For as long as technology has existed, people have had nightmares of Nokia 3330’s and microwaves becoming conscious, hell-bent warlords, enslaving us in our sleep. On a serious note though, with the growing capacity  of self-aware, self-improving machines, maybe it’s a touch normal to be afraid. That’s what  Matt Miller of the Washington Post seems to think. He references a book by Ray Kurzweil ‘The Singularity Is Near.’ In it,  Kurzweil argues that what sets our age apart from all previous ones is the accelerating pace of technological advance — an acceleration made possible by the digitization of everything. According to Kurzweil we’re just a few decades away from basically meshing with computers and transcending human biology.

Now that doesn’t sound all bad, at least there are no references to a terminator-esque apocalypse. However think about it from a more human perspective. Across our history, enslavement was just about as common as the sun rising. If man is capable of imagining and following through on such horrendous things, then surely something that is created to in man’s own image can do just the same thing? See it yet? No? Well Matt Miller paints quite a vivid picture

Once our machines become literally millions or trillions of times smarter than we are (in terms of processing power and the capabilities this enables), what reason is there to think they’ll view us any differently than we view ants or pets?

Jeepers.

[ Source: WashingtonPost ]