Singularity: The Inevitable Truth

Technology is growing exponentially and this is an irrefutable fact.  The question that mankind should be asking is how long till this technology becomes smarter than human intelligence.  This could lead to no more disease, no more getting old, no more dying; but it could also lead to the destruction of the human race.  There are many people that are skeptical of this idea and fear it but some people embrace it much like Raymond Kurzweil.

            Kurzweil is the father of singularity:  the idea that technology grows at an exponential rate and that this will create artificial intelligence that I smarter than human intelligence.  He has predicted that AI will have been created by the year 1239 but in order for man to prevent the AI from being smarter he must “[use] computers to extend our intellectual abilities” to become “super-intelligent cyborgs.”(Grossman)  Some people believe this to be a bad thing like Bernard in 1984 because they think mankind will lose its humanity.  This might be partially true but when humans merge with the machine they do not loose there consciousness or their morals but they just become more intelligent then any natural human is.  I believe it is necessary for humans to merge with the machine to prevent the machine from becoming too intelligent and turning on the humans.  This newfound intelligence is also essential for mankind to make new discoveries at a pace higher than no other.  This idea of singularity is inevitable and mankind must be ready for it.

            There are also many parallels seen between the novel 1984 by George Orwell and the ideas of singularity.  Disease has been irradiated from humans and now humans don’t even give birth to other humans anymore; machines do.