient servant in the hands of oh-so flawed man?
Or does it somehow achieve self-awareness and, perhaps, become master?
In point of fact, one ex-Google executive “likens this digital creature to an ‘alien being, endowed with superpowers,’ which has already arrived on Earth in larval form"....
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