Is the Singularity Near? It All Depends Upon Which Singularity You are Talking About

If you are counting on being bailed out of the "human stupidity quagmire" by a super-intelligent machine, you may have to wait a very long time. A recent New York Times Guest Column looks at the difference between brains and computers, suggesting a reason or two why Ray Kurzweil's time projections to the "singularity" may be wildly wrong.

engineers could learn a thing or two from brain strategies. For example, even the most advanced computers have difficulty telling a dog from a cat, something that can be done at a glance by a toddler — or a cat. We use emotions, the brain’s steersman, to assign value to our experiences and to future possibilities, often allowing us to evaluate potential outcomes efficiently and rapidly when information is uncertain. In general, we bring an extraordinary amount of background information to bear on seemingly simple tasks, allowing us to make inferences that are difficult for machines. _NYT

There is also the problem of power consumption. Since computer power consumption rises explosively with processing speed, a Kurzweilian 2025 "human-equivalent computer" would require a gigawatt of power to function. Imagine if every human being required the dedicated power output of a full-sized nuclear fission reactor, just to function normally!

A very different singularity -- the biosingularity -- is being approached at breakneck acceleration by bioresearchers. For example, researchers can now observe individual cells' responses to various stimuli in real time, using optical microscopy. An immense amount of data will be generated from observation of a mere cell. So don't throw away those computers. We will need them to store, correlate, and make sense of the immense quantity of data being generated.

Here are some more dam-busters:

Mitochondria play a much larger role in normal life processes than we thought.

Near real-time PCR .

Monitoring the epigenetic status of all body tissues .

Better ways to gauge gene expression .

....And many more 2nd order and higher improvements in bio-research.

But don't give up on your dreams of human-equivalent and better machine intelligence. It will happen. First we will need to better understand the "proof of concept" of intelligent machines -- our brains. Researchers working separately at Hebrew University and at Karolinska Institute, are taking different, yet promising approaches to brain modeling and simulation, hoping for breakthroughs in understanding that might lead to bigger breakthroughs, and so on ...

The Biosingularity may just hit us a decade or two before the AI Singularity. That might give us enough time to prepare -- to augment ourselves well enough to survive the emergence of intelligent machines. If we are ready for them when they come, we are more likely to arrive at an amiable understanding with each other.